Netflixeando: 17 Argentine Films You Should Stream on Netflix

Childhood friends Matías and Jerónimo reunite in their hometown of Paso de los Libres, Argentina, on the banks of the Uruguay River. The summer before high school, the teens’ close friendship transformed into something deeper, but their mutual attraction never came to fruition. More than a decade later they meet again, and the chemistry between them is palpable, but now Matías has a girlfriend who has traveled to his hometown for Carnival. Seeing his old friend, now so comfortable and confident in his skin, reawakens Matías’ feelings.

Throughout the 1980s, the so-called Puccio Clan, a family of twisted, upper crust porteños, adopted the tactics of Argentina’s Dirty War and made a well-organized family business out of kidnapping and extortion, only to mercilessly finish off their victims after completing the transaction. The mastermind behind this depraved family activity was an unassuming public accountant and small businessman named Arquímedes Puccio, along with his son, a professional rugby player named Alejandro. Their victims? Family friends and soccer acquaintances. Yeesh. The film is directed by Pablo Trapero, one of Argentina’s most internationally lauded directors, and features box office sensation and beloved comedian Guillermo Francella in the role of Arquímedes. It’s an edge-of-your-seat thriller, with plenty of dimly lit spaces, stacks of money, guns, menacing glares, and slamming trunks.

Eva Perón remains one of the most iconic figures of twentieth century history. When she died in 1952 at the age of 33, an expert anatomist embalmed her so as to leave her looking her best; you could be forgiven for thinking she was merely a sleeping beauty. In Pablo Agüero’s film we see the impact she still has on a country run by the Armed Forces who will stop at nothing to eradicate her image from popular memory.

Filmed on the Mar de Plata coastline, XXY shows an unpredictably wild but gorgeous seaside where Alex’s father works to protect and rescue sea turtles endangered by the area’s fishing industry. Kraken seems to feel his primary role is protector especially when it comes to his child Alex, a secretive and aggressive wild child who provokes Álvaro another young teen who has come to visit along with his family but both kids, each feeling themselves misfits, end up developing an intense connection. Eventually we learn that Alex, an intersex child, is beginning to go through puberty and is grappling with her (so far she’s been raised as a girl) sexuality. Fed up with hormone pills and forcing her complex body into a strictly female form. Alex, or at least her mother, is looking into whether Alex will undergo gender reassignment surgery. Then they discover that the head of the family staying with them is a renowned plastic surgeon specializing in sex changes. Fluid camera work filled with shots of window frames, mirrors, and reflections emphasizes the story’s doubling, narrowness of view, and constant thinking about fixed ideas and viewpoints of themselves, of others, and of how others might perceive them.

The passion and talent of María Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes, perhaps the most famous tango couple in history, is ever-present in Kral’s documentary. Tracing their romance and eventual heartbreak with sumptuously shot reenactments, using dance numbers in empty stages lit suggestively to play out their history together, and interviewing both dancers, now in their 70s, the film builds up to what the title promises us: their last tango together.

Marcos and Susana have always had a contentious relationship. Like most siblings, they’ve bickered on and off for most of their life. When their mother dies and Susana decides to sell off the house where Marcos had been tending to her for the past few decades, family fights will come to a boil. All that’s left for Marcos to do is to flee Buenos Aires and head to Uruguay where he’ll find a new life at a spa. This touching and very funny comedy is all about starting over and living life anew.

After spending 7 years in prison, Oso (Bear) is out. All he wants is to be reunited with his wife and his daughter. And get his cut of the money for the job that landed him in jail in the first place. Blindly driven by these two competing urges, Oso will come up against the life he used to lead and the one he wishes to create for himself now.

Starring one of Argentina’s most beloved actors, Ricardo Darín, Delirium is a comedy about the making of a low-budget film starring Argentina’s most beloved actors: Ricardo Darín. It all begins when three broke friends decide the best way to make an easy buck is to produce a film. All they need is Darín, who inexplicably agrees to star in their very very independent film. As their incompetence behind the camera starts to show, the productions spirals out of control leading this meta-comedy to go into more and more outrageous situations where only thing is clear: no one else is as admired and loved as their eventually missing leading man.

