The best Daniel Hendler’s drama movies

When his long-lost brother resurfaces, Jacobo, desperate to prove his life has added up to something, looks to scrounge up a wife. He turns to Marta, an employee at his sock factory, with whom he has a prickly relationship.

Cetarti is drowning in nothingness. With no job or purpose, he spends his days inside watching documentaries on television, until one day he is informed that his mother and brother were gunned down. He travels from Buenos Aires to Lapachito, a decrepit town in the province of Chaco in northern Argentina to deal with their bodies and to get the life insurance money. There he meets Duarte, a sort of boss in the town and a friend of his mother's murderer who also kidnaps people for money. Cetarti's path will lead him to committing illegal acts to get his hands on the insurance money and to his involvement in Duarte's dark dealings, leading to an absurd and unexpected outcome.

Tracking the tandem voyages of a mother and daughter into fraught emotional terrain, the latest from Argentine director Paula Hernández (Rain) examines the ways desire and expectation clash when familial pressures push women to their limits.

X arrives in a small town and witnesses a violent act; Z takes the job of a dead manager and discovers that he had a notebook written in code and a map; H is hired to go down a river and investigate a series of mysterious monoliths built on the shore.

In Buenos Aires, the twenty-something Jewish-Argentinean Ariel Makaroff ditches the University of Architecture and spends his time wandering through the downtown gallery where his mother has a lingerie shop and his brother runs an importation business. Ariel has never understood why his father left him when he was a baby, but when his dad returns to Argentina, that will soon change.

24 hours in the life of three street youths in Montevideo. Three teenage guys try to figure out what they're supposed to be doing with their lives in this drama from Uruguay that puts the emphasis on character over narrative.

Luciano works in birthday parties and writes his first feature when friend Manuel returns from Spain to repeat his TV show, "The Paranoids", together with his girl Sofia. Manuel is everything he is not and his trying to be helpful in his career and with women, only worsens the conflict. When Manuel leaves Sofia with Luciano for two days, she is seduced by the qualities Manuel rejects in his friend as weaknesses. Sofia changes. Luciano also, but only at the last moment he can overcome the fears he has been cultivating his whole life.

In 1999, Argentina's peso craters. Ariel, a young man from Buenos Aires' Jewish community, deals with his mother's fatal illness, finds a job as a night shift surveillance camera monitor, and wonders when he'll discover sex. Santamaria, middle aged, loses his bank job and is dismissed by his wife; he finds stolen wallets in dumpsters to return to their owners. Ariel tells Santamaria's story to a TV reporter who profiles lives on the street. She's Laura, in a relationship with another woman, but perhaps available. Ariel desires Laura, while Santamaria courts Elsa, a washroom attendant who's husband is in prison. Christmas and Hanukkah approach; can anyone connect?

This is the story of Pablo, a young uruguayan exiled in México, whose father was disappeared during the military dictatorship.

Humberto Brause takes advantage of Uruguay’s poor economy by specializing in offshore money laundering. Spanning the fifties to the seventies, the film follows Humberto as he gets increasingly in over his head with multiple shady book-cooking schemes throughout South America, leading to an ultimate life-or-death decision.

An architecture student is obsessed by his girlfriend. When she is invited to go alone to a party sponsored by her company, he becomes paranoid. He arrives at their place unexpectedly and finds a man hidden under their bed. He follows the man trying to find his name and occupation, along a night full of incidents and misunderstandings.

The Menezes, a powerful family of animal breeders from the Mid-West, have always been at the helm of all illegal dealings in the region. In recent times, they've watched as the system that protected them for so many years slowly disintegrates. Mirão Menezes lives at the mercy of the drug-trafficking industry, the ever-encroaching authorities, and the constant and violent power struggle with his brother Abílio. Mirão's daughter Elaine becomes involved with her father's pilot, finds herself pregnant and decides to flee with him after her Uncle Abílio bribes them. Brito, the hitman sent to find the couple and finish them off, is ironically also victim of a love story.

Martín Garabal is the best employee of Garabal and sons, his father's real state agency. Leonardo envies him deeply, Tomás admires him and Eva loves him. But something is wrong, the world seems to be telling Martín that he should take a different path. Martín doesn't listen because he's worried about his dad but, where is he?

São Paulo, 1984. Agostinho, an old and tired Physics professor, is married to Januária, a retired school principal. In his classes, he begins to feel attracted to one of his students, Márcia, an HIV positive teenager. Quickly, the attraction of the two turns into an impossible love.

Lasting tradition clashes with new ideas in director Ariel Winograd's tale of a mischievous pre-adolescent whose family spends their summers basking in the comfortable surroundings of a picturesque Jewish country club. Ariel is a young boy whose family enjoys the high life. When summer rolls around his mother leads an Israeli dance class at the local Jewish country club, and his grandmother seems to have a special knack for always winning at rummy. His sister Natalia is rarely seen without roller skates lest she need to beat a hasty retreat from her overbearing suitor, and his brother David's hormones are raging like a white squall. As Ariel and his friends hop on their bikes and explore the grounds of the country club it feels as if life simply couldn't get any better, but sometimes life in this highly exclusive paradise isn't all it's cracked up to be.

A man in his thirties does not want to be like his father, but that seems to be unavoidable.