a more than acceptable film". In Cinco Dias Antonio Gutti criticized the film's emphasis on the homosexual as too sustained and felt that Almodóvar's irresistible humor did not appear. Angel Fernandez Santos in El País considered that the film contained "such an excess of incidents and events that their sheer number neutralizes some of its quality". In El Periodico, Jorge de Cominges commented that: "Pedro Almodóvar's success is in putting together the different elements of such a wild story. In a quite brilliant manner he creates characters as impactful as the police detective and his son; and he turns the magnificent Carmen Maura into the most sensual woman you can imagine. Law of Desire is a film which is as satisfying as it is amusing. An outstanding achievement." Manuel Hidalgo wrote: "Law of Desire is Pedro Almodóvar's most homogeneous, controlled and finished film". Pauline Kael in The New Yorker commented: "The film has the exaggerated plot of an absurdist Hollywood romance, and even when it loses its beat (after a murder) there’s always something happening. This director manages to joke about the self-dramatizing that can go on at the movies, and at the same time reactivate it. The film is festive. It doesn’t disguise its narcissism; it turns it into bright-colored tragicomedy". In her review for The New York Times Janet Maslin said: "What it lacks in depth, Law of Desire makes up in surface energy, with a lively cast, a turbulent plot and a textbook-worthy collection of case histories". Jonathan Rosenbaum from Chicago Reader concluded: "The film bristles with energy and bright interludes before the lugubrious plot takes over…". In his review for Time Magazine, Richard Corliss called the film "a bleak comic and defiantly romantic". David Edelstein in New York magazine called it "a swirling Cri de Coeur [that] explores the conflict within a director between voyeurism and passionate love". Genre Law of Desire is anchored in the melodrama genre. However Almodóvar explained that the film did not follow the conventions of the genre: "In melodrama there have always been characters that are either good or bad, but today you can’t portray characters so simplistically. There aren’t good people and bad people, everything is more complex. Law of Desire is a melodrama which breaks the rules of the genre". Almodóvar has spoken of his aspiration for the films of Francis Ford Coppola particularly in the way he mixes