Everybody’s cup of tea: Penélope Cruz acts as an actor in a film within a film.

Nearly every movie Pedro Almodóvar makes is a gift to cinema lovers, but that’s especially true of Broken Embraces. The film continues the director’s streak of reliably elegant, original works, making the case, once again, that there are few, if any, other European directors working today who can match his particular blend of thought-provoking, artful, yet wholly accessible cinema. In his latest, the director — who has never been a stranger to paying homage to classic films, or his own films, for that matter — makes a movie about the movies themselves, referencing directors from Hitchcock to Rosselini to, of course, himself.

The film reveals its aims slowly, less a thriller than it is a methodical mystery about love, identity, and the process of creating; specifically, creating film. It opens with a man (Lluís Homar), who explains he was once a film director who wrote under a pen name, until the day when he could no longer direct. When he became solely a writer, he also became his pen name, Harry Caine. Harry is blind (the circumstances that lead to this condition are only revealed well into the proceedings) and starts the movie by casually seducing a young woman who just helped him cross the street — he’s charismatic and immediately likable, but he’s also not above using his disability to get laid. Almodóvar then introduces the two main figures in Harry’s current life: his straight-laced agent, Judit (Blanca Portillo), and her son Diego (Tamar Novas), a young man who acts as a sounding board when Harry is writing his scripts.