Los Amantes Pasajeros

It seems as though everything that could be said or written in praise of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has already been expressed. He is, without the shadow of a doubt, not only a critical darling, but has also earned himself a very respectable amount of fans in the movie going public, and, lest it be overlooked, built an impressive career with stories that, either directly or otherwise, spoke about subsections of the human population that only so rarely make important or relevant appearances in film, most notably homosexuals and transvestites.

For three decades, Pedro Almodovar has been the most internationally successful purveyor of queer cinema. His first film, 1980’s Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, was released just two years before Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s too-soon swan-song, Querelle. Though the directors possess distinctly different approaches to the medium (Almodovar hasn’t yet gone sci-fi ala World on A Wire, for instance), their films were among the first brashly and unapologetically queer films that were both critically accepted and widely seen.