Let's Anticipate Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Cannes-crowned THE SECRET AGENT.

https://i.imgur.com/ol9EUYM.jpeg

Effective world-building -- reminded me of one of Jia Zhangke's later efforts. Some of the conversations dawdle, and I prefer Filho's Bacurau and Aquarius, but overall it complements I'm Still Here. Wagner Moura is muito bonito as the lead.

based on the Joseph Conrad book?

Not that I can tell.

Looking forward to this! Very good director, but I still think 'Neighboring Sounds' is his best. Anyone see the documentary on old cinemas in Recife he did a few years ago?

yes! I love Pictures of Ghosts. I'm too biased for any of his films, lol – it's my hometown, I get giddy whenever I see his films, he used to program one of the local art houses, used to write on one of the local newspapers, used to see around when going out... Lived very close to where I grew up most of the time there, the places near the main house in Neighboring Sounds (which was his house, as explained in Pictures of Ghosts). seeing tomorrow in NYC with him and Moura talking afterwards.

saw this at the chicago international film festival last month. went in with few expectations (didn't even realize it was the same director as bacarau, which i have seen) and enjoyed it a lot. more meandering than i thought it would be and there's one unexpected moment of wild surrealism out of nowhere, but very watchable.

Felt a bit more conventional and crowd pleasery than I'm used to from him - the framing story set in the present I think could've been done without - but overall I thought it was great, just highly entertaining, atmospheric and his politics of course are my own. The wild surrealism of the foot is what really made me sure he hasn't lost it, just a great demarcation of "I'm not ever going to make middlebrow movies".

I followed Mendonça Filho on instagram recently and the film's press campaign seems a delight too, between him reposting letterboxd reviews that mention not having finished the film yet with "TURN OFF YOUR PHONE YOU MANIAC" and the old lady who plays the landlady saying stuff like "I don't even know who Oscar is".

Very much worth seeing Pictures Of Ghosts before you catch this one though as the films are totally in dialogue - the cinema plays a major part, and it is clearly recreated with a lot of love. Jaws and the Exorcist are plot points, though I inwardly cheered the loudest when you got to see that at one point it's playing the Jean Paul Belmondo vehicle Le Magnifique.

I wish the film had had more surrealism -- wish I'd seen it in a theater with an audience. na OTM with his description.

this was a lot of fun, particular the last act. loved tania maria, whom I’ve never seen before. moura was excellent. could have done without the flash forwards at all though, they seemed to continually take the air out of the film

I have to watch it again and I will this week.

God, this moview.

Easily the best new movie I've seen in the last couple of months

Trailer looked great. Can't wait

I loved this

What everyone else said (forgot to post on this thread back in December when I saw it). Tania Maria forever, that was a classic 'first couple of seconds, hasn't said anything yet, and will clearly be all time' performance.

I love her

Seeing it tomorrow. Really excited.

loved this movie. Bacurau is fantastic and wilder, definitely worth checking out

https://vimeo.com/klebermendoncafilho

you can see some of his old shorts (plus snippets of interviews and screenings he used to go/do as a critic himself, and also small essay/videos for a festival he created/programmed)

(some of those show up on Pictures of Ghosts, his doc just before Secret agent)

Loved this too, it was one of my favorites from last year. Saw Filho and Moura speak about it at MoMA (which Moura nearly missed from oversleeping, hah!) and Moura was easily one of the most articulate actors I've ever seen, speaking more than Filho about their country's history and politics and connecting them to what's happening here.

Great film, probably his best. I was impressed by it all the way through, but also thought it seemed a bit distant and cold at the beginning, but wow, it really pulled itself together. I get why it's nominated for all the Oscars, but it's so much more modern and exciting than 'I'm Still Here'. The thing about the hairy leg and all the other stories that were just alluded to were amazing. Fun and carnivalesque, but also extremely chilling.

https://vimeo.com/403165749
^ this one is very nice, regarding the 2014 world cup.
lots of taxis, muted colors (courtesy of our mid-year rain), urban design, frevos and best people on camera <3

I watched his documentary Pictures of Ghosts on MUBI earlier. It makes a nice little companion piece with The Secret Agent.

