The Secret in their Eyes (2009)

Some of the very best movies I see each year are the ones that are entered by their country to the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film--and every time I see a movie of this caliber, I vow to see more of them.
The movie takes place in Buenos Aires at two points in time--1974 and 2000. The story begins (although not the film) with a criminal-court investigator, Benjamin Espósito (Ricardo Darín) arriving at a crime scene bantering and cursing with a colleague, and sees the murdered corpse of a beautiful young woman. Not only does he relentlessly pursue the killer; he draws close to the woman’s husband, a bank employee named Morales (Pablo Rago), who remains obsessed with his dead wife for the rest of his life. the movie is a story first and foremost about love, but the front story is one of a crime and what happens to those who live to tell the tale.
The movie opens in 2000, and Espósito, gray-bearded, is at his desk, writing. It is twenty-five years after the murder, and the investigator, retired yet still fascinated by the case, is assembling his recollections of it.
Back in 1974, Espósito chases the killer with the aid of his antic partner, Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), and their cautious superior, Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), a judge’s assistant and the woman Benjamin loves. The movie has a haunted air, filled with missed opportunities and obsessions.
From scene to scene, the movie has an enormously vital swing to it. Espósito is a knight-errant of the law who seeks justice, and Sandoval is his Sancho Panza, while the judges (apart from Irene) are profane and corrupt political hacks; the back-and-forth among the court workers is juicy and explicit, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sinister, while the atmosphere outside the courts is savage. The dictator Juan Perón dies in 1974, and is succeeded by his wife, Isabel; it’s the time of the death squads, the disappearances, and legal anarchy. All the messages--the importance of living life fully, the glory and and the trechery of intense love, and where government fails us--are beautifully told in this wonderful film.