Offhand, I think I've seen only one other Argentine movie in my lifetime, and it was about 20 years ago. I don't recall what first got me interested in this one, but I felt in the mood for a modern crime caper story.
Veteran con artist Marcos meets young con artist Juan and offers to take him under his wing to replace an accomplice. The next big job: selling a counterfeit of nine famously misprinted stamps with a queen's face on them. The collector in question, Gandolfo, is rich but about to be deported, so he doesn't have much time to authenticate them, nor could he do much if he found out later. It gets more complicated than Marcos anticipated, not least because Gandolfo is staying at a hotel where Marcos's sister works, and the siblings do not get along well.
One nice thing about this subgenre is that it stays low on violence. Swindlers may victimize guilty and innocent alike (tho Marcos claims that most people would do as he does if they were brave enough), but they are disinclined to threaten anyone, much less attack, unless confronted by angry enemies.
This leads to little visual action, but in my opinion, NQ makes up for that in well-chosen dialog and character intensity. I can see why other viewers have thought of David Mamet. And why it has been remade -- once in the Hollywood and thrice in Bollywood. (I don't plan to see any of them.)
Of course, a tradeoff of the subgenre is that the central criminals, while obnoxious to the world, don't seem as villainous and thus can make you feel conflicted about whether to root for them. Maybe you want them to succeed only up until a certain point, for the sake of entertaining drama (or comedy). I hope you don't want to know the gist of the ending in advance, because I consider it bad form to tell a general audience, but I'll say this much: I didn't see it coming. It reshaped my opinion of the filmmakers, mostly in a positive way.
Would I recommend NQ? Well, maybe not to casual moviegoers. See it if you like a lot of movies, as I do.
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