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Penélope Cruz's 15 Best Movies Ranked from Worst to Best

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Ignacio Weil

Entertainment - April 28th 2026, 15:30 GMT+2

Penelope Cruz Nine 1 — 15. Nine (2008)

The movie around Penélope Cruz is overstuffed enough to make even a Broadway stage beg for breathing room, but her Carla cuts through the noise fast. *Nine* gives her a relatively small part as Guido’s seductive mistress, and she turns it into the film’s most alive burst of trouble, glamour, and comic desperation. The musical may wobble under its own celebrity weight, but Cruz understood the assignment better than almost anyone in the room. | © The Weinstein Company

Cropped Blow — 14. Blow (2001)

Johnny Depp gets the rise-and-fall drug-kingpin arc, but Cruz brings the much-needed bite once Mirtha enters the picture. *Blow* is not subtle about addiction, excess, or bad decisions, and sometimes it plays like a greatest-hits album of cartel-movie clichés, but Cruz makes Mirtha feel more bruised than decorative. Her scenes have anger, appetite, and the exhausting rhythm of people who mistake chaos for love. | © New Line Cinema

Cropped Elegy — 13. Elegy (2008)

A lesser version of *Elegy* would have treated Consuela as a fantasy object for Ben Kingsley’s aging professor, and honestly, the film occasionally leans dangerously close to that trap. Cruz keeps pulling it back toward something more human, giving Consuela intelligence, warmth, and a quiet sadness that Philip Roth’s thorny premise badly needs. The movie is polished and sometimes chilly, but her performance gives it a pulse. | © Lakeshore Entertainment

Cropped Captain Corellis Mandolin — 12. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001)

The accents, the sweeping romance, the wartime melodrama – *Captain Corelli’s Mandolin* has all the ingredients of a prestige epic that never quite becomes as moving as it wants to be. Still, Cruz gives Pelagia a grounded emotional center, especially when the film threatens to drift into postcard Greece with Nicolas Cage playing the mandolin like a man personally challenged by the concept of restraint. Her sincerity saves more than it should. | © Universal Pictures

Cropped Ma ma — 11. Ma Ma (2015)

Julio Medem does not exactly whisper in *Ma Ma*; he grabs tragedy, motherhood, illness, romance, and spiritual uplift, then turns the emotional volume all the way up. That could have been unbearable without Cruz, who stars as Magda and also produced the film, throwing herself into material that asks for almost impossible sincerity. The movie can be messy and manipulative, but her commitment keeps it from collapsing into pure melodramatic fog. | © Morena Films

Cropped Twice Born — 10. Twice Born (2012)

War, memory, motherhood, lost love, Sarajevo, hidden trauma – *Twice Born* carries enough heavy material for three prestige dramas and still finds room for more. Cruz plays Gemma with real emotional force, even when the story around her becomes too loaded with twists and grand suffering for its own good. It is not her most disciplined film, but it proves how much intensity she can bring to material that keeps pushing past elegance. | © Medusa Film

Everybody Knows 2018 1 — 9. Everybody Knows (2018)

Asghar Farhadi drops Cruz into a Spanish family celebration that curdles into suspicion after a kidnapping, and the result is a thriller built less on action than on old wounds being reopened in public. *Everybody Knows* is not Farhadi at his sharpest, but Cruz gives Laura a panic that feels physical, not performative. She plays the nightmare of a mother losing control while everyone around her suddenly remembers debts, secrets, and grudges. | © Memento Films

Cropped Vanilla Sky — 8. Vanilla Sky (2001)

Reprising her role from *Open Your Eyes*, Cruz becomes the warm human signal inside Cameron Crowe’s glossy, strange, sometimes over-explained dream machine. *Vanilla Sky* belongs to Tom Cruise’s identity crisis on paper, but Sofia is the reason the fantasy has any emotional weight beyond masks, pop songs, and expensive confusion. Cruz makes the character feel like a real chance at happiness, which is exactly why the movie’s unreality stings. | © Paramount Pictures

Cropped Open Your Eyes — 7. Open Your Eyes (1997)

