Matador, The

Documentaries are usually vanity projects: funding difficulties necessitate their being movie-makers' financially unrewarding labours of love or sponsored productions. So it's natural to assume that a Spanish bullfighter's management company funded The Matador, covering three years in the life of an ambitious young man.

In 2003, Granada-born David Fandila (El Fandi), a top-rated 21-year-old set out to be a top ranker. His voice-over interview comments note that most matadors only have six or seven years at their peak and that's when millions can be earned. Fandila's target was appearances at 100 corridas in Spain or South America in one year, a feat only achieved by a dozen other matadors during the ritual sport's recorded history.

One of them, with whom Fandila often co-starred, was Enrique Ponce, a box-office champion who broke the 100-plus record ten times running. A non-aficiando can sense, from the brief extracts shown, that the older Ponce had a calm, classical style of choreography and posing in the ring. Fandila's youth only partly explains his faster, flashier temperament.

Outside the ring, however, he's portrayed as a quietly determined professional, wanting to achieve the glory that had eluded his corrida-crazy family for four generations. Fandila had aped matador moves at the age of four; a family video shows him as an eight-year-old going through the motions with a calf. He and his more reserved brother were well schooled in competitiveness, becoming members of the national ski team. The brother became his personal assistant when Fandila junior switched to bullfighting.

First-time director Stephen Higgins needed to collate material from various sources (family archives, film of El Fandi's early corridas and visit to Lima, B&W media prints, and interviews with the family, managers, bullfighting commentators and a girlfriend who appears only once for an al fresco family meal). Wisely, the production including comments from, and footage of, Spanish anti-bullfighting campaigners (and also sensibly employed a veteran documentary maker, Nina Gilden Seavey, to co-direct it).

Interviewees apologetically stress the sport's cultural, tradition-conscious values, and several corrida scenes do successfully illustrate the beautiful barbarity of a spectacular entertainment and people's ballet. Fandi's massive leg scar, presumably from an early goring, is unexplained, but the movie's audiences do see him tripped, poked, unclothed, and then badly gored by different bulls.

The latter goring occured during the third match in a home-city corrida in which he fought all six bulls. Proudly shooing away nervous ring personnel, he completes the kill, strides out and undergoes back-stage surgery, returning to the ring and fans' oles after 45 minutes to complete the corrida. That was in 2005, when he finally reached his 100-plus target and was the year's top-ranker matador (having appeared in 72 corridas in 2003 and 97 the next year).

Relentlessly supporting a personal staff of six and all his loving family's pressure and needs, El Fandi gives one a sense of the money-making roles that Tiger Woods, Liz Taylor, Michael Jackson et al were obliged to play.

Strangely, the movie's been truncated. First screened in cinemas (in 2008) at a length of 106 minutes, it runs for only 75 on its DVD version. Maybe the producers reckoned that the bullfight's ritual three episodes for a matador's displays would look too much the same to maintain a TV or mainstream audience's interest and respect, so a half-an-hour of them were shunted into a DVD extra. (It doesn't explain the traditions of corrida dress code, and whether genitalia can only be flaunted on the left side.)

Missing lynx, The

There is definitely a vast global market for cartoon or CGI animation movies; they're the ideal family entertainment. Disney made fortunes out of them, as have Pixar, Dreamworks, the creators of South Park and The Simpsons, Tim Burton, Aardman and specialist Japanese studios. Art houses often show other nations' efforts, often grimmer or more bizarre, from Czechs, Danes, Israelis, French, Irish, Australians and Brits other than Nick Park. Other countries entering the competitive animation lists include Spain, whose The Missing Lynx [El lince perdido]was "presented" by Antonio Banderas (Shrek's now-spun-off Puss in Boots).

Released for the Christmas 2008 market in Spain, the original movie ran for an unlikely 140 minutes according to its Wikipedia page, lasted for 97 minutes when it went elsewhere in Europe, and is listed as a 75-minuter in the U.S. market. I saw the medium-length version and could see why cuts could have been made to speed up its pace.

The title character (appropriately, an Iberian wild cat) is an accident-prone comic hero whose menagerie of unlikely allies comprises a feisty goat, a paranoid chameleon, a convalescent hawk and a half-blind double-agent mole (like the movie's title, that must also be a wordplay in the Spanish language). Naturally, a lynxette arrives on the scene, along with an evil hunter, a pair of his bumbling henchmen, a flighty flamingo, and a modern-day Noah with a scifi ark.

In addition to this line-up of standard animated characters, there are other acknowledgments to classics in the scenery and plot developments (from The Lion King to Mouse Hunt). Above all, the animators do what all their peers do - display their talents for creating trickier effects such as dust and shadows, water and changing light, reflections and vehicular speed. They're admirable as are some of the animals' solo scenes, but group scenes exhibit a static staginess also evident in poorly-directed movies featuring human actors not transformed into an ensemble.

