Penelope Cruz lights up Cannes in Almodovar flick

Can Penelope Cruz do no wrong? The Spanish actress who won an Oscar earlier this year for her role in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona has lit up yet another film occasion with her dazzling smile and bravura performance - this time the Cannes premiere of the new Pedro Almodovar film, Broken Embraces. While the critics raised one or two questions about the film itself - Almodovar's take on a Fifties-style film noir - Cruz comes out smelling of roses.

According to the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, Cruz plays Lena, the mistress of a shady financier and lover of a film director, "in a state of almost hyperreal gorgeousness". She is, he enthuses, "a sublime beauty in whose presence Almodovar's camera goes into a kind of swooning trance, and whose exquisiteness consists at least partly in its fabricated quality; she is part of cinema's magnificent artifice."

Bradshaw enjoyed Almodovar's "slick and sleek" film-making skills, but asked whether the Spaniard, 60 this year, wasn't in danger of retreading old ideas. "It doesn't quite match the heartfelt power of his 2006 Cannes film festival contender, Volver [which also starred Cruz]; Broken Embraces is always conspicuously concerned with passion, but without being itself fully passionate."

David Gritten in the Daily Telegraph similarly feels Broken Promises "treads water rather than breaks new ground". But he too is captivated by Cruz, who gives "a far more nuanced performance" than in her work for Woody Allen. Describing a scene in which she tries on a variety of wigs for a film-within-a-film to be directed by her lover, he says: "You think Audrey Hepburn, you think Leslie Caron, but mostly you think: movie star."

And in case anyone thinks it's simply male critics losing their sense of proportion, here's Lisa Schwarzbaum for Entertainment Weekly: "She [Cruz] has always done her best work with Almodovar, and she's fully delectable here."