Film (4K restoration)
2025 (Argentina) (original release, 2002)(Drama/Thriller) (English subtitles)
Director: Fabian Bielinsky
Starring: Ricardo Darin, Gaston Pauls, Leticia Bredice
Fabián Bielinsky’s Nine Queens is a razor-sharp Argentine grifter satire that spins confidence tricks on both its characters and the audience. Ricardo Darín stars as Marcos, a seasoned conman who rescues naïve Juan (Gastón Pauls) from a botched petty scam and recruits him into a high-stakes plot: sell an allegedly priceless set of Weimar stamps, the “Nine Queens,” to a corrupt collector.
Bielinsky layers successive double-crosses, inviting comparisons to The Sting while offering a pointed, prophetic critique of Argentina’s deregulated financial scene that foreshadowed its crash. The film toys with the line between cynical disbelief and the gambler’s hope of a once-in-a-lifetime payoff, asking whether refusal to risk is its own self-deception. This is an outstanding film with an amusing payoff over the final credits – and it is very sad that Bielinsky died of a heart attack just a few years after it came out
Harborough Cinema showed this film in February 2004 when it received a 76.1 Appreciation Index score and it so impressed two members of the programming committee that we had to show it again when we learned that it had been re-released!
(1h 54 mins)