Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho dazzled cinephiles with 2016’s “Aquarius” and 2019’s “Bacurau,” but he may have achieved new heights with his latest, “The Secret Agent,” which now has an official trailer that you can watch below.
“The Secret Agent” won the most awards of any film at Cannes 2025: Best Actor for lead Wagner Moura, Best Director for Mendonça Filho, and the FIPRESCI Critics Prize for Best Film. Moura has been on the cusp of becoming a huge star for years with his work in “Narcos” (where he played Pablo Escobar), the gentle Sundance drama “Sergio,” and last year’s Alex Garland nightmare-epic “Civil War.” The Brazilian actor has received the highest acclaim of his career to date, though, for his work in “The Secret Agent.”
The film is set in the last days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which lasted until the early 1980s. As David Ehrlich put it in his review of “The Secret Agent” from Cannes, “The film’s story begins in media res, and while the plot couldn’t be easier to follow, it fittingly requires the audience to earn every morsel of the context they’ll need to appreciate its power. A middle-aged man who marries the quiet confidence of a cowboy with the “I don’t want any trouble, here” demeanor of an extra who just wants to survive the trigger-happy Western around him, Marcelo [Moura] could be an anti-military Communist, but he could just as easily be a tech researcher who has personal business in Recife.”
“That duality is at the heart of Wagner Moura’s deceptively recessive lead performance — a performance that Mendonça mines for its errant sense of mystery from the movie’s opening scene, in which Marcelo smooth talks a dirty cop at a highway gas station where a corpse has been rotting in the sun for several days. ‘I’m almost getting used to this shit,’ the station owner spits, alarmed at how fast he’s adjusted to the reality of doing whatever business he can with a dog-eaten body lying next to the pump. Change comes fast in Mendonça’s Brazil, and it’s hard to blame people for doing their best to roll with the punches.”
Twists and turns happen from there, and the soundtrack is laced with Tropicália gems from the 1970s. So much so, it inspired Ehrlich to murder (and perhaps the first-ever confession to a murder in a movie review): “[There are] so many great Tropicália-accented songs that the critic sitting next to me spent the entire movie Shazam-ing every scene. I obviously stabbed him to death with my pen at a certain point, but I made sure to steal his phone for reference when the screening was over.”
NEON will release “The Secret Agent” in theaters on Friday, November 26. Watch the trailer for “The Secret Agent” below.