It would be criminal to discuss the plot of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, “The Skin I Live In,” in any linear or sensible fashion, for it would ruin the sick joke he’s setting us up for.

The best way to describe it is to lay out the unsettling images and metaphors Almodóvar fills the screen wtih for about an hour, after which, through assorted flashbacks, he gradually starts to link all the threads.

Pedro Almodóvar's “The Skin I Live In,” which opens Friday, continues the theme of captivity and powerlessness—whether experienced through a coma, a kidnapping or a permanent, paralyzing handicap—that has permeated films like “Talk to Her,” “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” and “Live Flesh.” Whether they're deranged or romantic, farcical or tragic, Almodóvar's movies always combine melodramatic stories

Limelight, the documentary directed by Billy Corben, is perhaps the most apologetic, mournful retelling of a party animal’s life since The People Vs. Larry Flynt, or at least, Blow. Given Corben’s kid-gloves treatment of his subject—1970s-through-‘90s dance club kingpin Peter Gatien—you may, by the end of this coke-fueled, debauchery-drenched saga, confuse Gatien with Saint Teresa of Avila herself. But whether you

Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” released forty years ago, is perhaps the most thematically confused thriller ever made. On the surface, it’s a standard fish-out-of-water/revenge story: a stuffy professor, David (Dustin Hoffman) and his lithe, blonde, British housewife Amy (Susan George) are tormented by hooligans—including Amy’s ex-boyfriend—when they move back to her rustic England hometown. At first, these roughnecks, who

Dying to Do Letterman, the documentary directed by married couple Joke Fincioen and Biagio Messina, chronicles five tumultuous years in the life of Steve Mazan, an average-Joe comedian whose lifelong dream is to perform on Late Show with David Letterman. That goal was expedited once Mazan was diagnosed with liver cancer and told, in early 2005, that he may have just five years to live.

Phnom Penh Lullaby is a John Cassavetes-style documentary—about a bickering couple, no less—but one will not find amusingly rambling scenes of middle-class drunkards quaintly skirting their troubles. Here, the handheld, jerky camera lingers on sad babies, sad prostitutes, trash-strewn streets and some of the saddest domestic squabbles ever recorded on film. Depending on your personal taste, you will either be riveted or exhausted—even bored

The most poignant scene in Miss Representation, Jennifer Siebel Newsom's documentary on the sorry state of female imagery in popular culture, is where Newsom reveals that she made the film for her newborn daughter. A teenage athlete molested by her coach, Newsom developed a severe eating disorder and inferiority complex about her looks. She excelled at Stanford University, but when she later turned to acting