Almodovar’s ‘Volver’ resurrects Penelope Cruz

In theaters

VOLVER, written and directed by Pedro Almodovar, 120 minutes, rated R. In Spanish, with English subtitles.

Pedro Almodovar’s “Volver” stars Penelope Cruz in a comeback performance that’s so good, it recalls the film’s title itself. In Spanish, “volver” means “to return,” and that’s exactly what Cruz has done here. She’s fantastic.

The movie reminds you what all the hype was about when Cruz first hit the scene in the United States in Fina Torres’ 2000 film “Woman on Top.” In that movie, whether holding a tomato near her breasts and saying “you need to make sure they’re full and plump” or lifting a chili pepper to her nose and inhaling its aroma while thinking of a man, there rarely was a moment that the actress wasn’t smoldering with sexuality.

She was like a young Sophia Loren or Anna Magnani softened with the vulnerability of an Audrey Hepburn. When the movie became an underground hit, the Hollywood machine not surprisingly cheapened her appeal in such films as “Vanilla Sky,” “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” and “Sahara.” Later, when she became Tom Cruise’s real-life love interest, there was the sense that that was it. We likely had lost her to Xenu on a DC-8 of no return.

But not so. Cruz is one of the key reasons to see “Volver,” a comic melodrama with broad echoes of “Mildred Pierce” that gathers together a tight network of strong women – a staple in Almodovar’s work – and becomes increasingly serious as the movie unfolds.

In the film, Cruz’s Raimunda is first seen scrubbing graves with her daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo), sister Sole (Lola Duenas), and dozens of other women at a La Mancha cemetery before the death that surrounds them literally blows to the forefront of the movie.

Raimunda’s elderly aunt (Chus Lampreave) is failing physically (though you’d never know it given the heartiness of her loud kissing), while at home, Raimunda’s deadbeat husband, Paco (Antonio de la Torre), makes the mistake of trying to rape his own daughter. This leads to his bloody murder at the hands of Paula. Raimunda, who is nothing if not resourceful, steps in to dispose of the body while the plot thickens with the return of her mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), who died in a fire years before.

What’s going on here? We’ll leave that for Almodovar to explain, which he does with typical flourish and aplomb, but also with unusual reservoirs of restraint. It’s a balance the director strikes throughout, and while that makes for a movie that’s less showy than, say, Almodovar’s “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” it also reveals the maturity of an artist working near the peak of his craft.

As for Cruz, returning to Spain and to her native language has left her transformed. No longer does she seem uncomfortable onscreen. Instead, with these words, this story, that talent and that body, she’s unleashed. This is her third film with Almodovar – her first was 1997’s “Live Flesh,” her breakout was 1999’s “All About My Mother,” in which she played a pregnant nun infected with HIV – and she reaches deep here to mine a fiery, complex character that’s her most compelling to date.

Grade: A

On DVD and HD DVD

MIAMI VICE, written and directed by Michael Mann, 133 minutes, rated R.

The first sign that Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice”is going to remove itself from Mann’s own popular 1980s television show is the moment Colin Farrell slides onscreen sporting a blowout mullet and a blunted Fu Manchu.

Whereas a good deal of the television show became a harbinger for what was fashionable during the day – it championed the skinny neck tie, the geri curl, the white shoe, the pastel suit – there is nothing in Farrell’s tangled bird’s nest of a ‘do that suggests that mousse, let alone shampoo, has been applied in days.

This rough-and-tumble version of “Vice” never finds a story that competes with Miami itself. At night or at sunset, Mann’s Miami looks at once hot and cool, dangerous and seductive – just as it should be. But those same qualities only occasionally apply to the story, which fails to mine a trace of chemistry between vice cops Sonny Crockett (Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx, barely registering). Instead, it’s the relationship between Crockett and the mysterious Isabella (the terrific Gong Li) that gives the movie the soul it otherwise would have lacked.

The story that draws them together is a convoluted pastiche of drug cartel cliches. Crockett and Tubbs find themselves investigating a South American drug kingpin routinely shipping drugs into Miami. Amid this dim world of oily toughs, Crockett meets Isabella, a gorgeous money launderer who not only works for the kingpin, but who also is in a shaky relationship with him. What she finds in Crockett is pure heat beneath the mullet with fireworks and bullets eventually consuming the plot.

What’s peculiar about “Miami Vice” is how the movie refuses to fetishize the Ferrari Crocket and Tubbs drive, the expensive speedboats they race, the swank locales they visit, the bling that’s part of their job. That was a core element of the television show, but here, it’s as if the sub-culture doesn’t exist, which is hardly true, particularly for Miami, where it continues to thrive.

More curious is the reason the movie exists. If Mann was determined to ditch the kitsch of his television show and make a serious film, the natural conclusion is that he did so to offer new insights into the current drug culture. So what are they? Turns out not much. While the movie does feature a fine shootout here and a swell romance there, throughout “Miami Vice” there’s the sense that Mann became bored with the ideas that propelled his television show onto the screen in the first place.

Grade: C

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, for Christopher Smith’s reviews that appear Mondays in Discovering, Fridays in Happening, weekends in Television and on bangordailynews.com. Reach him at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.