The Secret in Their Eyes

Juan José Campanella's The Secret in Their Eyes arrived at the 2010 Academy Awards as a long-shot contender against Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard's A Prophet, and walked away with Best Foreign Language Film, the first Argentine win in the category in nearly three decades. The verdict was contested at the time and has only sharpened since: the Campanella film is the most accessible of the three, but it earns its prize through structural craft and emotional precision that the more austere European nominees were uninterested in.

The film operates simultaneously as a crime procedural, a doomed romance, and a coded reckoning with Argentina's Dirty War. Benjamín Espósito (Ricardo Darín, in the performance that defined his international reputation) writes his novel in the early 2000s about a 1974 murder he could never let go of, and about Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), the magistrate he never told he loved. The two timelines fold into each other with the patience of a long memory. The justice system fails twice, in different decades, for different reasons, and the film refuses to pretend otherwise.

The set-piece (a single-take pursuit through a packed Buenos Aires football stadium) is one of the great technical sequences of 21st-century cinema, executed with CGI invisibly enough that audiences argued for years about whether it was real. The 2015 Hollywood remake, with Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman, retains the structure but loses the political weight and the chemistry. Stick with the original.