The refrain in Spain
Bank Holiday Monday treat: the new Almodovar. Volver is being hailed as a return to form for the Spanish Fellini, just as every new David Bowie album is hailed as a return to form. To which assessment you must ask the question: return from where? He's seemed pretty on-form to me for a long while. In Sight & Sound, Peter Mathews takes the opporunity to bring Almodovar - and the legions who love him - down a peg or two, daring to suggest that he was never that great to begin with, and that he just recycles the same old themes with the same old formidable actresses and the people lap it up because of his dizzying brand. There's little arguing that Pedro returns again and again to the same well. Volver - which means "coming back" or "coming home", named after a song - ticks all the boxes, but that doesn't stop it being a stirring, evocative, funny and affecting female drama.

big question: what was Penelope Cruz doing knocking about with Tom Cruise and flirting with Hollywood? She's so much better on Spanish soil. Indeed, this is the role of a lifetime for her. She plays a suburban Madrid housewife of rural roots with a young daughter and a useless husband, who is haunted by her past but gets on with it. A textbook Almodovarian heroine. She looks fantastic in it - with a certain 60s look, heavy eyeliner, on teetering heels, little cardies stretched around her ample bosom, she's Sophia Loren, or Anna Magnani (who appears herself on a TV screen, as if to hammer the point home). It's all very deliberate, but Cruz pulls it off, coping admirably, but on the verge of tears much of the time. Presumably it takes a gay man to create female characters like this. Certainly, he puts women - especially mothers - on a pedestal, but he grounds them in gossip and "trash TV" and getting their hair done. They remind me of the women in my family, who used to congregate round our house on a Thursday and have their hair done by Auntie Janice. The smell of perm solution always takes me back there. I don't suppose people would fete me if I wrote a film about three generations of women in Northampton, but it works in Madrid. (Of course I felt immediately like going back to visit Madrid while watching the film, by the way.)

Only a gay male director would be allowed to occasionally objectify (ie. worship) his leading lady like Almodovar does with Cruz, in one scene shooting her washing up from above, all the better to see down her cleavage. Imagine Ken Loach doing that! I also liked the references back to Almodovar's childhood in La Mancha, with its fierce wind (fabled to send women mad) and its windmills. While Don Quixote tilted at the old-fashioned kind, now we get a landscape of wind turbines, the same energy that brings insanity and brush fires (it is a fire that killed Penelope Cruz's character's parents), bringing power to the small village where The Past took place. It's a striking image. But this is a director that does striking.

Yet again, it's a foreign-language film that relights my fire. I'm pleased that the Odeon at Wimbledon would reserve one of its screens for Volver, but even more so that the cinema, albeit one of the smaller screens, would be on its way to full on a Monday afternoon. It's nice to know there are people out there who will read subtitles. Volver makes me want to watch some old Almodovars. Peter Mathews is harsh. This is a four-star film. Not his very finest work (I prefer All About My Mother), but up there.