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The Motorcycle Diaries
The film recounts the 1952 expedition, partly by motorcycle, across South America by Ernesto Guevara, later known as the revolutionary leader Ché, and his friend Alberto Granado. The screenplay is based primarily on Guevara’s trip diary of the same name, with additional context supplied by Traveling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary by…
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Nine Queens
Conmen Marcos and Juan team up for a once-in-a-lifetime scam to swindle a corrupt businessman with forged rare stamps the Nine Queens. In a plot with serpentine twists and a gallery of rogues, deceptions pile upon deceptions and its up to us to sort out who’s conning who. First-time director Bielinsky uses real-life Buenos Aires…
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All About My Mother
Esteban, an aspiring young writer, runs to get the autograph of an actress, with tragic results. His mother, Manuela, goes to Barcelona to find Esteban’s transvestite father and her dislocated life begins to take a very different shape. Self -parody is part of Almodovar’s approach and the effectiveness of his story-telling comes partly from the…
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Volver
Revolving around an eccentric family of women from a wind-swept region south of Madrid, Cruz stars as Raimunda, a working-class woman forced to go to great lengths to protect her 14-year-old daughter Paula. To top off the family crisis, her mother Irene returns from the dead to tie up loose ends. The plot originates in…
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Pan’s Labyrinth
Del Toro, no stranger to science fiction or tales of the Spanish struggle between Fascism and left wing politics (Blade 2, Hellboy, The Devils Backbone) offers us something different here, skilfully blending history with fantasy. In Second World War fascist Spain Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is faced with a stark choice. On the one hand she…
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The Orphanage
Hitchcock explained the difference between surprise and suspense like this: if people are seated at a table and a bomb explodes, that is surprise. If they are seated at a table, and you know there’s a bomb under the table attached to a ticking clock, but they continue to play cards – that’s suspense. Well,…
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El Violin
A big winner on the film festival circuit in the Americas and Europe, juries and audiences alike applauded Vargas accomplished first feature. El Violin is the kind of social realism film we don’t see so much these days. The film tells a simple story of guerrilla forces struggling against the oppression of government troops in…
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The Secret in Their Eyes
It’s the year 2000, Buenos Aires, Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin – Nine Queens), disillusioned, retired investigator is obsessed with a 1974 unsolved murder and decides to write a book about it. This gives him the pretext to contact his former boss Irene Menendez Hastings (Soledad Villamil) a woman he has secretly loved since they worked…
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The Headless Woman
Vero (Maria Onetto) is driving home at night when she hits something in her car was it a dog or a child After the incident Vero is transformed from an elegant professional woman with self-agency to a passive state she says little, her face becomes an intrinsically meaningless mask. Is she suffering from concussion or…
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XXY
Based on a short story by Sergio Bizzio, Puenzo’s first feature film follows the psychological journey that 15 year old intersex Alex (Efron) makes as she struggles to find her sexual and gender identity. In a bid to protect her from the morbid curiosity and intolerance that her intersexuality would – in all likelihood –…