Wednesday, March 24, 2010

The Secret in Their Eyes (2009)


A man wants to solve a murder committed many years ago. [imdb]

Nominated for 1 Oscar:

Best Foreign Language Film: Argentina (WINNER)

The Foreign Language Film category is often enough a joke. How could you not nominate 2 years ago Romania’s highly praised submission: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days?! :P Ok, I’m very subjective about it and I can appreciate they’ve cleaned up this category’s regulations in the past year. And it strangely shows: this year’s line-up is kind of surprising and very VERY diverse. This one’s the 3rd I’m seeing and also the big winner.

A Prophet was too violent for Oscar, and White Ribbon too artsy. So this Argentinean police-drama seemed as a good voting back-up plan. I had my doubts at first, because the first 30-40 minutes of the film are slow, uninteresting, it looks like a random TV movie. The characters are never the highlights, not even when the story gets better and I couldn’t really get the character’s romantic intentions.

Secret in Their Eyes becomes good when the action side of it gets more interesting and dynamic. The secret treasure of the film is the story and the screenplay in its last 30 minutes. The film suddenly becomes interesting, mysterious, maybe even a bit tense. And the TWIST… oh, man… best twist in a movie I’ve seen in a looong time. And that makes me happy, when I am taken by surprise and it’s all explained in the story. I have no doubt now: it won the Oscar because of the surprise ending and those who’ve seen it know what I mean!!!

My rating for the film: 7.5/10. 75% of the film is a 5. But with a killer ending, I’ve decided on an almost 8.

5 comments:

  1. I really like the name. I hope I see it soon.

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  2. I can't wait to see it. It'll be hard for it to outdo my love for "The White Ribbon"...but I am in the mood for a good twist!

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  3. well, to me the twist was really good, as I didn't see it coming. More so, I was sure they were going for a cliche so-called-twist, but then I was surprised...

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  4. Saw the trailer before A Prophet this past week, and I was very intrigued by it. I'll see this one as soon as I can.

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  5. I want to see this movie as well.

    I’ve recently discovered your movie blog while blog hopping, and I've become a follower, and look forward to revisiting.

    I would appreciate it, if you, and others, would become a “follower” and/or link on your site to my new movie + music blog, just to help get it going: http://moviesandsongs365.blogspot.com/

    We can help each other discover new movies that we might not otherwise have heard of ( :

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