All About My Mother

Pedro Almodóvar made All About My Mother at fifty, after a decade in which his international reputation had wavered between cult curiosity and serious art. The film won Best Director at Cannes 1999, the Academy Award for Best International Feature, the BAFTA, the Golden Globe, and seven Goyas. Almodóvar dedicated it to all the actresses who have played actresses, to all the women who act, to men who act and become women, and to all the people who want to be mothers, a dedication that captures both the film's expansive humanism and its specific subject.

Manuela (Cecilia Roth, in the performance that defined her career) loses her teenage son in a road accident on his birthday and travels from Madrid to Barcelona to find his father, a transgender woman, Lola, whom she hasn't seen in nearly two decades. In Barcelona she falls in with a community of women: a pregnant nun (Penélope Cruz, in her breakout role), an ageing diva (Marisa Paredes), a streetwise transvestite (Antonia San Juan), each carrying their own grief.

The film weaves Lorca, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Cassavetes's Opening Night and Almodóvar's own preoccupations into something more generous than melodrama: a film about the unexpected families women build when biological ones fail. It remains, alongside Talk to Her and Volver, the apex of Almodóvar's mature mode.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Almodóvar's most emotionally complete film, and one of the few late-twentieth-century masterworks that placed transgender lives at its narrative centre without sensationalism. A masterclass in how generosity can be a structural principle, not just a tone.