“All About My Mother,” May 17 2000 (1999), theater, Spanish, subtitled. Nice to see director Pedro Almodovar finally hit it again. A very well-crafted film that only occasionallyslips into melodrama but avoids both the boring soap-operaish aspects, the over-the-top silliness, and the in-your-face- shock theatrics of his earlier pictures without changing t“conventional” characters. The same TSs, pregnant nuns, and thieves as before inhabit his film about a mother who loses her son and returns to Barcelona to try to figure out her past. A wonderful set of character studies that makes the alternative very normal and comprehensible. Well done, funny, interesting. Lots of inter-textual references and relationships with “All About Eve.” It is, after all, a film that is, in part, set in the theater. It is also about people recreating themselves. A very good film. See this one!