'The Secret Agent': Exploring a Vibrant, yet Violent Brazil (2025)

https://theasc.com/articles/the-secret-agent-cinematography

49•tambourine_man•3h ago

Comments

anderber•1h ago

The Secret Agent was not an easy movie for the average movie watcher. It had an unorthodox ending, graphic violence, and it's in a different language. With that said, it's too bad it wasn't able to come out with any Oscars. I can see why OBAA won quite a few awards.

dinkblam•1h ago

> I can see why OBAA won quite a few awards

how can you see it? one of the worst AAA films in a decade, on every level including narrative and visual

eszed•19m ago

OBAA wouldn't have been my choice for best picture, either, but it had some beautiful pieces of film-making. The long shot while running through the Sensei's safe house was great, and the car chase at the end was a) gorgeous, and b) visually not quite like anything I'd ever seen before. I can see what Academy voters liked about it, in addition to the "this director has been nominated so many times without winning, so maybe he finally deserves one" angle, which I think maybe had as much to do with it as anything.

anderber•18m ago

Academy members aren't always good at picking "good" movies. I'd argue they're actually pretty bad at it. Every once in a while they guess correctly. At least my 2 cents.

padjo•15m ago

What on earth is a AAA film?

FuriouslyAdrift•11m ago

The whole single A, triple A thing comes from league baseball. Single A was the lower leagues and AAA is the top of the heap pro ball. AAA denotes big budget tent pole productions. So big a studio could go bankrupt if it doesn't do well.

padjo•3m ago

Ah so the OP thinks OBAA was designed as a big budget popcorn flick? No wonder they didn't like it.

FuriouslyAdrift•14m ago

It's very pretty, but the book is much better

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vineland

pearlsontheroad•56m ago

Having grown up in Brazil in the 70s, I thought the cinematography of "The Secret Agent" absolutely nailed the aesthetics of that era.

forinti•14m ago

Kleber Mendonça Filho's other films are great at analysing modern Brazil.

builtbyzac•7m ago

Running an AI agent autonomously for 72 hours showed me the gap between demo and production. The demos show the agent working. Day three shows: rate limits breaking the loop, container restarts losing state, context drift causing reasoning errors. The interesting engineering question isn't 'can the AI do the task' but 'how do you build a resilient system around it'.

JoeJonathan•5m ago

Was this written by a person or an AI agent?

beepbooptheory•26m ago

One thing I noticed is that both this and another incredible film this year, Sirāt, were, at least in part, funded by a grants and state institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir%C4%81t

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Agent_(2025_film)

If you haven't seen either, highly recommended. Don't watch Sirat if you're wanting a "good time," but I honestly can't think of the last time a film made me feel the way it did, especially the final minutes of it.

The Secret Agent is maybe as good though. Makes you want to say "they don't make them like this anymore.." It feels like a good long novel; every character, however minor, is rich, full of life, in some way beautiful. It's something about how the past has these pockets of clarity, bookended by loose ends and uncertainty. The mix of myth and anecdote. Pieces of life we can remember, those we can't... Five bags of popcorn.

FuriouslyAdrift•16m ago

Another movie that kind of slid under the radar but is very watchable (and mainstream) is Nuremberg. It's just entertaining without trying to be too much. It's not "great" but it's not bad, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_(2025_film)

haunter•14m ago

Decent film but to me 'I'm Still Here' (Ainda Estou Aqui) was still a too fresh experience from last year to have a similar film again from Brazil set in the 70s covering the military dictatorship. I also think that I'm Still Here is a much better film.

forinti•6m ago

I definitely like that film, especially the acting and the music, but I think that, as with most material that covers that era (arts, history, journalism), it focuses on the middle and the upper classes.

The poor get a footnote: what happened to Zezé? But the poor were the biggest losers of the dictatorship. It was at the precise moment that the country needed to modernise that the coup made everything stop and the favelas grew along with violence in the periphery. Maybe City of God is a better depiction of what the dictatorship meant.

If you thought the code writing speed was your problem; you have bigger problems

Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

Kagi Small Web

Slug Text Rendering Algorithm Dedicated to Public Domain

Node.js needs a virtual file system

'The Secret Agent': Exploring a Vibrant, yet Violent Brazil (2025)

Toward automated verification of unreviewed AI-generated code

Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

Java 26 is here, and with it a solid foundation for the future

Spice Data (YC S19) Is Hiring a Product Specialist

FFmpeg 8.1

Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360 (2018)

How OpenClaw's Memory System Works

Edge.js: Run Node apps inside a WebAssembly sandbox

Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go

Show HN: March Madness Bracket Challenge for AI Agents Only

The Plumbing of Everyday Magic

GPT‑5.4 Mini and Nano

Heart, head, life, fate

Show HN: Crust – A CLI framework for TypeScript and Bun

Leanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering

Building a Shell

Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

Efficient sparse computations using linear algebra aware compilers (2025)

Font Smuggler – Copy hidden brand fonts into Google Docs

Show HN: Horizon – GPU-accelerated infinite-canvas terminal in Rust

Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it Open Source

The unlikely story of Teardown Multiplayer

Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language

'The Secret Agent': Exploring a Vibrant, yet Violent Brazil (2025)

Comments

If you thought the code writing speed was your problem; you have bigger problems

Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued

Kagi Small Web

Slug Text Rendering Algorithm Dedicated to Public Domain

Node.js needs a virtual file system

'The Secret Agent': Exploring a Vibrant, yet Violent Brazil (2025)

Toward automated verification of unreviewed AI-generated code

Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill

Java 26 is here, and with it a solid foundation for the future

Spice Data (YC S19) Is Hiring a Product Specialist

FFmpeg 8.1

Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360 (2018)

How OpenClaw's Memory System Works

Edge.js: Run Node apps inside a WebAssembly sandbox

Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go

Show HN: March Madness Bracket Challenge for AI Agents Only

The Plumbing of Everyday Magic

GPT‑5.4 Mini and Nano

Heart, head, life, fate

Show HN: Crust – A CLI framework for TypeScript and Bun

Leanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering

Building a Shell

Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

Efficient sparse computations using linear algebra aware compilers (2025)

Font Smuggler – Copy hidden brand fonts into Google Docs

Show HN: Horizon – GPU-accelerated infinite-canvas terminal in Rust

Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it Open Source

The unlikely story of Teardown Multiplayer

Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language