You can almost smell the sweat in “The Secret Agent,” a stylish, slow burn thriller about radicals and mercenaries in 1977 ...

You can almost smell the sweat in “The Secret Agent,” a stylish, slow-burn thriller about radicals and mercenaries in 1977 Brazil. Filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho begins his film with the note that it ...

“The Secret Agent” sounds like the title of a pulpy thriller from the 1970s that played on the bottom of a cinema’s double bill. There’s a generic simplicity to those three words that should indicate ...

Editor's Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication. I've been following your work for a few years, but for it to be for this film, from your home country of Brazil, and the ...

Despite society’s historical amnesia, our history informs our current reality. Brazil is a nation still impacted by the trauma of a military dictatorship that reigned from 1964 until 1985 following a ...

A casual disregard for human life contrasts with a colorful, hard-partyin’ atmosphere of 1977 Carnaval in Brazil in “The Secret Agent,” director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s momentous epic, a mercurial ...

“This is one of the year’s best films, and one of the most distinctive,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. An award winner at Cannes, the sixth feature from Brazilian writer-director Kleber ...

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here. Drenched in sex and death, “The Secret Agent” peers into the past in order to make sense of the present. The ...

If you've spent any time in a dictatorship — I've had that happy experience — you understand why your high school teachers were always praising democracy. You quickly learn that authoritarian states ...

Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” opens with a curious warning. “Our story is set in the Brazil of 1977,” white text reads as a yellow Volkswagen Beetle pulls into a gas ...