‘Secret Agent’ joins the New York Times list of the 25 most notable films of 2025 | I &

On Tuesday (16), “The Secret Agent” was announced by the Hollywood Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of 15 pre-nominated films in the foreign film category. The film is also pre-selected on the best cast list.

According to the NYT, the film features a “brilliant performance” by Wagner Moura, the protagonist of the production. The newspaper also highlights an “unforgettable scene” by Udo Kier, a German actor who passed away in November this year and who plays a Holocaust survivor living in Recife during the period of the military dictatorship.

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho from Pernambuco, the work received praise from critics from the New York Times, who stated that the director “finds humor where there would normally only be horror”. According to the newspaper, films about resistance to tyranny “rarely inspire laughter”, but in “The Secret Agent” Mendonça Filho “adopts a relaxed sensibility and finds laughter amidst the terror”.

Set in 1977, during the Brazilian military dictatorship, the film, according to the NYT, moves away from “the corridors of political power” to focus “under the sun and on the ground, where people live in the here and now”, contrasting the violence with Carnival scenes, with characters “dancing happily in the dust”.

Still according to the American newspaper’s review, Wagner Moura delivers a central performance marked by dismay, in a film that mixes political resistance and dark humor by “finding laughter in the midst of terror”.

“A swarm of flies buzzing over the body and a pack of running dogs also approaches. There is a frightening everydayness to this morbid scene, and a touch of disturbing humor, this eccentric opening establishes the oscillating tone and mood of a story that is occasionally punctuated by moments of comedy so absurd they can bring laughter”, states the newspaper’s review.