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Family secrets echo around a Spanish clan, ringing loud enough to rouse the dead, in Pedro Almodóvar's assured melodrama.

Ghosts haunt the colourful streets and vibrantly cluttered homes of Almodóvar’s knockout drama, which finds three generations of women greeting adversity with boundless vitality. In the face of death, illness, sexual abuse and natural disasters, a strong sisterhood emerges. Family ties are electrified by a luminous roster of the director’s regular collaborators, led by a steely Penélope Cruz.

If he really is "Godard with a human face – a happy face", as Pauline Kael claimed, Almodóvar is at his happiest with this fusion of Hitchcock, Cervantes, poignancy and obscenity. Cruz anchors the chaos with steadfast resilience as the steely matriarch of the type once played by Carmen Maura, who here plays the disturbed spirit.