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I've had the privilege to watch it at São Luis movie theater in Recife. The place is really a character of the movie. The theater was at full capacity. 10% of the public was with a yellow t-shirt that Wagner Moura uses for 10s :-) I forgot how good it was to see movies in a theater. Everybody laughed or clapped together. I've never more seen a movie with so much popular appeal. People seeing their lives and history in the big screen. If it had won an Oscar, maybe São Luiz would exhibit it frequently. Like the Casablanca theater in Morocco that just exhibits Casablanca movie.

Pure cinema.

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Secret Agent has a slow, difficult beginning (~hour). Not much happens. And it's not clear why what's happening is happening, particularly for someone unfamiliar with Brazil's political climate in the 1970s.

As someone who's never been to Brazil, certainly not in the 1970s, watching Secret Agent still felt like being transported there. How did they make a movie that makes you feel like you're in a familiar place you've never been to?

And then after about an hour, it picks up a bit more, and by the end, it felt like they directly transmitted to the audience the horror of the Brazilian junta in all kinds of subtle and dramatic ways. We don't see the resolution of the main character's story because that moment is lost. Memories of his life are fractured (through disjointed audio recordings) or repressed (by those closest to him).

Hard to put it into words. I started out disliking it and ended up loving it.

Felt the same as you. It felt like you didn't quite understand what was happening or what was going to happen in the beginning. Only for you to miss the characters by the end.

Good to know it pays off. I turned it off after 45+ minutes because I was falling asleep.

The world was impressive and immersive, but felt more like being on a tour than living a narrative.

Well said. I felt similar

> Secret Agent has a slow, difficult beginning (~hour). Not much happens. And it's not clear why what's happening is happening, particularly for someone unfamiliar with Brazil's political climate in the 1970s.

That's very much the director's philosophy. He values the dead time between things. I saw him talk years ago. He's a bit of an intelectual. Very competent too. I haven't watched Secret Agent yet though.

Beto Brant is another Brazilian director. He is phenomenal. Also artsy but his films usually work on a more traditional level as well. They're more satisfying. I highly recommend him -- particularly "O Invasor", "Ação Entre Amigos" and "Crime Delicado".

I found it unsatisfying. Such a strong opening let down by a meandering movie with no payoff. Made all the sadder by great moments and performances spread thinly through the 2-something hours. I remember coming out of the movie theatre thinking there was a really enjoyable film buried underneath the crud if they could have had more restraint in the editing room. To each their own I suppose.

I did too. It felt like there were a bunch of subplots that never ended up tying together. The leg was the most disappointing to me.

My take home at the end was that it was supposed to show the audience that the story was recreated from the parts of the story that could be pieced together by the future journalists. Basically it felt meandering because it was meandering to the journalists trying to figure out what happened. The ending with the son was the journalist trying to tie everything together for herself but he just didn’t have the information. Still dissatisfying.

The leg is used both as a urban legend that was told at the region at the time, but also as a metaphor. The surrealist scene where it shows the leg brutally attacking people at night: all the people attacked are prostitutes, gays, etc. People that during the dictatorship the police used to just dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.

And it is meant to feel meandering cause that is how this period feels for people trying to study it. There are many cases that we don't know what happened. We just know that the people were killed/disappeared. The perpetrators were never brought to Justice. We are not even sure who the specific perpetrators are in a lot of cases.

This is how the Brazilian military dictatorship operated. There are people in Brazil who want to go back to this period. They say that everything was better. The truth is that a lot of stuff that was bad, was so bad that we don't even have the records to properly reconstruct what happened.

>The leg is used both as a urban legend that was told at the region at the time, but also as a metaphor. The surrealist scene where it shows the leg brutally attacking people at night: all the people attacked are prostitutes, gays, etc. People that during the dictatorship the police used to just dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.

Yeah, so I had to lookup the leg after watching the movie. My interpretation was that it wasn't actually really surrealism. They juxtapose that scene with the lady reading from the newspaper about the attacking leg as if it was real. The reason I think this supports the "from the future journalist's perspective" interpretation is that those were legitimate articles ran, while there were serious cases not being reported on things like people going missing by the dictatorship. I think they included it to show the absurdity of what information was available and what information wasn't in the papers from that time. Also because of the lore of it all.

That's perfectly nice idea but still doesn't make for a good movie. Making a good movie comes before a nice idea, if a movie is what you're making.

> People that during the dictatorship the police used to just dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.

Reminds me of something.

Part of what it was trying to speak on was how truth and stories were lost during the dictatorship. What you felt was what a lot of Brazilians felt. Like part of them (or movie) was missing and they'll never be whole.

I found it the 2nd best movie of the year, right behind House of Dynamite.

Brazil has so much to catch up compared to Argentina, which jailed most of the generals. This one tries it differently, not directing the blame directly, but one bystander who took advantage. Much better than I'm Still Here. But the Argentinian fascism era movie are much better still. El bunaerense, Crónica de una fuga,...

