10 Best Penélope Cruz Movies to Watch Before The Invite

Why Penélope Cruz Is the One to Watch in The Invite

When A24 announced The Invite — the buzzy English-language remake of Spanish director Cesc Gay's hit comedy The People Upstairs — the internet had one immediate reaction: Penélope Cruz is in this? Yes.

Cruz plays Piña, the enigmatic upstairs neighbor whose dinner-party invitation spirals a marriage into unexpected territory, opposite Edward Norton, Seth Rogen, and director-turned-star Olivia Wilde. The film premiered at Sundance 2026 to rapturous reviews (it's sitting at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes), and Cruz is widely singled out as the film's live wire — charismatic, funny, and unnervingly hard to read. It's the kind of performance that makes you want to cancel your weekend plans and watch everything she's ever made.

That instinct is correct. Below, every essential Penélope Cruz movie, ranked — from her early Almodóvar collaborations to her Oscar-winning Hollywood turn to her recent career renaissance. Plus: where The Invite fits in the canon.

What Are Penélope Cruz's 10 Best Movies?

10. Nine (2009)

Cruz's Oscar nomination for Rob Marshall's baroque movie-musical is the most divisive entry on this list. Nine — an adaptation of the Broadway show based on Fellini's 8½ — is an overstuffed, scattered film. But Cruz's performance as Carla, the passionate and heartbroken mistress of Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis), is genuinely magnetic. In a film full of starpower (Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren), Cruz is the one who makes you forget everyone else in the room. The Academy agreed: she scored a Best Supporting Actress nomination. The film didn't deserve her.

9. Blow (2001)

Cruz's early American films were a mixed bag as Hollywood tested whether a Spanish actress with a fierce accent could anchor English-language productions. Blow — the true-crime saga of cocaine kingpin George Jung — gave her an answer to work with. As Mirtha, Johnny Depp's spiraling, volatile wife, Cruz brings a ferocity that the film would've crumbled without. The role is small by screen time, large by impact. It also announced something important: Cruz didn't need the material to be great. She could make something unforgettable in ten minutes of screentime.

8. Everybody Knows (2018)

Iranian master Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Salesman) made his first Spanish-language film — and his first with Cruz — in this slow-burn family thriller about a kidnapping that unravels old secrets. Cruz plays Laura, a woman whose return to her Spanish hometown for a wedding becomes something far darker. It's a film about what families bury and what the heat eventually forces to the surface. Cruz plays it with tremendous restraint, trusting Farhadi's coiled tension to do the work. Everybody Knows is underseen and underrated; if you've skipped it, correct that.

7. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)

Hear me out. On Stranger Tides is not a great film. But Cruz as Angelica — swaggering pirate and Jack Sparrow's former flame — is genuinely great in it. She holds her own against Johnny Depp's maximalist shtick, brings actual menace when the scene calls for it, and wears the costume like she was born to it. More importantly, this entry belongs on any definitive Cruz list because it proved something the art-house circuit already knew: she can do absolutely anything.

6. Broken Embraces (2009)

One of Almodóvar's most hypnotic films — a film-noir-within-a-film about an obsessive producer, a blind screenwriter, and a doomed love affair — features Cruz in perhaps her most Hitchcockian performance. She plays Lena, an aspiring actress whose relationship with her controlling, dangerous boss traps her in a story that only escapes its past gradually, painfully. Cruz is luminous and frightened in equal measure. Broken Embraces tends to get overlooked next to Almodóvar's bigger titles, which is the only thing wrong with it.

5. Pain and Glory (2019)

Cruz appears in only a handful of scenes in Almodóvar's most personal film — a meditation on memory, addiction, and the cost of a creative life — and yet she quietly steals every one of them. She plays the mother of Salvador (Antonio Banderas in a career-best performance), rendered through memory, through Super 8 footage, through the longing of a middle-aged man who can't stop revisiting the woman who shaped him. The sixth time she and Almodóvar have worked together, and they still surprise each other.

4. Parallel Mothers (2021)

The most recent masterwork. Almodóvar's emotionally devastating drama — about two women who give birth on the same day in the same hospital room, whose lives become fatefully entwined — gave Cruz her second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at Venice. She plays Janis, a photographer who must navigate an impossible secret while reckoning with Spain's historical wounds. The film weaves the personal and the political in a way only Almodóvar can, and Cruz carries both threads simultaneously. Parallel Mothers is the proof that Cruz is still operating at the peak of her powers.

3. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

The Oscar winner. Woody Allen's sun-drenched romantic comedy cast Cruz as María Elena — passionate, unstable, brilliant, and terrifying — the ex-wife of Javier Bardem's artist who arrives like a comet and changes everyone's orbit. Cruz won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role, making her the first — and still only — Spanish actress to win an Oscar for an acting performance. The film is playful and sensual and slightly too cool, but Cruz's every scene crackles with something rawer and realer than the material around her. María Elena is all fire; Cruz makes sure every frame burns.

2. All About My Mother (1999)

The film that introduced Penélope Cruz to the world. Pedro Almodóvar's devastating, tender, deeply human drama — about grief, identity, and the families we make — features Cruz as Sister Rosa, a young nun who is pregnant and HIV-positive and navigating it all with a kind of bewildered grace. Cruz is a supporting player in a film full of tremendous performances, but her presence is so vivid and her empathy so transparent that it's impossible to imagine the film without her. All About My Mother won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It's the beginning of the Cruz mythology.

1. Volver (2006)

The greatest Penélope Cruz performance. Almodóvar's warm, funny, heartbreaking film about mothers, daughters, secrets, and ghosts centers on Raimunda — a Madrid working-class woman who covers up a violent crime, runs a restaurant out of a borrowed space, and receives what may or may not be a visit from her dead mother. Cruz plays Raimunda with such physical and emotional truth that you forget you are watching a performance. She won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress, received her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and delivered a performance that critics still cite as one of the best of the 21st century. If you watch nothing else on this list, watch Volver.

Where Does The Invite Fit in Penélope Cruz's Career?

The Invite arrives at an interesting point. Cruz is 52, at the absolute height of her critical reputation (Parallel Mothers being the benchmark), and now choosing a mainstream American comedy — something she's rarely done in English since Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The early reviews suggest she's made the right call. One critic called her role as Piña "a master class in comic timing and simmering menace — sometimes in the same sentence."

The film is also, quietly, a homecoming of a different kind. The Invite is a remake of The People Upstairs (Sentimental, 2020), Cesc Gay's Spanish comedy — meaning Cruz is stepping into an English retelling of material that began in her native culture. The casting is not accidental. She's the film's most credible link to the original's spirit.

Whether The Invite becomes a defining entry in her career or a stylish detour, it doesn't matter right now. What matters is that Penélope Cruz is in a theater near you, doing exactly what she does best: making the whole thing feel inevitable.

The Invite opens in limited release June 26, 2026, expanding wide July 10.

Want to Watch Penélope Cruz in Spanish?

If this list has sent you down the Almodóvar rabbit hole — Volver, All About My Mother, Parallel Mothers, Broken Embraces, Pain and Glory are all in Spanish — you're in luck. These films are widely available on streaming platforms in their original Spanish-language versions, and they're the definitive way to experience Cruz's best work. For her English-language films with Spanish audio, or for any upcoming theatrical release where a Spanish track is available, the free TheaterEars app streams synchronized Spanish audio to your phone through your own earbuds — so you never have to choose between the big screen and your preferred language.