From rural Mexican drama to urban poetry in Medellín, via intimate Galicia and Mexican digital struggles, Spanish-language cinema is enjoying an exceptional year, with challenging, moving, and deeply human titles.

The first half of 2025 has been particularly fruitful for Hispanic American cinema, with a crop of films that have shone at festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, and Guadalajara. The landscape reveals an increasingly acute sensitivity to social issues, the recovery of collective memory, the representation of marginalized bodies and identities, and a commitment to hybrid cinematic languages.

This list of the best of the year (to date) includes poetic rawness, impactful documentaries, historical fiction, and queer or decolonial narratives. Below are the ten most notable films, with their respective premises and analytical commentary.

7. The virgin of the quarry lake (Argentina/Mexico/Spain)
Dir. Laura Casabé

In the midst of Argentina's 2001 crisis, three teenagers who share a forbidden desire unleash a dark force when one of them, driven by jealousy, resorts to a spell with the help of her grandmother. Adapted by Benjamín Naishtat from stories by Mariana Enríquez, this film, somewhere between coming-of-age and supernatural horror, explores sexuality, power, and superstition with a dense and earthy aesthetic. Casabé films adolescence as a disturbing threshold, where the intimate and the political contaminate each other. Premiered at Sundance and selected for the Argentine competition at BAFICI, it confirms the vitality of social horror in the River Plate region.

By The Hollywod Reporter - See full article here

THE VIRGIN OF THE QUARRY LAKES