Rob Marshall’s extravagant musical is far too polished to feel as feverish as Federico Fellini’s 8½, but Cruz nearly burns through the lacquer. As Carla, filmmaker Guido Contini’s mistress, she turns “A Call from the Vatican” into a spectacular mixture of seduction, physical comedy, and barely concealed need. The film never solves its traffic jam of famous faces, yet Cruz makes Carla more than another fantasy circling a self-absorbed director. Her Oscar nomination was easily the least surprising thing about it. | © Relativity Media
Isabel Coixet’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal could easily reduce Consuela Castillo to the beautiful student desired by Ben Kingsley’s aging professor. Cruz quietly refuses that assignment. She gives Consuela a private intelligence and emotional authority that expose David’s obsession as insecurity rather than grand romance. When illness changes the balance between them, her restraint keeps the material from sliding into tasteful prestige-film misery. Elegy remains more convincing as a performance showcase than as a love story, but Cruz makes its difficult final stretch land. | © Lakeshore Entertainment
Ted Demme’s cocaine biopic belongs to Johnny Depp’s George Jung until Mirtha walks in and turns his domestic life into another volatile business venture. Cruz is working with a character written largely in exclamations, so she makes the excess purposeful: every entrance signals that George’s fantasy of effortless wealth is about to receive an expensive reality check. The shouting can feel broad, but her fury also gives Blow the ugliness its glamorous rise-and-fall story needs. Mirtha is exhausting company, which is exactly the point. | © New Line Cinema
Ma Ma asks Cruz to carry a cancer drama, a romance born from shared grief, and enough symbolism to stock three Julio Medem films. She plays Magda, a mother confronting a breast cancer diagnosis while forming an unlikely bond with a soccer scout devastated by his own family tragedy. Cruz, who also produced the movie, never treats Magda as a saint waiting for a tasteful close-up. The screenplay pushes coincidence and sentiment until both begin to squeak, but her humor and clear-eyed warmth hold the melodrama together. | © Morena Films
A Spanish family wedding becomes an emotional crime scene in Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows, and Cruz is trapped at its center. Laura returns from Buenos Aires with her children, only for her teenage daughter to disappear during the celebration. Sustaining panic for most of a film can flatten a performance into constant screaming, but Cruz lets fear mutate into suspicion, humiliation, and fury as old secrets surface. The kidnapping mystery is not Farhadi’s neatest construction, yet her scenes with Javier Bardem give every accusation the weight of unfinished history. | © Memento Films Production
Reprising the same role in another language is unusual enough; doing it inside a glossier, more sentimental remake is stranger still. Cruz again plays Sofía, now serving as the human anchor in Cameron Crowe’s maze of privilege, disfigurement, dreams, and cryonics. Her easy chemistry with Tom Cruise gives his narcissistic David something emotionally credible to lose. Vanilla Sky is messier than Open Your Eyes, but it grants Cruz a fuller romantic presence, and her naturalism survives every stylistic detour—even the masks, the pop songs, and Times Square without people. | © Paramount Pictures
With a tower of red curls, a notebook full of sadistic rehearsal exercises, and the calm of someone paid to torment famous men, Cruz owns Official Competition. Lola Cuevas is an acclaimed director hired by a billionaire to force two incompatible actors—one a movie star, the other a theatrical purist—through a prestige production. Cruz never plays Lola as the reasonable referee; she is every bit as vain, manipulative, and absurd as her performers. Her deadpan authority turns filmmaking into psychological warfare and gives this industry satire its sharpest weapon. | © The Mediapro Studio
Alejandro Amenábar’s slippery psychological thriller introduced Cruz as Sofía four years before she reprised the role in Vanilla Sky. She appears to offer César an escape from his vanity and increasingly fractured reality, yet her shifting place in the mystery makes even her gentlest scenes feel unstable. Cruz’s performance is deliberately elusive rather than expansive; the movie needs Sofía to remain a person, a memory, and a possibility at once. Without her warmth, Open Your Eyes would still be an ingenious puzzle, but it would be a much colder one. | © Las Producciones del Escorpión