Before Hollywood remade it with bigger names and shinier surfaces, Alejandro Amenábar’s *Open Your Eyes* already had the cleaner, colder grip. Cruz plays Sofia with a softness that makes the film’s psychological trap more unsettling, because she feels both reachable and impossible, romantic and suspiciously perfect. It is a clever sci-fi thriller, but her presence gives the puzzle its ache instead of letting it become only a stylish mind game. | © Sogetel

Cropped Vicky Cristina Barcelona — 6. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Maria Elena could have become a cartoon of artistic volatility in less careful hands, all shouting, jealousy, and fabulous scarves. Cruz turns her into the live wire that makes *Vicky Cristina Barcelona* crackle, stealing the movie without flattening the character into chaos for chaos’ sake. Her Oscar-winning performance is funny, wounded, theatrical, and weirdly precise, as if every insult and cigarette drag has been rehearsed by heartbreak itself. | © The Weinstein Company

Broken Embraces 2009 1 — 5. Broken Embraces (2009)

Almodóvar wraps *Broken Embraces* in noir, movie-love, obsession, surveillance, and a story-within-a-story structure that occasionally enjoys its own cleverness a little too much. Cruz, playing Lena, gives the film its old-Hollywood shimmer without losing the fear underneath it. She is not just the muse in a tragic romance; she is an actress, a trapped woman, a screen image, and a person trying to survive men who keep rewriting her life. | © El Deseo

Parallel Mothers 2021 1 — 4. Parallel Mothers (2021)

Janis is one of Cruz’s finest late-career roles because the performance never begs for sympathy, even as *Parallel Mothers* moves through motherhood, grief, identity, and Spain’s buried historical trauma. Almodóvar gives her a story full of emotional landmines, and Cruz walks through it with remarkable control, letting guilt and love fight across her face. The film is elegant, painful, and politically haunted, with Cruz carrying its intimate and national wounds together. | © El Deseo

Pain and Glory 2019 1 — 3. Pain and Glory (2019)

Cruz does not dominate *Pain and Glory* in screen time, yet her scenes as Salvador’s mother, Jacinta, feel carved into the movie’s memory. Almodóvar builds the film around art, illness, childhood, desire, and regret, while Cruz gives the flashbacks a warmth that never turns sugary. Her performance is modest in size but essential in feeling, helping explain the emotional weather that Antonio Banderas’ older Salvador has been living under for decades. | © El Deseo

Cropped All About My Mother — 2. All About My Mother (1999)

Sister Rosa arrives in *All About My Mother* with innocence, fragility, and the kind of quiet conviction that could easily vanish inside Almodóvar’s bigger theatrical world. Cruz does the opposite: she makes the role feel delicate but never weak, giving the film one of its most tender emotional threads. Around her, the movie juggles grief, performance, chosen family, and identity with dazzling confidence, and Rosa becomes part of its bruised, generous heart. | © El Deseo

Cropped Volver — 1. Volver (2006)

Raimunda is the Penélope Cruz performance people point to for a reason: funny, furious, sensual, exhausted, protective, and somehow still luminous while hiding a body in a restaurant freezer. *Volver* lets Almodóvar turn ghosts, family secrets, working-class survival, and female solidarity into something both earthy and almost mythic. Cruz meets every shift without overplaying it, delivering the kind of movie-star performance that also feels completely lived-in. | © El Deseo

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Penélope Cruz has built the kind of filmography that refuses to sit neatly in one box: Spanish dramas, Hollywood romances, prestige Oscar players, stylish thrillers, and performances that can steal a movie without raising her voice. Ranking her best movies means moving through Pedro Almodóvar classics, international hits, and roles where Cruz turns charm, danger, heartbreak, and wit into something unmistakably her own.

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Penélope Cruz has built the kind of filmography that refuses to sit neatly in one box: Spanish dramas, Hollywood romances, prestige Oscar players, stylish thrillers, and performances that can steal a movie without raising her voice. Ranking her best movies means moving through Pedro Almodóvar classics, international hits, and roles where Cruz turns charm, danger, heartbreak, and wit into something unmistakably her own.