New York Adult Entertainment: Cinematic soul mates
Almodóvar’s films with Cruz have often found the sweet spot where the ornate trappings of melodrama eventually fall away to reveal deeper and more complicated emotions and motives. They’ve also offered Cruz some of her richest opportunities. In the 1997 thriller “Live Flesh,” she dominates the first 10 minutes, playing an impoverished prostitute in 1970 Madrid who gives birth on a city bus. Two years later, when he was casting “All About My Mother,” which would win the Oscar for best foreign-language film, Almodóvar called upon her again, this time to play a nun. Even as she falls into an affair with a transvestite and becomes HIV-positive, she remains the film’s sweetest, purest presence. “It surprised me when he told me what the role was,” she recalled. “But I thought, ‘Only Pedro could make this real, because he has no judgment against any of these characters.’ “