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If it’s possible for art to locate authenticity in artifice, Almodóvar’s twisty, genre-hopping movies document their maker’s five-decade quest to unveil a series of carnal, cathartic truths about love, lust and other basic instincts. His work will be on display in Laws of Desire: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, , beginning Nov. 1 and running through December.

For viewers familiar with Almodóvar’s most famous movies — the delectably accessible “All About My Mother” (1999) and “Talk to Her” (2002), both of which won Academy Awards — the punky, transgressive sensibility of his formative work may come as a shock. His earliest features are still bracing, like slaps in the face from a velvet glove.

One way to look at a movie like 1982’s “Labyrinth of Passion” — a raucous, polymorphously perverse romp about a sex-addicted pop star who becomes besotted with a Middle Eastern prince against a zany backdrop of orgies, punk shows and religious terrorism (screening Dec. 14) — is as a kamikaze course correction away from the repression of the Franco years. If the dictator’s death in 1975 represented a shot in the arm for Spain’s countercultural vanguard, Almodóvar’s low-budget, high-concept provocations were tantamount to celluloid adrenalin.

The sensation of moviemaking in overdrive applies to much of Almodóvar’s ‘80s output, which made him an international film-festival mainstay even as his work typically trashed bourgeois mores and morality while ostensibly working as crowd-pleasers.

The bloody bullfighting imagery of 1986’s “Matador” (Nov. 21) literalized the director’s desire to skewer sexual, cultural and cinematic taboos with extreme prejudice. As an aspiring toreador plagued by violent visions straight out of a ‘70s giallo thriller, the impossibly young Antonio Banderas made even crippling neurosis seem smouldering.

Banderas would continue to pop up at regular intervals in Almodóvar’s filmography, serving as the starriest member of a rotating repertory mostly made up of superlative and emotive female performers. The filmmaker’s fascination with women’s experiences — especially stories exploring maternal devotion — helped to make icons of actors like Julieta Serrano, Marisa Paredes, Rossy de Palma, Cecilia Roth and Carmen Maura. Another, Penélope Cruz, has consistently done her best work for her longtime friend, claiming that their collaboration — which started in 1997 with “Live Flesh” — is the byproduct of what she calls a “supernatural connection.”

Any attempt to reduce Almodóvar’s stylistically diverse and emotionally spacious filmography to a tidy set of themes and preoccupations is bound to come up short. Still TIFF’s retrospective provides casual viewers and devotees alike with myriad opportunities to juxtapose major and minor works in search of telling resonances between them.

For instance, it would be fascinating to pair 1983’s scabrous, wilfully sacrilegious “Dark Habits” (Nov. 9) — a delirious farce about a dysfunctional convent presided over by a drug-addicted Mother Superior — with 2004’s “Bad Education” (Dec. 7), which takes a more measured and sinister tack in critiquing the Catholic Church, or to double-bill 1989’s “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Dec. 1) with 2011’s “The Skin I Live In” (Nov. 26), twin psychodramas about women being held hostage by obsessive male captors that limn the limits of Stockholm syndrome.

Almodóvar’s 2020 short “The Human Voice” (Nov. 8 and Dec. 17), starring Tilda Swinton, serves simultaneously as an adaptation of a stage monologue by the French Surrealist Jean Cocteau and a spiritual sequel to two of his greatest and most philosophically complex features: 1987’s “Law of Desire” (Dec. 21) and 1988’s “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” (Dec. 27), both of which integrate Cocteau’s play into their storylines.

The extent to which Almodóvar’s 20-plus features tend to reflect and refract one another is why picking a single favourite from his oeuvre is such a daunting challenge.

That said, a case can be made that his most affecting and accomplished movie is also one of his most recent: 2019’s “Pain and Glory” (Dec. 5), which casts Banderas as a filmmaker modelled on Almodóvar himself — right down to his heritage as a former libertine and countercultural warrior weighing the compromises (personal and artistic) of maturity.

The self-reflexive self-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-flawed-visionary is a mainstay of capital-A Auteur cinema (think “8½” and the vast majority of Woody Allen), but “Pain and Glory” vibrates with humanity and humility. It’s less a victory lap around Almodóvar’s career than a meditation on what happens when somebody who has dedicated themselves to imitating life is suddenly obliged to do a reality check.

The scene in which Banderas’ Almodóvar stand-in tries to reignite an old flame, only to watch it flicker out before his eyes, is one of the great pieces of contemporary screen acting. Among other things, it proves that a filmmaker who became beloved for his willingness to take his ideas, his actors and his audiences spiralling over the top is able to practice his mastery in miniature.