In an attempt to make things well with her daughters and family, Irene, a smart woman, who dies with her husband in a fire, leaving her family stranded, returns to make things well and makes the unity of her family, the thing that challenges her.
It's clever and entertaining. It's marvelously deft, but never daffy. It works well enough, despite feeling like the most conventional film this great, envelope-pushing Spanish director has ever made.
BrandonFibbs.com
February 28, 2008
Pedro Almodovar's Volver is amazingly bright, fresh and clean for a film dealing with murder, adultery, incest, malignant disease and the occasional supernatural apparition.
Almodóvar's phantasms are emotionally anchored so the story never gets away from its characters -- just when you suspect he might have overplayed his hand he stages a clever, surprising inversion to tie the film together.
Time Out
February 03, 2007
Even if Volver sounds too high-concept for you, know that Almodóvar is smart enough not to rest on laughs alone, extending his premise to dark, though occasionally tidy psychological territory.
Volver is rich, crazy, ambitious and filled with heaven and earth in a way that no other filmmaker can touch. It is a flawed beauty, but the beauty is so much more important than the flaws.
At the center of this hectic universe, [Cruz] never misses a step and may even elevate what Almodovar originally conceived.
Philadelphia Inquirer
December 28, 2006
Pedro Almodóvar whipstitches a movie from patches of those mother-daughter melodramas Mildred Pierce, Bellissima and Two Women and makes it seamless and original, funny as it is fierce, breathtaking as it is life-affirming.
Houston Chronicle
December 22, 2006
The Return rattles its chains for a spell, but it doesn't linger -- it quickly leaves.
