This yr marked 1 / 4 into the twenty first century, and to have a good time the event, a number of the greatest names in cinema supplied their picks for the highest movies of the previous 25 years.
With only a few days left in 2025, the newspaper El Dario requested 56 Spanish administrators — together with Oliver Laxe (“Sirāt”), Carla Simón (“Romería”), and Alejandro Amenábar (“The Others”) — to checklist movies from the previous two and a half a long time that influenced them essentially the most. The ensuing 25-film compilation, which was roundaboutly impressed by the New York Instances’ considerably controversial summer time checklist, is bookended by Michael Haneke’s 2009 Palm d’Or-winning “The White Ribbon,” taking on the rear, and David Lynch’s 2001 Los Angeles-set fever dream “Mulholland Drive” at #1. Additionally named within the roll name of masterpieces are Wong Kar Wai’s “Within the Temper for Love,” Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Woman on Fireplace” and “Petite Maman,” Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Curiosity” and “Beneath the Pores and skin,” and Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet.”
Among the many administrators polled by El Dario was Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, whose early-aughts movies “Speak to Her” and “Volver” are additionally featured within the group’s prestigious prime 25. Like his fellow filmmakers, Almodóvar supplied the Spanish-language publication the chance to publish his prime 10 movies of the century as a companion piece to the collaborative checklist, which El Dario described in Spanish as contrasting “sharply with the one revealed six months in the past by the New York Instances, the place Anglo-Saxon cinema reigned supreme.”
Whereas not all the “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” director’s picks made it into the ultimate picks, they characterize an identical desire for evocative international movies that increase extra questions than they reply. Spanning from 2002, with Abbas Kiarostami’s “Ten,” to this yr’s class, with Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Worth” and Laxe’s “Sirāt,” the private prime 10 highlights a number of the most proficient auteurs of our day and supplies a window into the thoughts of one in every of this and the previous century’s most good, boundary-pushing, and beloved filmmakers.
Listed below are Almodóvar’s 10 prime movies from the twenty first century, in no explicit order:
“Ten” (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002)
“Name Me by Your Identify” (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)
“Toni Erdmann” (Maren Ade, 2016)
“Phantom Thread” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017)
“Amour” (Michael Haneke, 2012)
“La Ciénaga” (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)
“Sentimental Worth” (Joachim Trier, 2025)
“Drive My Automotive” (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
“Anatomy of a Fall” (Justine Triet, 2023)
“Sirāt” (Oliver Laxe, 2025)