Yes, I was a big fan of Bacurau and it works well as a fable but this one is very grounded historically and even with a basic knowledge of Brazilian history of this era I spent too much time wondering what was happening and why (even though I did understand everything, it's not cryptic either, just the rythm feels a bit off)

Excellent aesthetics though but I am less sensitive to that

Having no payoff is the payoff. After everything that's happened to him, he is killed offscreen and his son, now an adult, doesn't even quite remember him.

The journey is the point, basically :) The scenes with the fellow "refugees" are great, insightful glimpses into Brasil, into that 1970s Brasil in particular. They don't need to lead anywhere in particular for me to enjoy it.

That being said, I did like Bacurau and Aquarius more than The Secret Agent. But that speaks more to how incredible those films are.

Fair enough if you enjoyed it. I'm no stranger to the period or the director's movies and still found this one overly contrived. The tense bits are so engaging that the fantastic/anachronistic felt like it detracted from a great story.

yeah suddenly perna cabeluda was cool but it did feel a bit random :p

I interpreted it as people making up stories so that they didn't have to face the truth.

Or maybe the newspapers used it to write about things that couldn't be written.

And the people attacked in the weird scene are people that tended to just be dissappeared by police. Gay men. Prostitutes.

> I interpreted it as people making up stories so that they didn't have to face the truth.

That's a very plausible interpretation. I grew up hearing about this myth :p

Having grown up in Brazil in the 70s, I thought the cinematography of "The Secret Agent" absolutely nailed the aesthetics of that era.

Kleber Mendonça Filho's other films are great at analysing modern Brazil.

Neighboring Sounds is my favourite. It's the only movie I've ever watched that captures the psychology of living in a violent city: the mental load of constantly being in fear that something might happen to you, likely not today, but probably someday.

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.

Bacurau was quite a trip. I left that one pleasingly befuddled.

I liked Bacurau. The villains were a little stupid though. At some point after the brazilians mounted an armed resistance the americans basically gave up and started killing each other instead for no reason.

Still an extremely subversive film for modern Brazil which is dominated by a brand of leftism that wants to disarm the population. Without weapons, the americans would have genocided Bacurau and literally wiped it off the map.

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Was this written by a person or an AI agent?

It's a very badly made AI agent that simultaneously posted 3 comments.

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.

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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.

It's very pretty, but the book is much better

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vineland

I had no idea about this! Thank you, I quite enjoy Pynchon’s novels.

Bravo, palmas! etc.

Quality is not really near the top of Oscar eligibility criteria now, is it?

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Well I think there are some people that disagree.

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.

What on earth is a AAA film?

There's no such thing (parent likely borrowed this term from the video game industry)

The whole single A, triple A thing comes from league baseball. Single A was the lower leagues and AAA is the top of the heap pro ball. AAA denotes big budget tent pole productions. So big a studio could go bankrupt if it doesn't do well.

Ah so the OP thinks OBAA was designed as a big budget popcorn flick? No wonder they didn't like it.

Paul Thomas Anderson will tell anyone who will listen that he doesn't make commercially sound films. It's kind of his thing...

They did throw some serious money at this film, though, so I can see where people would have strange expectations.

it's actually from credit ratings which predate baseball leagues

when they said AAA i assumed it was satire

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.

OBAA was technically well executed but, to me, pretty fucking soulless.

I haven't seen all the nominees, but the ones I did see -- Train Dreams and Sinners -- were, to our eyes, profoundly better films than OBAA. I'm in particular interested in seeing Hamnet soon; everything I read about it puts it in the same category as TD and S.

OBAA was the safe Academy pick, and so that's what they picked.

i thought Sinners was so overhyped. mediocre performances (great music!) and a terrible plot (why were the vampires forced to ask for permission to enter, and then able to storm the building a few scenes later? was there no better way to resolve that then just forget about it)

loved OBAA (incredible pacing!) but had its flaws too

> why were the vampires forced to ask for permission to enter

Part of well established lore.

> and then able to storm the building a few scenes later?

Because the wife who just saw her husband killed invited them in because she wanted revenge.

> Doesn't pay attention to plot

> Claims plot is terrible

People who complain about aspects about movies they didn't like should all be as forthright as GP in explaining why exactly they didn't like that aspect, so I can decide whether to entirely disregard the opinion.

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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.

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.

It's just now starting to become common knowledge that the military dictatorship didn't industrialize Brazil. On most circles, saying that it deindustrialized the country will surprise every single person, and get immediately rejected as false by a large share.

Propaganda is a hell of a thing. We are not even close to start that discussion, so it mostly won't appear anywhere.

The Brazilian dictatorship did both. Just like the rest of Latin América they lost it all to high interest rates in the 70s and 80s. They lost so they quit.

