The Aura

Ricardo Darín, wearing a mild-mannered expression of emotional remove, plays the unnamed antihero, obsessed with imagining the perfect robbery. The ''aura'' is the clarity with which he sees -- or imagines he sees -- the world in moments preceding an epileptic attack.

Darin is an actor who's really consummate at suggesting two simultaneous levels of character.

This is a tremendously atmospheric movie full of moody mystery, and it'll keep you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end.

It's less a deconstruction of the heist film than an ambitious contemplation of our fascination with the genre, directed with a dispassionate eye at a ruminative pace and centered by a queasily emotionless figure wading through a swamp of moral ambiguity.

Bielinsky's "Nine Queens" was a complex romp through the machinations of high-stakes con artists, but this intricately plotted mystery ventures into darker psychological territory and never misses a step.

Bielinsky is a most expressive director, achieving considerable nuances and depths of emotion with characters' looks, gestures, body language and silences.

The careful camera work, beautifully dank cinematography and the quietly nuanced performance by Darín keep our attention, but in the end, the film's bigger challenge isn't its length, or its deliberate pace: It's that it's overly freighted with symbolism and meaning.