As 1997 drew to a close, this pair of foreign films made waves amongst film goers everywhere they played. Spanish enfant terrible Pedro Almodovar's latest, following his stunningly subdued and genuinely touching "The Flower of My Secret", is a straight-forward, and surprisingly well made, noir-like mystery potboiler based on a Ruth Rendell novel. I admit that I wasn't too keen on watching this film initially, given the fact that I had suffered through the twin terrors of "High Heels" (and its bizarre women's prison musical song and dance routine) and "Kika" (and its overall bad taste), but "Live Flesh" sees the director working at a level of maturity not previously in much evidence. He has cast his film extremely well (Angela Molina is the stand-out in the cast) and his restrained but still somewhat over-the-top, droll treatment of the material lends a new, unexpected playfulness to a tired genre which revitalises and makes it interesting once more. "Live Flesh" is set against the backdrop of political upheaval and unrest, but really, the film is nothing more than a torrid romantic mystery about a young ingenue who is wrongfully sent to jail for shooting a man in the apartment of the woman he believes himself in love with; once out of prison, he sets out for revenge, unexpectedly drawing together the disparate lives of two policemen and their wives into his web of anger and lost innocence. Surprisingly good, "Live Flesh" is arguably Almodovar's most consistently pleasing work to date.