El Angel (2018)

"Serial killer" seems the wrong word for the murderous criminal portrayed here - is it possible to distinguish between serial killers and murderous criminals? - but extra confusingly, this murderous criminal is Rob Puch, a real-life babyfaced killer from Argentina who in the 60s, working as a brazen career thief, killed eleven people, but look him up later - because this striking and well-acted movie will garner your interest in this peculiar character - and discover someone quite different to this eccentric, possibly sociopathic babyface here - staring out from newsppaper photos and Wikipedia pages is a sneering rapist and abuser (did the movie neglect to metnion that?) and it becomes hard to reconcile fact with this, what, fiction?

★★★★☆

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Apartment Zero (Conviviendo con la muerte) (1988)

In this "apartment thriller", as in Single White Female (which has the same homoerotic undertones and is about as deep), apartment doors (and masks, sunglasses and wigs) hide potential dangers (satan, psychopathy, or death, say) and certainly as Colin Firth's neurotic, introverted moviehouse owner Adrian Le Duc takes into his apartment a new tenant, the James Dean-like (or really very Tom Cruise-like) Jack Carney (Hart Bochner), there are brutal political executions taking place, and I suppose in a city like Buenos Aires in the mid-80s, so soon after State-sponsored terrorists have disappeared thousands and brutally killed artists and intellects, it is hard for the residents of an apartment complex to know whom to open their doors to.

★★★★☆

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The Heist of the Century (El Robo Del Siglo) (2020)

I tend not to like heist films - I lack patience with the set-up knowing the meticulous planning comes undone the second the plan is enacted and I never manage to care much for the crims (so what if everything goes belly up and they get caught?) - but this comedy thriller from Argentina is a rollicking good time, a heist film full of characters you can care about, based on the incredible true story of the 2006 robbery of the Banco Rio in Acassuso, Buenos Aires dubbed by media outlets at the time "The Heist of the Century", a crime staggering in its complexity and ingenuity and one that had the peculiar effect, only in Argentina, of turning the criminals into folk heroes including mastermind Fernando Araujo who wrote the source book and co-wrote this film's screenplay. 

★★★★☆

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Esteros (2016)

 

Esteros

It includes occasional glimpses of the beautiful Iberá wetlands and ends sweetly, but wading through the  flashbacks showing Matias and Jeronimo's burgeoning childhood romance and waiting for the adult Matias to reconcile long-lost feelings after he reunites with Jeronimo at the summerhouse where they first discovered their love for each other is pretty ponderous. 

★★☆☆☆ 

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Kóblic (2016)

Argentina's Dirty War is the context of this thriller, set in 1977, that has Ricardo Darin playing a traumatised former Death Flight pilot who becomes involved with a married woman, and it is just a shame that by film's end this fascinating context, beautifully realised in complete period detail, ceases being relevant to the thriller plot except perhaps for dictating how brutally everyone behaves.

★★★☆☆

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Rojo (2018)

The comings and goings of people from a suburban house and an altercation in a restaurant between two men, one the calm respectable lawyer and community leader Claudio and the other an agitated stranger who briefly upsets the restaurant's convivial atmosphere, are the not quite commonplace, slightly skew-whiff scenes that launch director Benjamin Naishtat's exceptional thriller; how the scenes are connected is unclear and the disparate moments continue (a fleeting tv commercial in which a model kills rather than shares his drink, a tv detective and former cop with an easy case on his hands, and a teenager to whom the immorality of simply disappearing a rival never occurs) but the movie gradually, unexpectedly ties these threads together while in the background the military coup that commenced Argentina's Dirty War starts being felt in the day-to-day of the characters.

 

★★★★★

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The Clan (El Clan) (2015)

This true crime drama about the Puccio family, an outwardly respectable Buenos Aires family revealed soon after the end of Argentina's Dirty War in the mid-80s to be responsible for a series of shocking kidnappings and murders, ends with intertitles that tell the fate of each family member and reading them I found I still had no idea who was who, suggesting I should have paid more attention or that the movie, full of shots that linger unhelpfully over sex or offer clinical detail about who was doing what where and when, was made to revel in the horrific details, not to provide insights about the perpetrators and their motives, and was made primarily for viewers already familiar with the story.

★★★☆☆

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The Aura (El Aura) (1993)

In this really good Argentinian thriller, an epileptic taxidermist with an eye for detail (played by the always excellent Ricardo Darin) goes on a hunting trip with his buddy and everything is hunky-dory until a shooting accident leaves one man dead and more men, grim-faced ones, show up wondering why the dead man hasn't kept some kind of an appointment.

★★★★☆

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Everybody Knows (2019)

A joyous wedding celebration in a wine region of Spain turns bad when a guest, the teenaged girl of an Argentinian family, disappears, possibly kidnapped, in Asghar Farhadi's beautifully acted, beautiful-to-look-at, absorbing, but ultimately inconsequential crime drama that spends so long on its sumptuous set-up, there's no time for the mystery except for in a series of lurching scenes in the film's final third in which the plot doesn't so much develop as the audience is perfunctorily caught up on a situation everyone except the audience (and perhaps, unimportantly, one or two other characters) already knows.

★★★☆☆

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The Secret In Their Eyes (El Secreto De Sus Ojos) (2009)

In this engrossing romantic mystery thriller from Argentina, a criminal investigator in retirement played by the captivating Ricardo Darin looks back upon a murder case for inspiration for a novel and as the movie switches backwards and forwards between the brutal events of the past and his and his colleagues' memories of them, questions are raised about seizing life, living with grief, and seeking justice and revenge.

★★★★☆

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Happy Together (春光乍洩) (Chung gwong cha sit) (1997)

A passionate but dysfunctional relationship plays out in Argentina in Wong Kar-wai's utterly captivating 1997 love story that, with Tony Leung in the lead, with the prominence of a hypnotic soundtrack, with its foreign setting like a timeless other world, and with its whispered secrets (here, whispered into a cassette player, not a hole in a wall at Angkor Wat), feels as much a part of the director's other romantic works, Days of Being Wild, In The Mood For Love, and 2046, which are considered a loose trilogy but for some reason not a tetralogy.

★★★★★

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Evita (1996)

This film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical attempts to reduce decades of Argentinian history into two hours of Tim Rice's bawdy rhyming couplets and because of this is an almost unwatchable movie-length rock opera music video featuring, among other embarrassments, suited Argentinian statesmen rapping to funky synthesizers, Antonio Banderas drifting around as a everywhere narrator who often has to nod and look unembarrassed as he waits a beat or two for the music to let him finish what he is saying, bawdy rhymes about Argentina's reverred/abhorred Eva Peron played by an out-of-her-depth Madonna and, the musical's biggest sin, apart from repeated scenes shot on the balcony of the Casa de Rosa, an almost entirely absent Buenos Aires.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

You'll yearn for your own adventures watching this account of Che Guevara's formative motorbike ride around South America with his friend, Alberto Granado, but you'll also wonder at the characteristics of the 23-year-old Argentinian medical student that see him so politicised by his adventure that - in events beyond the scope of this travelogue - he goes on to become leader of the Cuban Revolution, then a reviled mass-murdering terrorist killed by a CIA-supported Bolivian military, then a contemporary hipster icon.

★★★★☆

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