That said, "Bad Education" is another in Spanish director Almodovar's canon of wildly entertaining, occasionally disturbing and always original films about sex, religion, show business, death... and life in all its tawdry glory.

Homosexual characters are a staple of Almodovar's films and in "Bad Education" he introduces us to three men trapped by their past who must come to terms with life in a hollow present that has lost the promise once offered by their youth.

Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez) is a film director in search of a story. He has been reduced to clipping out outrageous tales from the tabloids, but nothing clicks. The one about the man who drove 60 kilometers on his motorcycle after he was dead does hold some promise but is quickly supplanted by a much more personal and immediate one.

Small-time actor and hustler Ignacio Rodrigez (Gael Garcia Bernal), arrives at the film-director's office with a story he says he wrote called "The Visit." It's the tale of two boys growing up in an abusive Catholic school and examines the relationships between the boys and the Principal, Father Manolo (Daniel Gimenez Cacho).

Enrique thinks he recognizes Ignacio as his long lost school friend who "The Visit" is based on and decides to make it his next directing project. As he comes face to face with his own past, through researching the film, the present becomes a far more dangerous place than he ever expected.

"He was my first love," Enrique tells his associate after Ignacio first leaves his office.

Enrique reads the script and it comes to life before our eyes as "The Visit" unfolds on the screen. This film-within-a-film gets even more complex as the true story of a recent pivotal event is related by one of the characters to add another layer of suspicion and suspense, while several scenes take the protagonists (at different times in their lives) to the cinema. At one point we are watching four films at once: the present, the past, the recent past and a third- party punctuation to all of them. It's quite amazing, but Almodovar pulls it off seamlessly.

As the story of Father Manolo's abuse of Ignacio as a boy, the boy's love for Enrique and his subsequent hatred of Father Manolo unfolds, the present overlaps with the past, truth overlaps with lies and the passions of yesterday are played out in the present to devastating effect. (I'm trying to be cryptic here so as not to give too much away)

"Bad Education" is a noir-ish tale of secrecy, deception, blackmail and murder and a mesmerizing mix of cinematographic style and character substance.

Almodovar has made a different kind of film noir here. One that is as dark, as gritty and as tricky as the great film noir thrillers of the past, but its sexual subtext is much more palpable and intractable. Sex is responsible for everything that happens in the movie, from the original passions of two young boys for each other, the Principal's abuse of Ignacio and his unkept promise not to expel Enrique, to the subsequent events and characters that are exposed so deftly during the climax of the film.

There is a lot of graphic sex in "Bad Education," but it is never trivialized. It is always done realistically to capture the desperate passions of its characters and though there are graphic moments, they are part of the story, and less graphic than say, HBO's "Oz" or Showtime's "Queer as Folk" TV series, though they do come close.

One powerful scene involving murder and its cover-up by two priests contains these searing lines of dialogue as the two priests rationalize what they have just done:

Priest 1: "There are no witnesses."

Priest 2: "God."

Priest 1: "Yes, but he's on our side."

"Bad Education" is a pleasure to watch but tough to review because of the many levels of reality one has to deal with. By the end it's hard to tell what is real and what is not and I would prefer you decide which is which without too much help. Characters reappear later in life as different actors and those who you think are one character turn out to be another.

All the actors are brilliant here. From Bernal's phenomenal turn as Juan/Ignacio and the transsexual Zahara to Lluis Homar's tortured Manuel Berenguer, each actor brings out the inherent sympathy to what, on the surface, are unsympathetic roles. Watch for Francisco Boira as the tortured transsexual junkie who appears late in the film and you'll see what I mean.

In "Bad Education" art doesn't imitate life as much as life becomes art and then becomes life again. You just have to know where to look.

If you are on the lookout for something intriguing and different to start the New Year with, this powerful film is an experience to be savored, not to be explained.