THE OJOS HAVE IT

Tuesday afternoon I finally caught up with a movie I’d been meaning to see for about a month: this year’s foreign film Oscar winner The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de sus Ojos), from Argentina.

Holy crap. This is the best movie I’ve seen this year. Based on a novel by Eduardo Sacheri & directed by Juan Jose Campanella, it’s about the probe, by a judge’s investigator (the sensational Ricardo Darin), into the rape & murder of a young married woman. I won’t give away any details of the story, which is set in the mid-‘70s & told in wistful flashbacks from a quarter-century later, but I will say that it’s a rich, hearty stew of a movie—a crime drama with some Hitchcockian flourishes, a political thriller in the Costa-Gavras vein, a love story & even, at times, a bit of a buddy comedy, with a chilling & deeply satisfying gothic twist at the end.

I highly recommend this one. For folks here in the Valley, it plays at least until this Thursday at Harkins Camelview in Scottsdale; everybody else should keep an eye out for it on video. They don’t make ‘em this good very often.