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Secret in their eyes1/13/2023 Ray forces Siefert to admit that he set up Ghazala as a patsy to protect Marzin. Officer Reggie Siefert brings in a suspect named Aban Ghazala, who Ray realizes is not the killer. DA Martin Morales is reluctant to go after Marzin, fearing it would compromise the terrorism investigation. Ray scans the photo and matches it to Anzor Marzin, who is an informant in the terrorism probe. While helping Jess pack, Ray notices pictures from a picnic thrown for law enforcement in which a young man is seen staring at Carolyn. Ray, who was supposed to meet Carolyn to plan a surprise party for Jess, feels responsible for what happened to her, while Jess feels the increasing need to move out of the city. At the crime scene, both are devastated to discover that the victim is Jess's 18-year-old daughter, Carolyn, whose body has been bleached inside and out to destroy DNA evidence of both rape and murder. Jess and Ray receive a call about an unknown female body found in a dumpster near a local mosque, which Ray has been investigating for possible terrorist links. But it might well lead people back to the excellent original.In 2002, shortly after 9/11, Ray Kasten, a counterterrorism agent for the FBI, and his friend Jessica "Jess" Cobb, an investigator for the Los Angeles district attorney's office, meet new ADA Claire Sloan. Nothing about this film will challenge Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot as the greatest remake in film history. But our heroes’ opposition to homeland security isn’t so clearcut as the originals’ resentment of junta tyranny, and everything is blurred by the fact that Roberts’ character has become the emotional centre of the drama, making the Ejiofor-Kidman relationship look even more implausible and extraneous. Could the authorities be suppressing investigation of an unrelated non-terrorist crime? An informer within a homegrown terrorist cell is therefore someone to be given the kid-gloves treatment. The junta tyranny of 70s Buenos Aires has been replaced with the homeland paranoia of 2002 America, and the conviction that LA was next on al-Qaida’s hitlist. Ray’s version finds a potentially interesting twist on this theme. Campanella’s film found an intriguing noirish possibility in the world of the Argentinian junta: the idea that regular, common-or-garden murders couldthemselves be made to “disappear” in the murky gloom of state oppression. I concede that the point is that supposedly he was always overawed by her. It’s with the glassy-eyed blonde regality of Nicole that Ejiofor’s character is enamoured. A relationship between Ejiofor and Roberts might have generated more heat. The problem is that her character never really meshes with the other two she upstages and out-acts Kidman, and it might well have made more emotional sense if Ray’s hopeless crush was on her. She looks older and more careworn than I think she ever has before on screen. It is actually an interesting and even quite courageous performance from Roberts. Now the third character is Ray’s other old colleague Jess, played by Roberts, who has a heartwrenching connection with the crime that haunts all three of them. Now it’s Ejiofor as retired prosecutor Ray, who comes back into the office and reveals himself to be obsessed with a cold case from years earlier, in the immediate post-9/11 era, and also eternally smitten with the classy senior DA official he fell for all those years ago, played with a waxy stateliness by Kidman – a frozen and unrelaxed performance that makes her moments of cleavage-flashing sexiness all the more odd.īut there is no novel-writing this time around, and the boozy best friend has gone. The remake, adapted and directed by veteran Hollywood screenwriter Billy Ray, messes with and messes up the central romance and changes the triangular dynamic. Julia Roberts … an interesting, courageous performance. The film fuses thrills with dark comedy, musing on fictional levels of reality and metaphysical strangeness: the idea that guilt can be seen in the perpetrator’s eyes. We are also introduced to the third wheel in this thwarted judicial romance: Esposito’s hopeless-drunk colleague Sandoval (Guillermo Francella). The action flashes back to the case and the days when Argentina’s sinister state assassinations and kidnappings (the ugly world of los desaparecidos) provided camouflage for non-political murderers. Esposito visits his old colleague Irene (Soledad Villamil), who is now a senior official, ostensibly to ask for her help but really because he has always been deeply in unrequited love with her. He plays Esposito, a retired Buenos Aires prosecutor writing a crime novel based on an unsolved cold case from the early 1970s that continues to haunt him. The first film starred that great character actor Ricardo Darin, who was already known for another cerebral crime-drama, Nine Queens, itself later given the inferior-remake treatment.
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