Metacritic reviews

The kind of movie that seduces you into becoming putty in its manipulative card-sharking hands and making you enjoy being taken in by its shameless contrivance.

Bielinsky's movie builds like a poker game in which the players, having invested everything, cannot afford to fold.

Has more twists than the Pacific Coast Highway and more layers than a stack of silver-dollar pancakes. If you can wrap your mind around one unlikely condition, the picture provides unalloyed pleasure for connoisseurs of cinematic con artists.

It may not keep you guessing to the end, but there are enough surprises and wry revelations, right down to the last play, to make this a most satisfying cinematic confidence game.

An accomplished and enjoyable Spanish-language debut feature by Fabían Bielinsky.

Leaves you feeling tense and terrific. It's fun to be fooled.

If Nine Queens were a great film, instead of just a very good one, this rottenness would be so pervasive that it would burst the bounds of the plot; it would make us shudder.

Often more ingenious in appearance than fact. The hunter-gets-captured-by-the-game scenario is predictable and the sequence of shell games does not, when reconsidered, actually add up.

The movie may be Nine Queens, but it slakes your thirst for surprises and thrills because of its Nine Jokers.

Has a customarily jovial air but a deficit of flim-flam inventiveness.