The Secret in Their Eyes · reception & legacy

How The Secret in Their Eyes has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A hit from day one — it became one of the biggest Argentine box-office successes ever and won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar — and rather than fading, it's climbed: now an IMDb Top 250 fixture and a Letterboxd darling that serves as many people's gateway into Argentine cinema.

What's debated

The evergreen fight is whether it deserved that Oscar over Haneke's The White Ribbon and Audiard's A Prophet — 'crowd-pleaser beats masterpiece' discourse that still flares up in awards threads.

Its footprint

The film's five-minute stadium chase — a seemingly unbroken shot swooping from aerial view into the stands and onto the pitch — is a permanent resident of every 'greatest long takes' list and compilation; meanwhile the 2015 Hollywood remake with Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman is routinely invoked as the cautionary tale of 'just watch the original.'

Where it stands

Firmly in the 21st-century world-cinema canon — only the second Argentine film ever to win the foreign-language Oscar (after 1985's The Official Story), and a reliable 'you must see this' recommendation.