The Best Spanish Films

Cinema against the censor

Spanish film history is inseparable from the forty-year shadow of the Franco dictatorship, and its canon is largely a history of evasions. The keystone case is Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (1961): the regime, hungry for cultural legitimacy, invited its most famous exiled director home to make a film — and Buñuel delivered a fable of a novice nun whose charity ends in a beggars' orgy staged as a parody of the Last Supper. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes as Spain's official entry, was immediately banned in Spain and denounced by the Vatican's newspaper, and existed for years only because the negative had left the country. No film better embodies the gap between state canon and world canon that composite measurement makes visible.

The subtler masterpiece of the dictatorship years is Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), made while Franco still lived: a village child sees Frankenstein at a traveling cinema and goes looking for the monster, in a film whose every silence is about the Civil War no one onscreen may mention. The censors, reading only the surface, let it pass. Critics' polls have ranked it steadily higher for fifty years — it now stands among the top hundred films in the Sight & Sound poll and is routinely called the greatest Spanish film ever made.

After Franco: exuberance and export

Democracy released the pressure, and Spanish cinema swung to the opposite pole: Pedro Almodóvar's melodramas — All About My Mother (1999) the most laureled — made post-Franco Madrid's freedom itself the subject. The industry also became a platform for the Spanish-language canon beyond Spain: Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006), a Spanish-Mexican co-production set in the Francoist 1944 countryside, folded the dictatorship's violence into dark fairy tale and became one of the century's most internationally decorated films. And Spain's studios had already served the world's genre trade for decades — Leone's Westerns were shot in Almería's deserts. Ranked by composite score, the Spanish list is compact but sharply defined: a canon forged under censorship, vindicated by festivals and polls the censors couldn't reach.