Latest news with #politicalThriller
BBC News
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The Secret Agent review: Kleber Mendonça Filho's 'stylish and vibrant political thriller' could be an Oscars contender
Set in the military dictatorship of 1970s Brazil, this buzzy crime drama, which has premiered in Cannes, "makes up in pulpy excitement what it lacks in subtlety", and "bursts with sex, shoot-outs and sleazy hitmen". One of the biggest sensations of this year's awards season was I'm Still Here, an Oscar-nominated drama about the cruelty of the military dictatorship in 1970s Brazil. Now there's another film with the same subject matter – and it, too, could make a splash when awards season rolls around again. That's not to say that The Secret Agent is quite as sensitive as I'm Still Here, but Kleber Mendonça Filho's stylish and vibrant political thriller makes up in pulpy excitement what it lacks in subtlety. Set in the northeastern city of Recife during the raucous week of carnival celebrations, it bursts with sex and shoot-outs, sleazy hitmen and vintage cars – and it features a severed human leg which is found in the belly of a shark. You'd have to assume that Quentin Tarantino is already the film's number-one fan. Still, for all its brightly coloured, grindhouse flashiness, The Secret Agent is rooted in the real anxieties and tragedies of ordinary citizens. Indeed, its hero isn't a secret agent at all, even if Wagner Moura (Civil War, Narcos) is as tall, dark and handsome as any of cinema's super-spies. He plays the mild-mannered Marcelo, who is first seen driving into Recife in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle. It's about an hour before his identity and back story are revealed – The Secret Agent doesn't go anywhere in a hurry – but we eventually learn that he is a widowed academic who objected to a government grandee's attempts to steal his patented research. A big mistake. Marcelo now plans to reunite with his young son, who has been living with his in-laws, and to obtain the documents he needs to leave the country. In the meantime, he works undercover in a public records office, where he hopes to find even a shred of official evidence of his late mother's existence, and he stays in a dissidents' safe house overseen by a wonderfully chatty seventy-something mother hen (Tânia Maria). Even before he reaches Recife, Marcelo happens upon a corpse on a petrol station forecourt, which no one has got around to removing, so he isn't naïve about life in what an opening caption waspishly calls "a period of great mischief". But he is shocked when he hears that his old adversary has hired two assassins to track him down, and he is appalled by the amorality of the local police chief (Robério Diógenes). Filho and his cast have a gift for creating characters who are either movingly honourable or grotesquely evil. The police chief falls into the latter category. When he reads a newspaper headline stating that 91 people have died during the carnival, he cheerily bets that the total will soon reach triple figures. Despite all the danger and corruption in the humid air, Marcelo has an amused tourist's eye for Recife's eccentric goings on. He laughs in disbelief at a cat with two faces, at his son's obsession with seeing Jaws at the cinema, at the number of people having sex in public places, and at a surreal urban legend about the aforementioned severed leg hopping back to life and kicking the men in a cruising ground. For some viewers, The Secret Agent will have a few of these humorous detours too many. Running at more than two-and-a-half hours, it rambles here and there, hanging out with the numerous characters who dream of escaping from Brazil, like the patrons of Rick's Café in Casablanca. More like this:• Revenge thriller is favourite for top Cannes prize• Gay romance The History of Sound is 'too polite'• The 'dazzling centre' of Wes Anderson's new film But one of the film's key themes is the question of what is remembered and what is forgotten, and Filho, who grew up in Recife, seems intent on putting all sorts of quirky details on celluloid lest they be erased forever. As well as imbuing his hardboiled espionage yarn with richness and comedy, these lovingly realised period details add to the quiet melancholy that Moura radiates: one way or another, Marcelo won't be in Brazil to enjoy these sights for much longer. Anyway, just when The Secret Agent seems to be drifting too far from its central plot, it jolts back into focus, as the hitmen dump a body off a bridge, or an enigmatic contact promises to forge Marcelo's passport. An expertly choreographed chase through the city streets makes for a superb, bloody climax, but, as in I'm Still Here, there are still haunting questions to be answered and mysteries to be solved. For one thing, whose leg was that in the shark's belly, anyway? ★★★★☆ -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
No Way Out: the 1987 thriller that prophesied a deeply corrupt US government
I n 1987 – right before he became the biggest movie star in the world with a five-year hot streak that included Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves and The Bodyguard – Kevin Costner headlined two films that offered very different visions of America. The Untouchables assembles a group of plucky misfits to dole out frontier justice against those who would seek to extort the American dream – it's brash, gung ho and morally transparent. A guaranteed classic. Far more interesting, though, is No Way Out, Roger Donaldson's 1987 political potboiler that's equal parts pulpy spectacle and damning critique of the US project. Functioning as a bridge between the conspiracy flicks of the 70s and the erotic thrillers of the 90s, the film starts with a sex scene in the back of a limo (complete with a perfectly timed cutaway to the Washington Monument) and ends with an unforgettable flourish. Adapted from Kenneth Fearing's 1946 book The Big Clock (which also became a 1948 film), No Way Out transports its source novel's action from a New York magazine house to the beating, bloody heart of cold war-era Washington. A baby-faced Costner plays Lt Cmdr Tom Farrell, a navy golden boy summoned to DC to work for the secretary of defense, David Brice (RIP Gene Hackman, fully stepping into his late-career 'craven bureaucrat' mode). Brice's special counsel/whipping boy Scott Pritchard (Will Patton, chewing every piece of available scenery as a textbook 80s 'evil gay') wants Farrell to help them derail an overly expensive stealth submarine program (shades of Aukus). The problem is that Farrell is in love with Brice's kept woman, Susan Atwell (an infectiously delightful Sean Young, turning a potentially thankless role into the emotional centre of the movie). They happily continue their incredibly horny, incredibly doomed affair under Brice's nose, until – spoiler warning – Brice learns that there's another man in Atwell's life and and lashes out. Young as Susan Atwell. Photograph: Columbia/Sportsphoto/Allstar This prompts Pritchard to go full Iago as he concocts a plan to get his boss off the hook. What if Atwell's other lover was a long-rumoured Russian mole, codename: Yuri? What if the investigation into the attack on her became a Soviet witch-hunt instead? And what if their new dogsbody, Farrell, was in charge of the case? This is the ingenious narrative engine that propels the rest of the film: Farrell was at Atwell's that night, right before Brice, making him the prime suspect in his own investigation. With all five walls of the Pentagon closing in on him, Farrell has to sabotage the manhunt and find the real villain before he's framed. Donaldson (a Ballarat boy done good!) is one of those uber-reliable journeyman directors Hollywood doesn't make any more; guys you wouldn't recognise if you passed them on the street but whose films you've watched a thousand times at 11pm on 7mate: Cocktail, Species, Dante's Peak, Thirteen Days. No Way Out is highly competent entertainment but it also portrays a deeply corrupt US forever at war with both the world and itself – a nation where people are thrown under the bus at a moment's notice to protect the vested interests of powerful men. Perhaps the only thing more impressive than No Way Out's airtight thriller structure is its profoundly cynical view of US institutions – an outlook that feels almost radical in hindsight, given the chest-beating, self-congratulatory air of so much other Ronald Reagan-era Hollywood fare. You can understand why The Untouchables went on to become a jewel in the crown of Costner's filmography while No Way Out has sat there, largely forgotten, for close to 40 years. In 2025, though, it's clear which version of the US rings truer, right down to a defense secretary accused of sexual assault (not to mention those damn submarines). Ten years ago I would have considered parts of No Way Out painfully outdated – today it feels almost too close to the bone. No Way Out is streaming on Amazon Prime in Australia, the UK and the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
