Spain and Portugal for Visitors

In contrast to Pedro Almodóvar, whose quirky films always carry the Almodóvar stamp, Amenábar specializes in not repeating himself. Thesis, Open Your Eyes, The Others, and the Oscar-winning The Sea Inside - every Amenábar film is quite different from the rest.

Basque director Alex de la Iglesia is the most iconoclastic and irreverent of Spain's film makers. The quality of his output is erratic, but when it is good it can be tremendously good indeed - I have a particular weakness for 800 Bullets myself, or the flawed but memorable Perdita Durango, (Dance With the Devil in some places), with a perversely broody Javier Bardem perfectly coupled with a fearsome Rosie Pérez.

1999 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, the is Spanish cult director Pedro Almodóvar's most mature work. The link goes to the relevant pages of the Sony Pictures website.

Spain's most internationally known film director Pedro Almodóvar specializes in surreal comedies with a lot of black humour and surrounding himself by the best and best-looking actresses in Spain, the chicas Almodóvar, the most famous of whom is Penelope Cruz. This blog is rarely updated, but given that the Pedro Almodóvar site has been hijacked, you'll have to make do with it.

OK, not a Spanish film, but it is the one that earned Penelope Cruz an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2009, and one which received almost as much praise for its Spanish locations - mostly Barcelona and Asturias - as for anything else. That is probably because Woody Allen reworked his Manhatten trick, making the location an essential character in the story. The link seems not to work reliably in Firefox, sorry about that.