'The Secret Agent': Exploring a Vibrant, yet Violent Brazil (2025) (theasc.com)
56 points by tambourine_man 4 hours ago
pearlsontheroad an hour ago
Having grown up in Brazil in the 70s, I thought the cinematography of "The Secret Agent" absolutely nailed the aesthetics of that era.
forinti 32 minutes ago
Kleber Mendonça Filho's other films are great at analysing modern Brazil.
padjo 19 minutes ago
Bacurau was quite a trip. I left that one pleasingly befuddled.
bugglebeetle 22 minutes ago
Bacurau is one of the best movies I’ve seen in recent memory and Pictures of Ghosts tells an amazing story about the history of Recife’s relationship to cinema.
anderber 2 hours ago
The Secret Agent was not an easy movie for the average movie watcher. It had an unorthodox ending, graphic violence, and it's in a different language. With that said, it's too bad it wasn't able to come out with any Oscars. I can see why OBAA won quite a few awards.
dinkblam 2 hours ago
> I can see why OBAA won quite a few awards
how can you see it? one of the worst AAA films in a decade, on every level including narrative and visual
eszed 38 minutes ago
OBAA wouldn't have been my choice for best picture, either, but it had some beautiful pieces of film-making. The long shot while running through the Sensei's safe house was great, and the car chase at the end was a) gorgeous, and b) visually not quite like anything I'd ever seen before. I can see what Academy voters liked about it, in addition to the "this director has been nominated so many times without winning, so maybe he finally deserves one" angle, which I think maybe had as much to do with it as anything.
anderber 37 minutes ago
Academy members aren't always good at picking "good" movies. I'd argue they're actually pretty bad at it. Every once in a while they guess correctly. At least my 2 cents.
FuriouslyAdrift 33 minutes ago
It's very pretty, but the book is much better
holmesworcester 18 minutes ago
holmesworcester 19 minutes ago
The visuals weren't terrible, I thought, but the writing, dialog, acting (except for Moura), and narrative arc were terrible.
It's one of those movies where almost everyone looks like they just really love being on stage ("isn't cinema lovely?") and where the writers have an idea of what cliches they're trying to work with but can't land them into an actual story, even a story made out of cliches.
padjo 33 minutes ago
What on earth is a AAA film?
FuriouslyAdrift 30 minutes ago
calmkeepai 16 minutes ago
The immersion into the time and place was fantastic, the surreal elements being bold , outlandish, and unexpected were great. The time jump at the end was interesting. a great piece of work that some felt divided over as a general audience but overall memorable and ambitious
haunter 33 minutes ago
Decent film but to me 'I'm Still Here' (Ainda Estou Aqui) was still a too fresh experience from last year to have a similar film again from Brazil set in the 70s covering the military dictatorship. I also think that I'm Still Here is a much better film.
forinti 25 minutes ago
I definitely like that film, especially the acting and the music, but I think that, as with most material that covers that era (arts, history, journalism), it focuses on the middle and the upper classes.
The poor get a footnote: what happened to Zezé? But the poor were the biggest losers of the dictatorship. It was at the precise moment that the country needed to modernise that the coup made everything stop and the favelas grew along with violence in the periphery. Maybe City of God is a better depiction of what the dictatorship meant.
beepbooptheory an hour ago
One thing I noticed is that both this and another incredible film this year, Sirāt, were, at least in part, funded by a grants and state institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir%C4%81t
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Agent_(2025_film)
If you haven't seen either, highly recommended. Don't watch Sirat if you're wanting a "good time," but I honestly can't think of the last time a film made me feel the way it did, especially the final minutes of it.
The Secret Agent is maybe as good though. Makes you want to say "they don't make them like this anymore.." It feels like a good long novel; every character, however minor, is rich, full of life, in some way beautiful. It's something about how the past has these pockets of clarity, bookended by loose ends and uncertainty. The mix of myth and anecdote. Pieces of life we can remember, those we can't... Five bags of popcorn.
FuriouslyAdrift 35 minutes ago
Another movie that kind of slid under the radar but is very watchable (and mainstream) is Nuremberg. It's just entertaining without trying to be too much. It's not "great" but it's not bad, either.