THE PREDICTABLY engaging new film from Pedro Almodóvar does not, on paper, seem to have much in common with Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

Zipping between present and past, Broken Embracesdetails the complex, oscillating relations that connect a blind film-maker, an elderly plutocrat, that old man's son and a classic Almodóvarian siren. Inglourious Basterdsis about scalping Nazis. Yet both films find their directors eschewing reality for near-total immersion in the parallel universe that is Cinemaland. Both feature films-within-films that you might actually want to watch. Both may frustrate quite a few of their makers' fans.

"This shit is incomprehensible," one character says of a particularly twisty script and – this is the sort of film where such comments reverberate – the plot of Broken Embracesdefies easy summary. We begin by meeting a former director (Lluís Homar) who, since being struck mysteriously blind, has taken to screenwriting under the pseudonym Harry Caine.

When news reaches him of the death of Martel (José Luis Gómez), a sinister financier, his thoughts turn to traumatic experiences from a decade earlier. Martel had been carrying on an affair with a young women – sometimes a harassed secretary, sometimes a romanticised call-girl – named Lena who, after securing a part in one of Caine’s films, began an affair with the director. Suspicious, Marcel encouraged his camp, pretentious son to make a documentary on the production and studied the footage for evidence of hanky-panky.

Viewers hoping for the more grounded, naturalistic Almodóvar of Volveror the more outrageous, camp Pedro of the early movies may find the picture a disappointment. Penélope Cruz brings passionate fury and energy to the role of Lena, but, embedded in a throng of cinematic references, this is the second-hand fury of a Roberto Rossellini heroine or a Douglas Sirk victim.

Broken Embracesis, like Inglourious Basterds, very much a movie about movies. There is, however, no director better qualified to anatomise, pastiche and parody cinematic melodrama and, as events progress, the complexity of Pedro's construction becomes ever more involving and the images become ever more intoxicating.

When Lena turns suddenly from a dressing-room mirror towards an opening door, an entire aeon of classic cinema – most notably, All About Eve– streaks boldly across the screen. Indulgence has never been so delicious.