Finally watched this last night, thought it was terrific. Not sure where I rank it among his movies, because I like all of them. First, the look and feel of it, the evocation of the era, I did not live in Brazil in the 1970s (or ever), but it very much made me feel like I did. He's about my age, so he's recreating the era of his childhood, and it was invested with that kind of personal detail. I really liked how the story unfolded, the way it sets up expectations in one direction (via the title and early action) but ends up being something both deeper and broader — about this particular character, and also about the country. Of his films I think it connects most to Neighbouring Sounds (the buried layers of conflict and history) and Pictures of Ghosts (the loving cinephilia).

Good essay here: https://www.rogerebert.com/women-writers-week/who-will-remember-you-the-secret-agent-and-the-humanities-as-resistance

One of the things I liked about this is that the bad guys are not super romanticized. I kind of got this fatalistic attitude based on Scorcese movies and the like "ah well, people are always going to idolize the gangsters, what can you do" but this movie made me think it's possible to avoid that.

well, the story is told from the perspective of good/ordinary people

I don't like to make these predictions but speaking for myself this film will make my personal canon. Can't wait to watch it a third time.

One of the things I liked about this is that the bad guys are not super romanticized. I kind of got this fatalistic attitude based on Scorcese movies and the like "ah well, people are always going to idolize the gangsters, what can you do" but this movie made me think it's possible to avoid that.

The movie positions the gangsters as part of a wider ecosystem of governmental oppression. If Scorsese's gangsters were working with the authorities we'd look at them different too (in fact the gangsters in Secret Agent are closer to the baddies in Killers Of The Flower Moon.

really loved this movie. kind of a strange thing to say about a movie about oppressive life under a military dictatorship, but i just enjoyed spending time in this world, and learning about all these characters.

I thought this movie was pretty great, too, it was so complex and layered and real-seeming

BTW this is truly amazing.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVqpLsxEdNj

Dona Sebastiana is a great character

I would be happy if this film won the first Best Casting award, it is filled with so many amazing people

It has a lot of competition though, with Marty Supreme, One Battle, Sinners and Hamnet. All of those are also worthy

i would die for dona sebastiana

She's already an amazing character even before she gives her backstory in that great scene.

She's literally great from the first frame she's in! I basically went "Okay, all in," just by how she looks and carries herself.

Thought "oh no too long" a few times but by the end I loved the pacing at which this was all told in.

A nice sorta counterpart to 'One Battle After Another'

Also made me miss Brazil, which is not something I get when I watch Brazilian films here.

The Secret Agent is kinda more Pynchonian than OBAA. A group of preterite pursued by a shadow elite for unknown reasons.

Dunno if this is a cultural context thing but the reasons didn't seem very unknown to me.

Reasons seemed to be fairly obvious, but all of these groups had a larger shadow cast on them than OBAA, just by not saying as much. The narrative depended on the viewer picking up and running away with hints.

The back story is there, but the real reason is, well, just because, which is also the reason in Vineland and pointedly not in OBAA.

the reasons in secret agent weren’t unknown, just capricious and driven by personal vendetta (also true in one battle, but bob was a fugitive and revolutionary, while armando was just a left-wing guy)

The reason in OBAA isn't personal vendetta, it's cleaning up so that Lockjaw can become a christmas adventurer. In Vineland, it's more or less just vendetta, yeah. In both cases, the question then becomes 'why now?'. In both cases, the answer is 'why not', because the elite can get away with basically anything. Armando seems shocked to realize who is after him, he has no idea things were that bad.

