General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Nine Queens

Nine Queens (Nueve reinas) is a 2000 Argentine crime thriller written and directed by Fabián Bielinsky, in which two small-time con artists, Marcos (Ricardo Darín) and Juan (Gastón Pauls), spend a single day in Buenos Aires attempting to sell a forged sheet of ultra-rare Weimar-era stamps, the "Nine Queens", to a wealthy collector.¹^•² It was Bielinsky's first feature film, and it became one of the most successful Argentine films of its year.³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Nueve reinas; Argentina, 2000, directed and written by Fabián Bielinsky¹
Cast	Ricardo Darín (Marcos), Gastón Pauls (Juan), Leticia Brédice (Valeria)¹
Argentine premiere	31 August 2000; running time 114 minutes⁴^•⁵
Box office in Argentina	More than one million spectators and nearly four months in theaters⁶
Awards	Seven Cóndor de Plata awards (2001); best international independent film in a non-English language at the British Independent Film Awards⁴^•⁷
Remakes	Criminal (2004, United States) and Bluffmaster (2005, India)⁴
Restoration	4K restoration from the original 35mm negative, presented at Cannes Classics in 2024 and re-released for the 25th anniversary⁷

Spoilers

Plot and structure

The film opens with Marcos, a hard-bitten veteran con man, noticing the fresh-faced Juan incompetently running a petty change scam in a convenience store. Marcos rescues him from the authorities by pretending to be a police officer and offers to take him on as a partner for a day's worth of small hustles.² Juan tells Marcos he has saved money toward a bribe to keep his career-criminal father out of a long prison sentence, and Marcos carries a long story of his own dispute with siblings over a family inheritance.²

The pair then get the chance at a large score: selling an ultra-rare set of stamps from Weimar Germany, the "Nine Queens", to a crooked businessman with a passion for philately.² Marcos's sister Valeria, who works at a swank hotel where much of the business is done, brings the opportunity.⁸ The film runs on double-crossing: as deceptions mount, it becomes difficult to tell who is conning whom.⁹ Critics have compared its tone to David Mamet's con films such as House of Games, with a little of George Roy Hill's The Sting, and to Hitchcock-style genre craft.²^•¹⁰

Production

The script originated in mid-1998, when Bielinsky entered it in a competition run by the production company Patagonik Film Group. The company had rejected the same script shortly before, but the jury, presided over by the filmmaker and teacher José Martínez Suárez, judged it the best of the several hundred screenplays submitted and gave Bielinsky the go-ahead to direct it.³ Bielinsky was 41 at his debut, after two decades alternating between advertising work and work as an assistant director.³ The crew included cinematographer Marcelo Camorino, editor Sergio Zóttola, and composer César Lerner.⁵

Reception and context

The film was a local phenomenon. In its fourth week it had drawn more than 510,000 spectators in Argentina, and it went on to sell over a million tickets and stay in theaters for nearly four months.³^•⁶ In the United States it opened in limited release on 19 April 2002 in Los Angeles and New York, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.¹¹ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 92% critics score from 96 reviews.⁹

A prophetic ending. A bank failure precedes the film's final scene, which reveals that Juan and Valeria were part of a scheme that swindled Marcos.¹² A year after release, similar scenes filled Argentine news broadcasts during the 2001 economic collapse, when financial institutions closed and middle-class bank deposits were frozen in the episode known as the "corralito"; the crisis culminated in popular unrest and the resignation of President Fernando De La Rúa in December 2001.⁶^•¹² Commentators have read the film as a portrait of Argentina in the late 1990s, marked by the looting of public institutions, the discrediting of the business and political classes, and a deregulated banking system that crashed soon after the film came out.¹²^•²

The film also made Ricardo Darín an international name and is counted among the works that spurred the revival of Argentine cinema.²^•⁶ Bielinsky directed only one more feature, El aura (2006), before dying of a heart attack in São Paulo at the age of 47.⁴

Remakes and adaptations

Hollywood remade the film as Criminal (2004), the directing debut of Gregory Jacobs, Steven Soderbergh's longtime assistant director, produced by Soderbergh and George Clooney's company and co-written by Jacobs under the Soderbergh pen name Sam Lowry. It stars John C. Reilly as Richard, Diego Luna as Rodrigo, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Richard's sister, and it moves the story from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles, replacing the stamps with rare currency notes.¹³^•¹⁴ Reviewers generally found it inferior to the original: the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that it strips the menace and texture of Nine Queens without offering big stars in compensation, while the Guardian called it a competent translation that never becomes its own film.¹⁵^•¹³ An Indian remake, Bluffmaster, followed in 2005.⁴

A Spanish television adaptation is also in production. Netflix's series Nueve reinas, created by Xosé Morais and Víctor Sierra and produced by LAZONA, stars Álvaro Morte and Patrick Criado as con artists in Madrid in 2012 who escalate from small scams to selling counterfeit "nine queens" stamps to a ruthless tycoon played by Jose Coronado.¹⁶^•¹⁷

Restoration and re-release

For the film's 25th anniversary, Patagonik produced a 4K restoration from a frame-by-frame scan of the original 35mm camera negative, held by the production company and the Buenos Aires Museum of Cinema. Under the supervision of cinematographer Marcelo Camorino, the image was cleaned and color-corrected to recover its original look, and the Dolby Digital soundtrack was restored in the Netherlands.⁵ The restored version screened in the Cannes Classics section of the Festival de Cannes in 2024, returned to Argentine theaters on 22 February 2024, and was re-released in Spain on 29 August 2025, the anniversary date of the original premiere.⁷^•¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 2000–2004 films › Released 2000 to 2002

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?