In this dark comedy, a simple DIY home improvement leads to a keen meditation on class relations in Argentina. Leonardo, a successful designer lives in Casa Curutchet, a modernist house in Buenos Aires. The landmark building is the only house Le Corbusier built in the Americas. But his picture perfect life in the house, with his wife and kids, comes to a screeching halt when a brash next door neighbor decides to build himself a window that looks straight into Leonardo’s home. Cohn and Duprat’s award-winning film is a biting satire about affluence and hypocrisy.

At 37 years old, time is not on his side. Sergio “Maravilla” Martinez can drop the best boxers with his lightning strikes, floor the most beautiful women with his devastating looks, and has a hard scrabble immigrant story and work ethic that make him a natural hero. But a willingness to call it the way he sees it and speak truth to power, has left him a virtual pariah in the notorious corrupt world of professional boxing. This is story of a man fighting to fight. But the clock is ticking. It may already be too late.

A man and his wife head to a snow-capped family cabin in the Patagonia where his estranged brother has been living for the past few decades. There’s an offer on the large swath of the land the brothers inherited from their father, but they both need to agree to sell. Set against a frosty landscape that mirrors the chilled relationship between the two men (played by Ricardo Darín and Leonardo Sbaraglia), their standoff will soon lead to discoveries and revelations about a past family secret that they’ve both carried with them for decades.

A phenomenon upon its release in 2015, Boca Juniors 3D: The Movie is a love letter to the fans of the famed soccer club. Weaving stories of its star players, Carlos Tevez , Martin Palermo, Juan Roman Riquelme and Diego Maradona, alongside images of the greatest goals in the history of Boca Juniors, this sports doc is a gift for soccer fans around the world.

A struggling Argentinean actor frustrated by his fledgling career decides to try his hand at landing a role in a North American Western set to shoot in his country. He dons a hat and practices the mannerisms he knows will get him the part, pushing himself perhaps a bit too far into the cowboy role he so desperately wants. Lauded around the world for its tale of quiet desperation, Vaquero is a touching character portrait of a working actor, written, directed, and starring Juan Minujín.

Directed by former pilot (and airline whistleblower) Enrique Piñeyro, this drama recreates the events that led to the Lapa Airlines crash of 1999 which killed 67 people. The crash was not, as many were first led to believe, caused by human error. Instead, it was, the film argues, the result of the airline and the Air Force’s decision to routinely circumvent security controls in order to obtain greater economic benefit in operations. Thrilling and informative in equal measure, Whisky Romeo Zulu is a bleak portrait of corruption.

Based on the autobiographical novel by Cielo Latini, Abzurdah is a probing look at the dizzying world of a teenage obsession gone horribly wrong. A loner girl (played by Eugenia Suárez) meets an older man on the internet and begins a relationship with him. With no friends and no supportive network around her, her obsession with him soon leads her to suffer from depression and anorexia. A powerful personal story makes for a captivating drama with hints of a pitch black sexual thriller.

This raucous comedy follows four friends: Damián, Marcelo, Luciano and Facundo. All in their thirties, they’re starting the feel the weight of middle age. One of them’s lost the screenplay he was hoping would help him get back his ex. Another is about to get married. Their lives, it would seem, are more complicated than they ever could’ve imagined. Yet what brings them together stays the same. Nesci’s popular comedy is a celebration of male friendship and music; an ode to being there for your mate no matter how crazy it all gets.

An aging boxer (played by Leonardo Sbaraglia) isn’t ready to give up his life in the ropes just yet, not even at the request of his wife who’d like him to focus more on his family. It’s then he meets a Mexican boxer (Eva De Dominici) at his gym. Unafraid of the consequences, he kickstarts an affair with the beautiful young woman which alienates him from those around him and pits him against everything he’d built for himself. A tale of passion, aging, and sportsmanship, Sangre en la boca is not your regular boxing flick.