It might seem like a small thing, I'm just reading a bit about how a lot of the violence under these dictatorships basically happened because people realized they could get away with it, and really for no other reason. The actor Alfredo Castro said that the time had 'an air of malignancy', which is a phrase I really like. And The Secret Agent shows it really well.

The disembodied leg terrorising the parks of Recife is pure Pynchon.

Mentioned this in my review for Uncut, which they haven't put online so I will put here

THE SECRET AGENT
Directed by: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Starring: Wagner Moura, Maria Fernanda Cândido, Udo Kier
Certificate: 15
Released: 20 February 2026
Rating: 9/10
Last year Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here began as a rapturous love letter to the lost Rio of his youth. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent feels like that film’s lurid and unruly twin. Both films look back at Brazil’s “years of lead” military dictatorship through the wide eyes of the boys their directors once were. But where Salles’ film unfurled into a sombre survey of the long, dogged fight for justice, Mendonça Filho offers a more phantasmagorical ride through the past, via its B-movies, its pop songs, and its urban myths.
Set in Recife in the north east of Brazil in 1977, the film follows Marcelo (Wagner Moura, superbly hangdog in a variety of period hairstyles), a fugitive university researcher finding some kind of asylum in a city boarding house. He’s desperately trying to reconnect with his young son, and find one last record of his lost mother. But the city is intoxicated with carnival and cinema, infested with corrupt cops, gangsters and hitmen, half crazed by paranoia, political intrigue and fever dreams.
Fantasy spills very vividly into everyday life. The whole country’s obsession with Jaws (released in Brazil as Tubarão) becomes manifest when a shark is caught off the coast complete with a severed human leg in its belly. The leg becomes the film's most striking detail and takes on a life of its own as the “Perna Cabeluda” (“the hairy leg”), a hopping monster that stalks the city’s parks at night. While it sounds like a surreal flourish, it’s based on a genuine urban legend turned samizdat code: the Hairy Leg became a way for Recife journalists to report on police violence without alerting the censors.
Mendonça Filho films these sequences with grindhouse flair, but the whole film is a cineaste’s delight, centred around Recife’s grand Cinema São Luiz, where Marcelo’s father in law works as a projectionist, showing not just Jaws, but also The Omen, King Kong, Close Encounters and Belmondo in Le Magnifique (which obliquely provides the film’s title). The film is heady with allusion, but this isn’t the nerdy indulgence of a Tarantino, but rather a rich suggestion of the way that everyone, from the corrupt police chief to the would-be assassins, have their head filled with b-movie archetypes.
One Battle After Another is rightfully sweeping the board of the awards ceremonies, but in its own determined way, The Secret Agent might be the most authentically Pynchonian film of the year, reporting back from the nocturnal side of reality with nightmarish aplomb, devastating loss, and murderously black humour.

Nice review.

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(also true in one battle, but bob was a fugitive and revolutionary, while armando was just a left-wing guy)

― harper valley paul thomas anderson (voodoo chili), Thursday, 12 March 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Sorta. He had a patent on what sounds like green tech, and there was a possibility he could carry on his work if he got out of Brazil.

that's a good point. as a scientist and a marxist, he was always a possible target for a right-wing regime, even without the personal aspect

Yup, if you're on the left in a fascist dictatorship you live knowing you are always in danger.

really good posts Maggy Scraggle!

Belmondo in Le Magnifique (which obliquely provides the film’s title)

The reference is spot on for the time and place, but did you not notice the TV screen with the title "Secret Agent" (the U.S. title for the U.K. series "Danger Man")?

Finally saw this and catching up on the thread, without wanting to make too much of the comparison to OBAA it actually does have more of the structure of Vineland with the generational flashbacks via AV tech

Loved it. Only other thing to add is that the end credit reel hammered home what an incredible array of character actor faces this was, to the point where you forgot udo fucking kier was in it

this absolutely deserved Best Casting

really enjoyed this although the flashes to the present day sorta slowed the film’s momentum for me a bit