Princesas

Film works best as a soberly witty commentary on the workplace and makes an interesting companion piece to "Mondays in the Sun."

Princesas isn't the cliché "Pretty Woman" type romantic-comedy you'd expect – it's actually quite surprising.

Indeed, Aranoa loves these women so completely that his film seems overly drawn out at nearly two hours and likely would have had greater effect had it been half an hour shorter. Even so, Princesas remains largely engaging and rewarding.

This loosely-structured pic feels authentic, its underdramatized script resolutely nonjudgmental.

The way that Aranoa so clearly venerates his lively women feels Almodóvar-esque, but the movie aims most of all to suggest that hookerdom is hell -- and it's neither realistic nor unsentimental enough to pull that off.

While the director-screenwriter clearly has a sensitive affinity for his characters, his film lacks narrative momentum and fresh observations.

A maudlin melodrama about prostitutes in Madrid, Princesas is not, alas, the new film by Pedro Almodóvar, but a dilution of his manner by the writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa.