From today's Oregonian....
"The Secret in Their Eyes" -- winner of this year's Best Foreign Picture Oscar -- contains the coolest scene made to look like it was shot in a single camera take that I've seen since "Children of Men." (Much digital trickery was involved -- lovingly explained here -- but still. It's seamless.)
The camera flies over and into and through the bowels of a packed Argentina soccer stadium as inspector Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) and his boozy partner (Guillermo Francella) chase a suspect in the murder case that's come to obsess both men.
It's a stunning set piece, and it was wonderfully unexpected in the movie -- which is mostly a romantic, grown-up and occasionally loopy police procedural about the perils of living in the past.
Director Juan Jose Campanella jumps back and forth across a 25-year span as Benjam'n fights a) a rising tide of government corruption and b) his growing love for the high-class judge (Soledad Villamil) who bends rules for him. The actors give full-bodied, warm, melancholic performances, and their easy chemistry grounds the film even when it flirts with the cliched (including a train-platform farewell) and the downright bizarre.
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(127 min., rated R, playing in Portland at the Fox Tower) Grade: B-plus
'The Secret in Their Eyes' (The Oregonian, Friday, May 7, 2010)
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