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Actress Penelope Cruz shines in "Broken Embraces," her fourth movie with Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar.

Directed and written by Pedro Almodóvar. Produced by Esther García. Photographed by Rodrigo Prieto. Edited by José Salcedo. Music by Alberto Iglesias.
With Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Blanca Portillo, Tamar Novas, José Louis Gómez.
Playing in Manhattan at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, 1886 Broadway, and Landmark Sunshine Cinema, 141-143 E. Houston St.
In the most indelible scene of "Broken Embraces" ("Los abrazos rotos"), Pedro Almodóvar's latest vivid melodrama, Penélope Cruz plays dress-up.
As an aspiring actress named Lena, she's testing wardrobe for a film.
She quickly turns to the camera in one wig after another, each time flashing the megawatt smile of a silver screen goddess. It might be Lena's first movie, but Cruz has gotten the hang of this.
In her fourth film with Almodóvar, Cruz gives her most glamorous performance yet, and a fitting one, too, as "Broken Embraces" is in many ways a movie about movies. Cruz is even done up like Audrey Hepburn.
Transformation, like Lena's rapid shape-shifting, is a theme throughout. Almodóvar relishes the metamorphoses actors and people undertake while at the same time mournfully observing this constant flight from self.
At the center of the film is Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar), a writer who takes his nom de plume, Harry Caine, after being blinded in a car accident years earlier. He's a successful screenwriter with a manager, Judit García (Blanca Portillo), whose son Diego (Tamar Novas) also assists him.
"I was always tempted by the thought of being someone else," he narrates.
Mateo's past returns, though, when a young filmmaker approaches him about a script. Dressed in a black leather jacket and sunglasses, the man introduces himself as Ray X. We soon learn that his identity, too, is a concealment; he used to be an awkward teenager named Ernesto Junior.
Ernesto Junior's visit prompts consternation and a long flashback. (There's a great deal of time shifting and story swapping.)
We travel back to Mateo meeting Lena in 1994, when he could still see. His first sight of Lena — in ravishing close-up — is played like Rita Hayworth's entrance in "Gilda." Mateo immediately falls for her and casts her for his film, a comedy.
Lena lives with an older, wealthy businessman named Ernesto Martel (José Louis Gómez), Ernesto Junior's father. She doesn't love him, but is indebted to him for helping her sick father.
Ernesto, though, is obsessed with Lena. To control her, he finances Mateo's movie and sends Junior to document everything Lena does on set. Each night, he watches the footage with a lip reader, soon discovering the budding love between Lena and Mateo.