The Secret Agent, dir. by Kleber Mendonça Filho

"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.