The Best Spanish Director of All Time Names His 10 Favorite Movies of…

Sirât (2025)

If your watchlist is already judging you, here’s some moral support from Pedro Almodóvar. The celebrated Spanish filmmaker has named his 10 favorite movies of the 21st century, and yes – this is exactly the kind of list that can derail a perfectly calm evening.

The premise of the first entry sounds like a straight line – go looking for someone, keep moving forward – until the desert turns that line into a spiral. Óliver Laxe’s Sirât leans into sensory storytelling: sound, dust, bodies in motion, the kind of intensity that makes you sit up like you’ve just heard the bass through a wall. It’s part road movie, part trance, and it carries grief and urgency without packaging them into something neat. What makes it stick is the feeling that the journey is doing the talking, not the characters explaining themselves on cue. And yes, knowing Almodóvar’s taste for visceral emotion, it tracks that Sirât would hit him right where cinema gets dangerous. | © El Deseo

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Courtroom dramas usually want you to pick a side fast – this one keeps sliding the evidence out from under your feet, and it’s thrilling for all the wrong (right) reasons. Anatomy of a Fall thrives on ambiguity: every detail feels meaningful, every testimony slightly performative, and the marriage at the center becomes the real crime scene. Justine Triet frames truth like something that can be argued into existence, while Sandra Hüller navigates the story with a face that can read as innocence, calculation, exhaustion, or all three at once. The movie’s greatest trick is making you feel how narratives get built – by lawyers, by lovers, by anyone trying to survive. | © Les Films Pelléas

Drive My Car (2021)

Three hours sounds like a commitment until you realize Drive My Car is the rare film that makes time feel like part of the therapy. Ryusuke Hamaguchi adapts Murakami with a gentle, deliberate rhythm – conversations that circle back, rehearsals that reveal more than they intend, silences that hit like plot twists – and the result is surprisingly gripping. The car itself becomes a moving safe space, with grief riding shotgun and language barriers turning into unexpected bridges rather than walls. Somewhere along the way, Drive My Car slips from “story” into something closer to a shared experience: patience, pain, and connection moving at the speed of honest talk. | © C&I Entertainment

Sentimental value cropped processed by imagy

Sentimental Value (2025)

You can practically feel the furniture holding its breath when a family decides it’s finally time to talk about the things they’ve been politely stepping around. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value plays with that uneasy overlap between memory and performance – what people truly feel versus what they’ve rehearsed for years – and it does it with a calm confidence that makes the emotional jolts land harder. There’s humor here, but it’s the kind that shows up as a coping mechanism, not a punchline machine. The film’s quiet intelligence is a big part of its pull: it trusts you to sit in the discomfort, then rewards you with moments that feel disarmingly human. It’s not hard to see why Almodóvar would keep it close. | © Mer Film

La Ciénaga (2001)

Sticky heat, clinking glasses, a pool that looks more like a warning sign than a luxury – this is the kind of domestic “vacation” where everything feels one argument away from tipping over. Lucrecia Martel stages family life as a low-level crisis you can’t quite name, and La Ciénaga makes that tension weirdly addictive: you’re watching people drift, collide, and ignore what’s right in front of them. The sound design does a lot of the storytelling, turning laziness into menace and small talk into something sharper. It’s also one of those films that understands how class and boredom can curdle into cruelty without anybody announcing it. If Almodóvar loves emotional chaos with razor precision, this one speaks his language. | © Lita Stantic Producciones

Amour (2012)

No flashy tricks, no melodramatic padding – Amour just walks straight into the hardest room in the house and stays there with you. Michael Haneke frames aging, illness, and devotion with a clarity that’s almost unbearable, anchored by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva in performances that feel lived-in rather than “performed.” The apartment setting becomes its own universe, shrinking as the couple’s options narrow, and Isabelle Huppert’s presence as the daughter adds another layer of helpless love at the edges. Calling Amour devastating is accurate, but it’s also precise: the film is ruthless about truth while still protecting its characters’ dignity. If Almodóvar is drawn to stories where love is messy, frightening, and real, this one earns its place the hard way. | © Les Films du Losange

Phantom Thread (2017)

A love story where the romance feels like a duel, stitched together with silk and side-eye – Paul Thomas Anderson really went for it here. Phantom Thread drops you inside a rarified fashion world and then makes the real spectacle the relationship: Daniel Day-Lewis as a controlling designer, Vicky Krieps as the woman who refuses to stay in the role he assigned her, and Lesley Manville as the unnervingly calm power behind the throne. Jonny Greenwood’s score glides like it’s flattering you, even when the emotions are doing something sharper underneath. It’s decadent, funny in an almost wicked way, and strangely tender when you least expect it – exactly the kind of high-craft melodrama Almodóvar would recognize as serious business. | © Focus Features

Toni Erdmann (2016)

It starts with a prank-energy premise – an eccentric father barging into his daughter’s high-strung corporate life – then keeps tightening the screws until you’re laughing and wincing in the same breath. That’s the sly brilliance of Toni Erdmann: it skewers workplace performance and personal armor without turning its characters into cartoons. Sandra Hüller plays the daughter’s exhaustion like a permanent internal spreadsheet, while Peter Simonischek’s chaotic intrusions feel ridiculous… right up until they don’t. The film’s longest scenes are often the ones that pay off hardest, because it refuses to give you clean exits from discomfort. If Almodóvar responds to emotional truth dressed as comedy (and comedy that accidentally reveals the soul), Toni Erdmann is basically waving from the front row. | © Komplizen Film

Call Me by Your Name (2017)

Some movies don’t so much begin as they unfold, like a lazy summer afternoon that suddenly realizes it’s going to change your life. Set in sun-drenched northern Italy, Call Me by Your Name builds its romance out of glances, books left open, music drifting through old rooms, and the kind of charged silence that can feel louder than dialogue. Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer make desire look both exhilarating and terrifying, while Luca Guadagnino shoots longing with the patience of someone who knows the ache is the point. Mentioning Call Me by Your Name in the same breath as Almodóvar makes sense: it’s sensual without being showy, emotionally exact without pleading for applause. | © Frenesy Film Company

Ten (2002)

There’s something deliciously mischievous about how Ten turns a car into a confessional and a city into a chorus. Abbas Kiarostami keeps the setup brutally simple – ten rides, ten conversations, a woman behind the wheel – and then lets modern Tehran do the heavy lifting through fragments of intimacy, frustration, and blunt honesty. The film’s stripped-down digital look isn’t a gimmick; it feels like eavesdropping with permission, which is probably why it lands so sharply. Ten also has that Almodóvar-adjacent talent for making everyday messiness feel cinematic without polishing it into something “important.” It’s small, direct, and quietly radical in the way it lets women’s voices steer the narrative. | © Abbas Kiarostami Productions