Don’t Move gives Cruz one of the least glamorous and most emotionally punishing roles of her career. As Italia, an impoverished woman pulled into a destructive relationship with married surgeon Timoteo, she strips away every trace of movie-star polish through carefully accented Italian, nervous gestures, and a body seemingly braced for rejection. Sergio Castellitto’s drama is difficult to embrace, especially when it transforms sexual violence into tragic romance, but Cruz refuses to soften Italia’s damage. Her David di Donatello-winning performance exposes every ugly compromise surrounding her. | © Cattleya
Pedro Almodóvar photographs Lena as though cinema itself invented Penélope Cruz, then gives her a role built to test that image. She is a secretary, reluctant mistress, aspiring actress, comic performer, and tragic memory, changing posture and rhythm whenever the film shifts genre around her. Broken Embraces mixes noir, melodrama, voyeurism, and a deliberately ridiculous film-within-the-film without worrying about neatness. Cruz supplies the connective tissue. Lena may be watched and controlled by powerful men, but the performance keeps revealing a private self their cameras cannot fully capture. | © El Deseo
María Elena arrives late, furious, and entirely uninterested in behaving like a supporting character. Within minutes, Vicky and Cristina seem like spectators in their own movie as Cruz detonates arguments in Spanish, English, and occasionally both at once. She makes María Elena funny, magnetic, perceptive, and dangerous without turning her instability into a fashionable accessory. The chemistry with Javier Bardem feels combustible enough to require a safety inspection, while her unexpected tenderness with Scarlett Johansson complicates the chaos. Cruz’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar was thoroughly earned. | © Mediapro
Cruz occupies only the childhood chapters of Pedro Almodóvar’s semi-autobiographical drama, yet young Salvador’s memories seem to glow around her. As Jacinta, she turns ordinary maternal labor—washing clothes, traveling, negotiating a new home—into the foundation of an artist’s imagination. The performance is earthy rather than ornamental, particularly when she joins the women singing beside the river or recognizes her son’s hunger to learn. Antonio Banderas carries the film’s pain in the present; Cruz supplies the distant warmth that makes his longing understandable. | © El Deseo
Maternal joy, private guilt, and Spain’s unburied history converge in Janis, a photographer whose new motherhood is disrupted by a devastating discovery. Cruz lets the secret alter her behavior before the screenplay fully explains it: smiles tighten, pauses grow longer, and affection becomes inseparable from fear. Almodóvar connects an intimate domestic story to the search for Civil War victims without making either feel decorative. Cruz won Venice’s Volpi Cup and received another Oscar nomination for the performance, but the real achievement is how naturally she makes a melodramatic premise feel morally complicated. | © El Deseo
Raimunda has a corpse to hide, a daughter to protect, a restaurant to run, and a family history that refuses to remain buried. Cruz plays this absurd workload with the brisk practicality of a woman who cannot afford to notice that she is starring in a melodrama. Almodóvar frames her like an old-school screen goddess, but the performance stays funny, exhausted, resourceful, and bruisingly human. Her rendition of the title song—lip-synced to Estrella Morente—briefly allows everything Raimunda suppresses to reach the surface. The resulting Oscar nomination marked a career turning point. | © El Deseo
Cruz is not the protagonist of All About My Mother, but Sister Rosa is essential to its improbable emotional balance. Playing a pregnant, HIV-positive nun could invite solemnity or caricature; instead, she makes Rosa sheltered, impulsive, generous, and painfully real. Cecilia Roth carries the central grief, while Cruz brings another form of motherhood into Almodóvar’s expanding circle of women, performers, and improvised families. The film moves between tragedy and comedy without cheapening either, ultimately winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It remains the strongest movie in Cruz’s remarkable filmography. | © El Deseo
Penélope Cruz’s filmography reaches far beyond the Hollywood roles that made her an international star. Her finest performances can be found in Spanish dramas, chaotic romances, sharp comedies, and especially her collaborations with Pedro Almodóvar. From Vicky Cristina Barcelona to Volver, these are the 15 best Penélope Cruz movies, ranked from the merely excellent to the genuinely unforgettable.
