Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent
by Imtiaz Popat
Brazilian film The Secret Agent has been nominated in four Oscar categories. The Secret Agent — nominated for best picture, best actor, best international film and achievement in casting.
The Secret Agent follows a widowed father — played by Wagner Moura — who becomes a target of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s simply because he stands up to a business owner with ties to the regime.
The Secret Agent, an unsettling new movie by Brazil’s leading filmmaker, Kleber Mendonça Filho. Set in 1977, near the middle of his country’s two-decade dictatorship this smart, brutal, often funny thriller uses the travails of one ordinary man to capture a reactionary era in its daily realities and surreal absurdities, its public cruelty and private decency. The film gives us a peek of the relies of Brazil in the 70s. It has charm and it is also full of mystery and suspense.
Imtiaz Popat 