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In Pedro Almodovar’s new film, "Bad Education", Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez), a successful homosexual film director, looks through newspapers for bizarre stories to turn into screenplays. One clipping is of a motorcyclist who freezes to death but rides on, chased by two traffic cops; another is of a woman who throws herself into the crocodile pit at a crowded zoo, wordlessly hugging the crocodiles as they devour her.

It is a fitting image for Almodovar himself, and explains why his films are not for everyone. Some fondly call them eccentric; others call them weird for weird’s sake.

"Bad Education" is the kind of self-reflexive film Charlie Kauffman ("Adaptation", "Being John Malkovich") would have written if he had been gay and depressed.

It tells the story of two boys, Enrique and Ignatio, who fall in love at a Catholic school in Spain, only to be separated by the jealous, child-abusing Principal, Father Manolo. Years later, they are re-united when Ignatio approaches Enrique to direct a short story he wrote about their childhood. Lust, blackmail, murder and numerous plot twists follow in a film where you are never quite sure what is fact, fiction, fantasy or the film being made.

Pedro Almodovar is undeniably a genius. His last two films — "All About My Mother" and "Talk To Her" — won Oscars for Best Foreign Film and Best Original Screenplay respectively, and "Bad Education" is full of his trademark structural inventiveness and sensual cinematography.

It also features rising Mexican star Gael Garcia Bernal ("Y U Mama Tambien", "Amores Perros" and the upcoming "Motorcycle Diaries") as a femme fatale who is prepared to do anything for fame, in a remarkable performance that should add thousands of Cape Town men to his already massive fan club of adoring women.

But "Bad Education" lacks both the melodrama and the comedy of Almodovar’s best work, and is strangely lacking in heart. Almodovar describes this as his most personal film yet, but while he raises a lot of tender issues, he seems afraid to delve too deeply into them.

Instead, he continually takes us out of the story to remind us of the filmmaking process itself, as though he needs to remind himself, as well as his audience, that what we are seeing is not really real.

Almodovar is the master chronicler of homosexual sexuality, drag acts, sex changes, drug addiction and mutually exploitative relationships. In this film, he points out all the problems but he cannot find a happy ending. That’s my main complaint: I admire the craft but wish he had a different story to tell.