More pot-boiling from Spain’s master of convoluted melodrama, Almodovar’s adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s novel Mygale is a gender-bending sci-fi hybrid starring Antonio Banderas as a plastic surgeon and grieving widower. Holed up in his Toledo mansion with his tart-tongued housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) and a beautiful imprisoned woman (Elena Anaya), he develops a new synthetic skin which can help burn victims. The revelation of a gruesome back story seems, often, to serve as much for laughs as for dramatic heft in what is one of Almodovar’s lighter efforts.