You mean it first industrialized and then deindustrialized the country?

Because if so, not really. Most of their industrializing policies had the opposite effect. What they really achieved was to reduce the industrialization pace to snail-speed, and then to turn it negative.

On the first half, it was not for lack of trying, though. It was just for lack of competence.

Reminds me of the dictatorship in Suriname in the 1980s. It was not about ideology. The military was just corrupt- they even did business with drug cartels.

Generals can't fix the economy they can only use violence and repression.

That movie was an absolute snooze-fest—way too slow and dull. I actually went to the theater with high hopes, but 15 minutes in, I felt like scrubbing the toilet would’ve been more fun. It’s a shame Brazilian cinema is so stuck on such a tired trope like the dictatorship era. Enough already. That’s a oranje that’s been squeezed dry. But I wouldn't bet against another one popping up this year... At least I won't make the mistake of wasting my money and time on the same old cinematic garbage again.

Considering Brazil almost suffered a coup just recently and the last president was convicted and jailed because of the attempt, how is it not a very much recent theme?

Maybe you didn't like the movie, but it's got nothing to do with the theme of the movie.

One of the boring and meaningless movies I ever seen. No arc, no coherent story, (almost) no humor, no development, no intrigue, nothing.

Only nice picture - then it qualifies as a good YouTube video, not really a movie. Because movies have some laws of the genre, this thing doesn’t even break any laws like great art does sometimes. It just presents a series of visially appealing but fundamentally dumb clips.

I envy people who have so much spare time to waste it on this so called art.

One of the strongest movie start sequences in a while, it immediately sets the vibe.

It didn't set the vibe though, After the strong start it is slow, wobbly and incoherent. It is ok, but could be much better.

the vibe of snoozefest

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.

> 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.

Aren't almost all films partially funded by grants and state institutions?

For example the MPAA publishes guides like [1], and if you watch the credits of most films at the end you'll see "thanks to XYZ" where it was filmed.

Even if you film in Hollywood itself you are eligible for tax rebates[1]

[1] https://www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Ol...

[2] https://www.ep.com/blog/california-expands-film-tax-incentiv...

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_(2025_film)

I liked it, but I didn’t understand how it became so successful abroad. A lot of the plot makes no sense if you’re not familiar with Brazil.

It is a shame, but culturally Brazil can't let the 60's go.

Americans may complain about their boomers, but American boomers can't handle a candle to the obstinate grip Brasilian boomers have on the brazilian imaginarium and culture.

Imagine if every single hollywood movie done nowadays was kind of a pastiche of Antonioni's Blow Up, and if the Grateful Dead were the great gatekeepers of popular culture. Every single new cultural movement either paid homage to their style and their culture or run the risk of being discarded. In a certain way, that's how Brazilian culture works. Add the fact that culture is highly politicized, because a big part of it needs to be financed by the state and you have the perfect recipe for movies like "The Secret Agent".

There's also a certain societal expectation that for being considered part of the elite you need to be thoroughly versed on the political and cultural dynamics of the period. If you are a Brazilian you won't criticize those productions, lest you be seen as the brazilian version of the "deplorables", and you don't want to do it in your urban professional upper middle classe environment.

And this lead us to another very common issue. As being well versed on the vicissitudes and cultural zeitgeist of the period is seen as an elite signal, th stories will always be hard to understand for the non-initiated. And this is almost proposital, a certain manner of gatekeeping, because, while brazilian cinema wants to make as much money as American cinema, it absolutely abhors the idea of not being sophisticated, full of hermetic references for the non-conoisseur.

Watch the other comments on this thread. International audiences feels lost, while the Brazilians keep playing softball amongst them while exchanging their precious references that nobody else knows, including most brazilian not privileged enough to have had money to do their basic education on expensive private schools and then conclude their education for free on high quality publi universities.

I spent the early 70s and early 80s in Brazil. I left at around the time of the abertura in 1984 when we lost a semester at UnB due to the student and faculty strikes. It was convenient that my family was coming to the USA. There's a lot I missed while living in Brazil but I've enjoyed watching Peninha (Eduardo Bueno) explain Brazilian history on his "Buenas [sic] Ideias" YouTube channel.

He spends a lot of time on the 1960s and the "milicos escrotos" (f'in military folks) who took over at the time, but he's written a number of books on Brazilian history and has an entertaining style.

> In a certain way, that's how Brazilian culture works

That's how Brazilian media conglomerate culture works

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

I watched both The Secret Agent and One Battle After Another (didn’t see any of the other nominees). For me, The Secret Agent was definitely better.

I wonder how many in the Academy actually watched The Secret Agent. I've heard before that a lot don't watch all the movies before making their picks.

Starting this year, an academy member was required to watch all films in a category in order to vote on that category. I’m sure compliance was not perfect, but it seems a much better process than the honor system.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2025...

Good to know!

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