Some of the biggest figures in film provided their selections for the best movies of the last 25 years to commemorate this year’s quarter milestone into the twenty-first century. The newspaper El Dario invited 56 Spanish directors, such as Alejandro Amenábar (“The Others”), Oliver Laxe (“Sirāt”), and Carla Simón (“Romería”), to identify the movies from the previous 25 years that had the biggest impact on them.
Michael Haneke’s 2009 Palm d’Or-winning “The White Ribbon” comes in last on the final 25-film compilation, which was loosely influenced by the New York Times’ somewhat contentious summer list. David Lynch’s 2001 Los Angeles-set fever dream “Mulholland Drive” comes in first. Pedro Almodóvar, a Spanish director whose debut films “Talk to Her” and “Volver” are both included in the group’s esteemed top 25, was one of the directors surveyed by El Dario.
As an additional contribution to the joint list, Almodóvar, like other notable directors, offered the Spanish-based outlet the chance to publish his top ten films of the century, which El Dario described in Spanish as “sharply contrasting with the one published six months ago by the New York Times, where Anglo-Saxon cinema reigned supreme.”
In no specific order, these are Almodóvar’s ten best films from the twenty-first century:
Ten” (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002)
“Call Me by Your Name” (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)
“Toni Erdmann” (Maren Ade, 2016)
“Phantom Thread” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017)
“Amour” (Michael Haneke, 2012)
“La Ciénaga” (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)
“Sentimental Value” (Joachim Trier, 2025)
“Drive My Car” (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
“Anatomy of a Fall” (Justine Triet, 2023)
“Sirāt” (Oliver Laxe, 2025)
The director’s choices, which were included in the final selections, show a similar inclination for moving foreign films that pose more questions than they provide answers.