Lead writer and co-director Raul Garcia is a veteran from Asterix, the Smurfs and Disney. Co-writer Stephen Hughes has lived and worked in Spain since 1986, has worked on other animated projects there, and provides the voice of the vengeful hunter. A trio of English voices join him to render the whole animal cast in the English-language version (one channeling the intonations of Kenneth Williams), and they don't add depth to the overly-cute flawed personalities.

Several minutes in the final chase sequence exhibit a pace, flair and visual excitement that capture a viewer's sceptical mind. But most of the movie is no worse than many recent sub-standard Hollywood efforts, and that's damning it with a faint praise.

Cria cuervos ...

A Spanish movie from 1976, Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos (Raise Ravens) was re-issued by Criterion's Janus Collection 30 years later. Any movie that wins top prizes at the Cannes or Venice film festivals is treated with caution by many film goers, a very different tribe to cineastes. This movie garnered the Cannes Special Jury Prize Award.

At the time, when Franco was on his deathbed, the movie was perceived as a subtle portrait of the Generalissimo's Spain, considered a land of repression and corruption by its critics. Movie critics praised writer-director Saura's calm study of good and evil in the family of eight-year-old Ana, her two sisters, their aunt and grandmother, and their dead parents.

Geraldine Chaplin floats through the film as the suffering mother, the wife of a philandering army officer. She's a figure from the past, recollected possibly only in the young girl's memories or imagination. In the present, she's a ghost who appears in the child's dreams by night and day. The actress is also the to-camera face of Ana as a young woman, recalling aspects of her own and her mother's story.

Even more important for the mystery's shifting perspectives is Ana's stoical face, grabbing the audience's wholehearted attention with the flicker of an eye or barely perceptible muscle movements. Child actress Ana Torrent had already won many awards for her 1973 performance in The Spirit of the Beehive, a Frankenstein-inspired fantasy created by Victor Erice when Torrent was seven years old. It's easy to assume that Saura saw it and Torrent and dreamt up a plot to showcase her exceptional cinematic talent. (Chaplin, the daughter of you-know-who, was Saura's life partner, appearing in ten of his movies.)

Did Ana, as she tells us, poison her father in well-planned revenge for his infidelity and heartlessness to her mother? Who else might she kill in her unlikeable family? The wheelchair-ridden mute grandmother, the domineering aunt who takes charge of the household, the military man's wife who'd had an affair with her father? She loves her older and younger sister, but are they safe? And why does her pet guinea pig die?

The ending is a bitter-sweet resolution, proving that Ana's evil imagination didn't poison anyone, even though she'd planned to. She leaves home to go to school, entering the reality of a modern Madrid previously hidden beyond their exclusive home's garden walls.

I couldn't see the connection between her escape from the past and Spain's release from a fascistic regime. Saura's cinematic skills were evident, and his screenplay artfully wove claustrophobic sets, ancient and modern songs, Hitchcockian red herrings and startling close-up photography. Is it a masterpiece? No, and Criterion rightly placed it in its second-tier Janus classification.

Broken embraces

Audiences are not supposed to take Pedro Almodovar's films seriously. They are supposed to giggle, guffaw and groan. The prolific Spanish director is an entertainer, a master of soap operatics.

He composes cinematic arias for his leading ladies and they revel in performing his high notes. Every actress in an Almodovar movie is so clearly in her element, and their male counterparts are treated almost as well. In Broken Embraces, it may seem that this is another vehicle (the fourth) that Pedro built for Penelope Cruz. It is, but it's also got a handful of extra seats for other ladies to fill passionately.

Cruz is Lena, the mistress of an ageing magnate. She's a wannabee actress, and he funds the production of a comedy she wants to make with director Mateo (Lluis Homar). Her father is dying, reason enough for a veteran actress to emote as her mother. Another Almodovar favourite, Blanca Portillo, is the director's loyal agent and the single mother of a sickly boy.

Fourteen years in the future, the director's blind and has sought sanity from bad memories by adopting a pseudonym, Harry Caine (yes, Michael must be chuffed by such an offbeat honour). Bit by bit, we are shown scenes from the comedy's sets, and scenes of the "making of" documentary being filmed by the magnate's son. He's gay, gratuitously so, but you knew there had to be at least one somewhere in an Almodovar concoction.

It's easy to sense that the master chef of serio-comic cinema adores sexual romps, outrageous plot twists, the whole movie business, and actresses with super-expressive eyes. The dvd extras reveal more of Almodovar's free-wheeling scripting genius with a trio of wonderful deleted scenes and one script read-through in which Pedro advises Penelope what her character's inner thoughts are. Best of all is the specially-shot comedy short, The Cannibalistic Councillor, expanding the hilarious character of the chubby, cocaine-snorting, cake-munching, sexually avaricious, foot-fetishist friend in the film within a film. That role is a gift, surely written specially for another longtime pal of Pedro, comic actress Chuz Lampreave.

Naturally, Cruz triumphs as a woman with a life comprising at least three roles. One of them is pretending to be an Audrey Hepburn lookalike who can't act very well on-screen. She alone is reason enough to enjoy the latest Almodovar quality soap opera. All the other women are great bonus reasons.