El Aura (The Aura) (2005)
Average Rating: 7.5/10
Reviews Counted: 45
Fresh: 40 | Rotten: 5
The Aura is a highly original and cerebral thriller that maintains its suspense from start to finish.
Average Rating: 7.8/10
Critic Reviews: 16
Fresh: 14 | Rotten: 2
The Aura is a highly original and cerebral thriller that maintains its suspense from start to finish.
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Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 4,909
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Movie Info
A lonely taxidermist with a photographic memory dreams of committing the "perfect crime" in Nine Queens director Fabián Bielinsky's deliberately paced existential thriller. Espinosa (Ricardo Darín) is an epileptic fortysomething who makes his living by stuffing creatures for the natural history museum in Buenos Aires. It is there that Espinosa meets friend and fellow taxidermist Sontag (Alejandro Awada). After picking up their paycheck at a nearby bank, Sontag kindly invites the lonely Espinosa
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All Critics (48) | Top Critics (18) | Fresh (41) | Rotten (6) | DVD (9)
A fuzzy attempt at significance that seems as aimlessly lost in the woods as its heist-plotting characters.
Top CriticThe Aura is richer and less showy than Nine Queens, and it lifts off from the gangster genre to contemplate deeper mysteries. Reminiscent of Antonioni's The Passenger in its obsession with fate and choice.
Bielinsky also is a most expressive director, achieving considerable nuances and depths of emotion with characters' looks, gestures, body language and silences.
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.
Argentinian writer/ director Fabian Bielinksy (Nine Queens) creates a character with an intriguing set of traits that inspire an equally intriguing plot.
The moody ambience suggests noir writers David Goodis and Jim Thompson...
Tense and twisty, this is what thrillers should be about.
I have to admit I was more than intrigued by a film featuring an epileptic taxidermist with a photographic memory who fancies that he can commit the perfect crime.
A psychological thriller about a wannabe gangster who ends up with overwhelming regret after becoming enveloped in a whirlwind of terror.
Cold, shallow existentialism. Save your money for the upcoming DVD release of Army of Shadows.
It's intriguing and absorbing, this thriller about a lonely taxidermist caught up in a shooting accident, a case of mistaken identity and a heist.
This character-heavy crime thriller from Argentina occasionally gets off track, straying into territory that has little to do with the main story line. But they are interesting digressions, and it's sort of nice to have a movie that's so unpredictable.
A startling psychological drama with plenty of unexpected twists, a worthy follow-up [to] Fabian Bielinsky['s] riveting debut Nine Queens.
A delight to look at, and full of both beautiful music and beautiful silences.
With "The Aura," his final picture, the director adopts a moody atmosphere to convey an original heist thriller set in the mysterious Patagonian forests.
It's less a deconstruction of the heist film than an ambitious contemplation of our fascination with the genre...
The movie is cause for both rejoicing and despair. The good news it's an absorbing, intelligent film. The bad is that there will be no more from the gifted [late director] Bielinsky.
It's tough to get behind a character who doesn't even seem to care about himself.
Visually, the film is almost perfect, with a weird, expressionistic sensibility considerably more sophisticated than the low-fi street shooting of Nine Queens, while the imaginative piano score trickles between pastoral harmony and primal discord.
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November 16, 2006:
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Foreign Titles
- El Aura (DE)
- Aura (El Aura) The (UK)
