Director: Pedro Almodóvar Cast: Adriana Ugarte, Emma Suárez, Daniel Grao Spain, 99 minutes Venue: General release By Elizabeth Kerr There are few non-ironic old-school formalists working in cinema today, and Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar continues to be the world’s most unabashed. An avowed fan of the lurid — in physical space, in theme and in his characters — Almodóvar has also never been one to shy away from pastiche. His latest, Julieta, based on the short stories Chance, Soon, and Silence from Canadian writer Alice Munro’s Runaway collection, blends Almodóvar’s hallmarks to somewhat middling effect taken as a whole. But he’s such an aesthete and so genuine in his storytelling that it’s easy to get caught up in his melodrama. Julieta is a classic, Firkin women’s picture, an outmoded and intensely mid-century form, but one Almodóvar has long given a modern veneer. The film builds a primary colour-coded portrait of Julieta (Adriana Ugarte in youth, Emma Suárez in middle age) as a young woman, daughter, wife, mother and widow. As a student, Julieta meets a dashing Galician fisherman, Xoan (Daniel Grao), …