The best movies in Spanish 2025
Spanish-language cinema in 2025 confirmed a moment of rare creative maturity and aesthetic diversity. Far from predictable formulas, these films addressed history, identity, desire, femininity, mourning and violence from registers that range from physical trance to social and political oppression, from intimate terror to detailed social observation. This is not a cinema that seeks to please or reassure, but rather works that sustain their gaze and trust in the intelligence of the viewer. This count brings together ten titles that not only marked the year, but also dialogue with each other like a map of the current state of cinema in Spanish.
10. CARS, MOTA AND ROCANROL (Mexico)
Dir. JM Cravioto
More than a recreation of AvĂĄndaro, the Mexican Woodstock, the film functions as a fable about the chaos, improvisation and political naivety of a generation. The mockumentary allows the story to oscillate between euphoria and disaster, between rock mythology and organizational clumsiness. Alejandro Speitzer and Emiliano Zurita play two characters who believe they are making history without fully understanding the monster they have unleashed. The cannabis film understands disorder as cultural energy and failure as a constitutive part of the myth.
9. BELĂN (Argentina)
Dir. Dolores Fonzi
Dolores Fonzi directs and stars in a judicial drama that avoids low blows and explicit allegations to concentrate on the daily mechanisms of power. Based on the case of a young woman accused after a spontaneous abortion, the film observes how prejudice, bureaucracy and social pressure come together to produce institutional violence. The story is built in hallways, offices and exchanged glances, where each decision seems small but has irreversible consequences. Belén It does not look for clear heroes or villains: it exposes a system that works by inertia and punishes with a terrifying calm.
8. THE VIRGIN OF LA TOSQUERA (Argentina)
Director Laura Casabé
The terror here seeps in slowly. Set in the Argentine crisis of 2001, the film based on the stories of Mariana EnrĂquez turns the landscape, the heat and the difference in social class into narrative material. Dolores Oliverio constructs a teenager crossed by desire, faith and latent threat. The tosquera functions as a symbolic space that is simultaneously a sanctuary, trap and abyss. The film avoids immediate scares and works from the atmosphere, allowing the supernatural to emerge as an extension of a decaying environment.
7. THEY WILL NOT MOVE US (Mexico)
Dir. Pierre Saint-Martin Castellanos
The Tlatelolco massacre appears here not as a historical reconstruction, but as a persistent wound. The film observes the consequences of ’68 from the present, embodied in an older woman who decides to reactivate a long-postponed search. Luisa Huertas composes a contained character, sustained by determination and moral fatigue, in a story that understands memory not as a tribute, but as a delayed action. The film is committed to narrative sobriety and an ethic of persistence. The past is not resolved, it continues to be inhabited.
6. SORDA (Spain)
Dir. Eva Libertad
A film that moves the conflict from melodrama to the very design of the world. The experience of a deaf woman facing motherhood is narrated from the structural imbalance of an environment designed for other bodies, other rhythms and other forms of communication. Miriam Garlo offers us a performance of enormous emotional precision, sustained in gestures and silences. The film does not fall into melodrama but rather observes how everyday violence occurs in the lack of adaptation and the imposition of a norm, in this case sound.
5. THE MYSTERIOUS LOOK OF FLAMENCO (Chile)
Dir. Diego CĂ©spedes
A debut feature that builds a powerful queer fable located in a Chile crossed by AIDS and prejudice. The story of Lidia (Tåmara Cortés), a girl raised by trans prostitutes, turns marginality into a refuge and her chosen family into a trench. Céspedes mixes melodrama, magical realism and twilight western with an unusual freedom, trusting in the power of gesture and gaze. The film proposes another form of affiliation, where care and desire replace fear.
4. AFTERNOONS OF LONELINESS (Spain)
Dir. Albert Serra
The best documentary in Spanish of the year avoids judgment and settles on observation. Bullfighting is filmed from the intimacy of the bullfighter and from a radical use of time and sound. Beauty and violence coexist without resolution. The film proposes a sustained moral ambiguity, forcing us to look without ideological refuges and without interpretive closure.
3. PILGRIMAGE (Spain)
Dir. Carla Simon
A journey into the past that does not seek redemption, but rather understanding. The director’s film Summer 1993 y Alcarras reconstructs a family memory crossed by heroin and AIDS, addressing, from the perspective of a young orphan (LlĂșcia GarcĂa), silence as an inheritance and as a survival mechanism. Pilgrimage It advances through fragments, encounters and absences, allowing the historical weight to emerge without explicit discourses. Galicia becomes an emotional territory, and the pilgrimage becomes a gesture of symbolic reparation that seeks to name what was hidden in order to continue.
2. A POET (Colombia)
Director SimĂłn Mesa Soto
The ânon-actorâ Ubeimar RĂos plays an aging, pathetic poet, trapped between alcohol, bitterness, frustration and the certainty of having arrived late for everything. The appearance of a talented young woman is presented as an opportunity for redemption, but that is not the case. Shot in 16mm, the film finds in its visual texture an extension of the emotional wear and tear of a character that, at first, we hate and pity, and then admire and respect. Between black humor and social observation, A poet reflects on artistic failure, precarious education and the persistence of creative desire in an environment that erodes it.
1. Sirat (Spain)
Director Oliver Laxe
A sensory experience taken to the limit. The search for a missing daughter transforms into a physical and emotional descent through apocalyptic raves in the Moroccan desert, where sound, the body and the sand impose their own logic. Sergi LĂłpez plays a broken father, sustained by obstinacy and guilt. Laxe abandons the classic narrative to build a cinematic trance that demands resistance and dedication. Sirat It does not seek to explain or console. It subjects the viewer to a lysergic journey where grief, faith, noise and explosions merge until they become inseparable.
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