All About My Mother MPAA Rating: R Entertainment: +2 Content: -3

Noted Spanish director Pedro Almodovar combines references to movie classic "All About Eve," Tennessee William's "Street Car Named Desire," with transvestite prostitutes in this interesting character study. Manuela (Cecilia Roth) is a nurse and organ transplant coordinator. Before his 16th birthday, she shows her son a picture torn in half which supposedly showed his father. For his birthday, he asks to see a perfomance f 'Streetcar' and to learn about his father. But while crossing a street after the show, he's hit by a car and killed. Manuela then decides to find his father and tell him about the son he never knew. In her search, she meets a young nun who's pregnant, apparently by her son's father. The nun has also contracted AIDS from the encounter. In the course of the film, we learn the father is a transvestite/partial transsexual prostitute now named Lola. When the nun dies in childbirth, Manuela and Lola meet at her funeral. This intriguing, but bizarre film will have a limited audience.

English subtitles translate many obscenities and moderate crudities. Many terms are sexually explicit and a transsexual friend of Manuela tells an audience about the cost of becoming a woman. One scene of a prostitution area called 'The Field' features breast nudity and sexual acts.

Preview Reviewer: Paul Bicking
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics, 550 Madison Ave., 8th Flr., NY, NY 10022