After a string of variable films which seemed to show the director searching for a style, The Man From La Mancha's 13th feature has been well received in Spain, consolidating the critical and commercial success of 1997's Live Flesh. Though Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother) is dominated by the melodrama of Almodóvar's recent films - "Almodrama", as Spanish writer Vicente Molina Foix has dubbed it - fans nostalgic for the kitsch humour of his early work will find consolation in the performance of Antonia San Juan, the latest "chica Almodóvar", as a golden-hearted transvestite. "It's an emotional story," the director said in a recent interview, "which I'd like to reach people's hearts and genitals."

Almodóvar's film is explicitly anti-machismo and femme-dominated - the director defines its theme as "the capacity of women to pretend" - with only a couple of miniature roles reserved for the physically stronger, emotionally weaker sex.

Almodóvar veteran Cecilia Roth plays Manuela, a nurse and single mother in her late 30s who has her son Esteban (Eloy Azorín) after coming to Madrid from Barcelona 18 years before. The early scenes develop the relationship between the two and emphasise Manuela's emotional dependence on her son. Esteban, Truman Capote fan and wannabe novelist, is writing a story about his mother for a competition. Following a theatre trip to see A Streetcar Named Desire, he runs into the street to get the autograph of actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), and is killed by a passing car as Manuela looks on.

Following an impulse to get back in touch with Esteban's father (Toni Canto) - who, in the interim, has become a transvestite called Lola - Manuela returns to Barcelona. She stops off in a slum district, where she witnesses an old friend, good-hearted transsexual La Agrado (San Juan) being beaten up.

When she goes in search of work, Manuela also meets Huma Rojo, Huma's junkie girlfriend Nina (Candela Peña), innocent do-gooder nun Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz), and her hysterical, incomprehending mother (Rosa Maria Sardá), who gets one of the best of the pic's many comic throwaway lines: "I hate strangers seeing me doing my Chagall forgeries," she says as the camera pans to a room full of drying canvasses.

All the women have some emotional burden to bear. The tone is thus basically dark. Death, pain and disease are never far away - Rosa becomes pregnant by Manuela's ex-lover and dies of Aids - but a sweetly paced and genuinely witty script prevents things from becoming depressing, focusing instead on the characters' stoicism.

Cecilia Roth, recently and memorably seen in Adolfo Aristaraín's Martín Hache, returns to the Almodóvar camp as a woman with powerful maternal instincts who's locked into a permanent struggle against grief and comes to realise that friendship can create satisfying emotional rewards. "Tragedy is a part of everyone," Roth says. "You just have to open the bottle and put the person in an extreme situation and tragedy will come out too."

Almodóvar's 1990s work has emphasised the complexity of existence and has achieved greater emotional force because of it, but there's still the feeling that he's not quite going the whole way - that he is a victim of his basically pop aesthetic, which keeps his films at the level of melodrama without elevating them into tragedy. Almodóvar cannot resist finding visual poetry in a scene - but when the scene is, for example, a night view of a Barcelona slum (this is his first film shot there), any emotional authenticity is sacrificed.

Surrounded by talent such as this, Antonia San Juan not only makes room for herself but creates that rare spectator sensation of anticipation - we look forward to her next scene. She is proof that Almodóvar has become a director of compassion, able to root out the humanity inside the misfits who people his universe. Jonathan Holland