The Secret Agent (2025)

Mendonça Filho’s most refined, outright-auteurist work yet, an intimate epic that always delivers the unexpected with head-spinning craft. Moura anchors this tale of history as an afterlife with a terrific encapsulation of hopelessness that masks itself as resilience.

The critic calls it an astonishing cinematic experience that lures the past into the present, praising the rich period details, vivid supporting characters, surreal detours, and how it roots its story of authoritarianism in deeply human dilemmas and resilience.

The review highlights the film's interweaving of politics, espionage, and cinema love, praising its detailed recreation of 1970s Recife and emotional depth through personal and historical lenses.

The critic lauds the film as a political thriller teeming with life, overflowing with sharply drawn characters and offering a bracingly immediate portrayal of history under dictatorship, with inventive cinematic form.

It’s a kaleidoscopic riot that quickly becomes a gear-shifting masterpiece. Wagner Moura plays the central character with vulnerability that makes you yearn for him to best Timothée Chalamet.

The critic hails it as a hypnotic thriller and piece of cinematic gold, praising Wagner Moura's shimmering lead performance, the scorched equatorial atmosphere, intoxicating music, surreal symbolism, and the deep-fried Brazilian rhythm of its story set during the military dictatorship.

The critic lauds the film's complex portrait of resistance under dictatorship, noting its evocative period detail, strong lead performance, and thematic links to cinema and memory.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s tale of loss and injustice in 1977 Brazil comes styled with brilliant pulp trappings. The strange, teasing note sets the tone for a rich and singular movie.

The review commends the propulsive thriller's vivid recreation of 1970s Brazil, its mix of genre tension with surreal elements, and its thoughtful engagement with cinema, politics, and personal history.

This sparklingly seductive Oscar contender from Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho rivals a Hitchcock thriller. The slipperiness of names and agendas is one of the central themes.

A twisty, tense, languorous 1970s-set Brazilian drama that captures the absurdity and suffocation of life under a corrupt dictatorship. It is vicious and vivid in its sense of place and danger but also has a streak of weirdness and a very human take on the political-crime thriller genre.

The critic calls it a terrific ’70s thriller and dazzling period drama that immerses viewers in 1977 Recife under dictatorship, praising its robust sense-memory, genre-skewing elements, and vivid time-capsule details.

A sweat-saturated riot of a movie: a dual-timeline thriller powered by anarchic, erratic energy. Tonally an unexpected blend of the bloody gusto of Bacurau and the more thoughtful approach of Pictures of Ghosts, with fascination with archives, oral histories and cinemas.

The Brazilian director’s stellar filmmaking and sharp storytelling make this portrait of life under dictatorship as politically incisive as it is entertaining. A consummate cinephile, Mendonça Filho is the rare director who conceives of cinema politically and as entertainment, rendering the film riveting for all 158 minutes.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s study of a man attempting to escape corrupt politics is a tremendous, novelistic study of corruption in high and low places. The film combines visual brilliance, sensual big-city intrigue, shaggy-dog comedy and epically languorous mystery.

The critic praises the film's blend of anarchic humor and genuine suspense in a period political thriller, highlighting Wagner Moura's stellar performance and the director's masterful exploration of Brazil's past.

The critic praises the film as a knockout that finds laughter amid the terror of Brazil's military dictatorship, highlighting its freewheeling sensibility and the standout performance by Wagner Moura.

Kleber Mendonça Filho is at the top of his game with the sprawling, anarchic, supremely entertaining 1970s-set thriller. Not a moment drags and every frame is vibrant and full-blooded.

The film is an expansive, original, and tonally daring epic blending intrigue, absurdist comedy, grotesque violence, and bureaucratic paranoia. It stands out for its refusal to conform to thriller expectations and for Wagner Moura's formidable, deeply human performance as a man navigating moral compromise and existential dread.

An imposing masterpiece that coalesces the director’s prior aesthetic and ideological concerns into an expansive triumph steeped in history and a palpable adoration for cinema. It matches the caliber of films like Roma in its use of historical context and recreation of a specific time and place, with a chameleonic lead performance by Wagner Moura.

The critic commends the film's novelistic depth in portraying Recife under military rule, weaving a thriller with multiple stories of resistance and community. It praises the dexterous balance of tones, rich details, and strong performances that create cumulative emotional force.

The critic highlights how the film finds its revolutionary power in everyday human moments and quiet personal desires amid the dictatorship's banal cruelty and surreal absurdities. It emphasizes the protagonist's simple quest for memory and safety as a form of resistance.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film places Marcelo in the tradition of ordinary men thrust into political intrigue, evoking Hitchcock while rooting the story in Recife during 1977 carnival amid Brazil’s dictatorship. It mixes absurdity and realism, mischief and horror, using cinema references and everyday details to show how authoritarianism distorts justice and reality.

The critic describes the film as a mischievous and messy romp set in 1970s Recife during Carnaval, with secret identities, brutal action, and garish period style. Its lack of coherence is part of its charm and deliberate point.

The critic finds Wagner Moura convincing as a man of mystery in this political thriller set during Brazil's dictatorship. The film is stylish and exciting on a widescreen scale despite being overlong and sometimes rambling.

The critic calls the film a remarkable, beautifully composed historical thriller with some of the year's best directing, editing, and writing, plus an enthralling lead performance. They single out Wagner Moura's subtly tremendous, restrained work as one of the year's best.