This is Pedro Almodóvar back in his wonderful world of women after the all-male Bad Education. His Spanish sisterhood may be slightly loopy but they are indomitable, nurturing and endlessly preferable to men, the only significant representative of whom is Penélope Cruz's feckless, workshy husband who is dispensed with almost before we have got going, to nobody's great concern.

Not for the first time, the director's plot takes off from a Holywood original - in this case, the fabulous Mildred Pierce. Cruz combines corpse removal with restaurant duties and is on peak form after a Hollywood sojourn where she was usually better than the movies around her; ironically, it took a move away from the US for her first Oscar nomination (the movie's entire female cast won a joint best actress award in Cannes).

The director's usual 80s muse, Carmen Maura, also returns for a film set in the director's home town, La Mancha, nowadays shown to have wind turbines rather than Don Quixote's windmills, so the title, which translates as "to return" or "to go home", is apt in many ways.

It's a gentle film and a little too silly and cosy to rank with Almodóvar's best - it's not a patch on Live Flesh or Talk to Her - but as ever, he has put together a colourful entertainment well worth a couple of hours of your time, and with the legible subtitles that so many foreign-language DVDs lack.