The Secret Agent

“Okay, Okay, Marty Supreme, sure. But this is the real deal movie of the year.”

“I thought this was just about perfect. A Brazilian friend of mine was concerned that North Americans wouldn’t find it interesting without the historical context (and I’m sure some background reading on the military dictatorship in the 70s wouldn’t hurt) but I experienced it as an outstanding political thriller——intimate, funny and universal in its portrayal of fear, violence and love.”

“"But the movie I can’t quite shake is Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. ... I’m thinking particularly of its opening sequence. In it, our hero, Armando (Wagner Moura) drives into an Esso gas station where he notices that there’s a dead body lying in the dirt, covered awkwardly with a piece of cardboard. The attendant casually tells him that the corpse has been there for some days and that it belongs to a guy who tried to steal fuel one night and got shot by the night attendant. The night attendant has since left for Carnaval. The cops were called days ago, but they’re busy (with Carnaval, supposedly) and haven’t shown up. The gas station’s actual owners can’t be bothered. The attendant himself is quite nonchalant about it. Armando wants to leave, but he really, really needs the gas. A cop car comes by—but not to investigate the dead guy. Rather, they want to poke around Armando’s car in hopes of finding something wrong with him or it, thereby eliciting a bribe. Unable to find anything, they finally just ask him for the bribe directly. He gives them some cigarettes and drives off. The film takes place in 1977, when Brazil was in the midst of a military dictatorship, but there was no other sequence this year that better encapsulated for me what life is like in 2025: A corpse rots in the corner, and nobody’s doing anything about it because we’re all stuck in our own hustle. Also, someone’s having a party somewhere." Bilge Ebiri, writing in Slate's 2025 Movie Club, 12/26/2025.”

“favorite film from this year's pre-oscars catch-up (though yes, yet another boyfriend rec as well). such a cutting exploration of the ceaseless struggle against fascism and systemic corruption, the ease with which orchestrators of evil frequently erase any record of their wrongdoing, the natural inclination of societies to go along with this historical revisionism for their sanity and safety, and the necessity to resist cultural amnesia no matter the emotional cost - because if we don't, the truth will eventually be no more than another "political opinion." reminded me of mon mothma's climactic speech in season 2 of andor (one of my all-time favorite shows), and this line specifically: "of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. the death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. when truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest." keep screaming, and teach the next generation to do the same.”

“A cinematic tour de force - a historical political thriller set in Brazil in the turbulent 1970's featuring the incredible Oscar nominated performance of Wagner Moura.”

“come to Brazil and see the sights: ear-shaped phone booth, re-animated bloodthirsty hairy human leg, beautiful people doing espionage”