SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL: Pedro Almodovar's 'Bad Education' skillfully examines the dark aftermath of a Catholic priest's abuse of students

The paradox of Pedro Almodovar's "Bad Education" is that while it may be the Spanish director's most personally felt film since those he made in the post-Franco '70s, it has less emotional impact than his two previous films -- 2002's indelible "Talk to Her" and 1999's "All About My Mother." At this level, however, Almodovar is competing only with himself.

"Bad Education," which opens the winter-spring season of the Detroit Film Theater on Friday, may be a bit too intoxicated with its own film-noir cleverness. But it's hard to imagine anyone other than those personally offended by the subject -- sexual abuse and homosexuality in a Catholic school -- leaving "Bad Education" without acknowledging Almodovar as one of the world's best and most consistent filmmakers.

"Bad Education" is not an indictment of the church, at least not in the accusatory way of, say, the documentary "Twist of Faith," which depicts a more casual callousness. Almodovar's film is a more complex (at times, too complex) examination of how the system aided and abetted sexual predators who justified their actions to themselves and, in the process, wreaked sexual identification crises on others.

Detroit Free Press dated February 3, 2005

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