Pedro Almodóvar · Filmography Ranked
Best Pedro Almodóvar Films, Ranked by IQ Score
Four decades of Spain's most-celebrated film auteur. Every Almodóvar film, ranked by IQ Score.
Pedro Almodóvar's filmography is the most sustained engagement with Spanish post-Franco cultural identity, gender-and-sexuality, and family-architecture in cinema. The catalog spans the 1980s Movida Madrileña counterculture entries through the late-career memoir-mode films (Pain and Glory, Parallel Mothers).
Anchor picks: Pain and Glory (2019) is the catalog's most-direct autobiographical entry. Volver (2006) is the matrilineal-Spanish-rural canonical work. All About My Mother (1999) is the Best Foreign Language Oscar winner. Talk to Her (2002) is the catalog's most-controversial moral-architecture work. Parallel Mothers (2021) is the most-recent canonical entry.
7 titles · ranked by IQ Score
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Questions about this ranking
What is the best Almodóvar film?
By IQ Score on TV Intelligentsia, Pain and Glory (2019) and Volver (2006) anchor the Masterclass tier. All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Bad Education, and Parallel Mothers round out the canonical entries.
How does TVI rank Almodóvar's filmography?
Every Almodóvar film is scored on the same rubric: Cognitive Stimulation (40%), Educational Value (35%), Craft & Quality (25%). The rubric reads the catalog as Spain's most-canonical post-Franco filmography, and the rare auteur catalog whose late-career entries are as critically significant as the breakthrough work.
Why is Pain and Glory ranked so high?
TV Intelligentsia scores Pain and Glory at Masterclass tier because the 2019 autobiographical film is Almodóvar's most-direct memoir work, Antonio Banderas's Cannes Best Actor performance committing to the aging-filmmaker register with documentary specificity. The film operates as both confessional auto-fiction and as formal experiment in late-career artistic identity.
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