Monday Week 7, 26 February 2007, 7:30pm + 9:15pm

"If it was a drink, it would be pink champagne" ~ Le Monde
Get rid of winter blues with this hilarious and bizarre murder-comedy from Merchant Ivory productions. Rent boys, hash brownies, opera, a neurotic actress who thinks she's Vanessa Redgrave, and a dead psychoanalyst - Merci Dr. Rey is a madcap trip through the boulevards and backstreets of Paris, populated by bumbling policemen. The (gloriously unlikely) plot follows Thomas, a young man who trawls the gay personal ads looking for love. Or sex. Or whatever. What he finds, in a sequences of outrageous coincidences, is his father, his father's (hot, young, male) murderer, a deluded but charming actress, and her psychoanalyst. Overseeing the lot is Thomas's American opera-singer mother (played by Dianne Wiest) - a true diva - in Paris to sing Turandot. Naturally, hilarity ensues.

Base and beautiful, La Mala Educación is Almodovar's semi-autobiographical exploration of pre-pubescent love between two boys in the context of the corruptions of the catholic church. Years later, the two meet up as young men, and begin to make a film about their childhood. Artifice and acting are interwoven with reality, and characters are not who they say they are as Almodovar creates a world of deception, illusion, memory and fantasy. Gael Garcia Bernal, achingly desirable both in and out of drag, acts an actor, in layers of character which are gradually stripped away. Sex, lies, and cinema combine in this sublime and haunting masterpiece. Almodovar at his finest.

Claire Kirwin (Magdalen FilmSoc Committee)