Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most critically acclaimed directors of his generation.  The shelf-haired auteur has produced film after film of stylish visuals, off-kilter humor, sexual frankness and emotional depth.  He's one of the few filmmakers on the international scene whose very name is enough to open a movie and make it profitable.  And he's managed to put his homeland of Spain on the cinematic map like no other filmmaker since Buñuel -- and without spending half his life in Mexico and France, to boot.  By almost any reckoning, any country would consider him a godsend to their film industry.

So why do more and more people in the world of Spanish film keep talking about something called "the curse of Almodóvar"?

In the Guardian this week, Paul Julian Smith examines the ironic circumstance of how Pedro Almodóvar has so captured the national attention -- and so thoroughly become synonymous with Spanish filmmaking -- that he's crowded out room in the filmic imagination for any of the other hundred or so films to emerge from the Iberian peninsula in a typical year.  He also takes a look at this year's Spanish Film Festival in London, which aims to change that.  One of the fundamental clevages in Spanish cinema, he notes, is between nationalism, which wants to see charming, quaint stories of local color and deep authenticity, and internationalism, which strives to tell universal stories that would appeal to moviegoers from Hong Kong to Tallahassee.  The former (typefied by La Soledad, the story of how a single mother copes with the recent terror attacks in Barcelona) keep a tradition of Spanish filmmaking alive, but can they appeal to the ever-more-important foreign markets?  The latter (exemplified by King of the Hill, a tight thriller featuring a young man menaced by enigmatic snipers) may bring in foreign interest and foreign dollars, but what makes them uniquely Spanish?  Until those questions are answered, Spain may have to continue coping with the curse of Almodóvar.