The problem with the film is its very staginess -- it never really seems to get out of drag. Between the impersonations of the priesthood, the impersonations of the transvestites and the impersonations of the actors themselves, there is little to choose.

| Jan 9, 2018

If Americans are allowed to see this film they may well conclude that the mature Almodvar is now ready to take his place alongside the great Buuel.

| Jun 18, 2012

Like a Chinese box, it has layers under layers, fictions within fictions. A mystery and an intricate triangular love story, it's also a tale about storytelling itself, the uses of art and artifice to make the unbearable bearable.

| Nov 1, 2007

In accounting for Almodvar's identity as an artist and a man, Bad Education comes together like a bold and far-reaching summation of his career to date.

Full Review | Sep 26, 2005

It still exerts an uncanny power: Like the best of Almodvar's work, it throws you a first-love sucker punch that will stagger your heart, mind, and soul.

| Feb 27, 2005

Taken at face value, Bad Education is about molestation, but from a wider perspective, it's about love, loss of innocence and the desperate quest for redemption.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 10, 2005

With Bad Education, the great Almodvar delivers the finest movie of his career.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 6, 2005

Even though Bad Education ultimately seems to escape the director's control, there is no small amount of enjoyment in getting lost in its sexual-philosophical house of mirrors.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 4, 2005

Reality, fantasy and cinema interweave with such grace and power that it's often difficult to separate one from the other, which is, of course, the point.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Feb 4, 2005

This is a disturbing film that challenges the viewer's comfort. It also challenges you to keep up as it jumps stylistically from comedy to romance to drama to a film noir thriller.

| Jan 27, 2005

A masterful epic charting love's labyrinths.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 20, 2005

His films are set-designed to the teeth, fastidiously framed and filled with beautiful bodies across the gender spectrum.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 15, 2005

One of Almodovar's darkest films since the early days of Law of Desire and Matador, and certainly one of his finest.

| Jan 14, 2005

To watch Bad Education is to revel, along with Almodovar, in the power of cinema to take us on journeys of breathtaking mystery and dimension and beauty.

| Jan 14, 2005

An exercise in stylish, seductive and cinematically self-referential finesse.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 14, 2005

Like all of Almodvar's films, Bad Education takes the audience down unexpected roads and switchbacks.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 14, 2005

Almodvar's most fiendishly crafted, emotionally complicated film.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 14, 2005

Crime and deception have rarely looked so sumptuous.

| Original Score: A | Jan 13, 2005

Almodóvar has fashioned this story to his own twisted sensibilities, and as such emerges as nothing less than a genius.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 27, 2004

If only Bad Education engaged the heart as much as the head, Almodovar's fractured tale might have risen above its alienating noir conventions.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 27, 2004