This year marked a quarter into the 21st century, and to celebrate the occasion, some of the biggest names in cinema offered their picks for the top films of the past 25 years.
With just a few days left in 2025, the newspaper El Dario asked 56 Spanish directors — including Oliver Laxe (“Sirāt”), Carla Simón (“Romería”), and Alejandro Amenábar (“The Others”) — to list films from the past two and a half decades that influenced them the most. The resulting 25-film compilation, which was roundaboutly inspired by the New York Times’ somewhat controversial summer list, is bookended by Michael Haneke’s 2009 Palm d’Or-winning “The White Ribbon,” taking up the rear, and David Lynch’s 2001 Los Angeles-set fever dream “Mulholland Drive” at #1. Also named in the roll call of masterpieces are Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love,” Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “Petite Maman,” Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” and “Under the Skin,” and Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet.”
Among the directors polled by El Dario was Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, whose early-aughts films “Talk to Her” and “Volver” are also featured in the group’s prestigious top 25. Like his fellow filmmakers, Almodóvar offered the Spanish-language publication the opportunity to publish his top 10 films of the century as a companion piece to the collaborative list, which El Dario described in Spanish as contrasting “sharply with the one published six months ago by the New York Times, where Anglo-Saxon cinema reigned supreme.”
While not all of the “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” director’s picks made it into the final selections, they represent a similar preference for evocative foreign films that raise more questions than they answer. Spanning from 2002, with Abbas Kiarostami’s “Ten,” to this year’s class, with Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” and Laxe’s “Sirāt,” the personal top 10 highlights some of the most talented auteurs of our day and provides window into the mind of one of this and the past century’s most brilliant, boundary-pushing, and beloved filmmakers.
Here are Almodóvar’s 10 top films from the 21st century, in no particular order:
“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)