Kleber Mendonça Filho likes stuff. The Golden Globe-winning director of The Secret Agent (2025) is doing Zoom interviews from the office of his home in Recife, the northeastern Brazilian city where he grew up and the setting of his latest film. The wall behind the filmmaker is lined with books, reels of film, and boxes of papers and cassette tapes. Overflowing with ideas and voices and stories and vivid details, it’s like a visual representation of Filho’s movies.
There’s a lot going on in The Secret Agent: It was Udo Kier’s (R.I.P.) last film role, for one, as well as a vehicle for unlikely 79-year-old awards-season darling Tânia Maria, who plays the lead’s anarcho-communist landlady. Armando, aka Marcelo (Wagner Moura), is the Secret Agent of the title, a former technology expert who’s living under an assumed name after pissing off an energy-company executive during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Powerful men are sending dangerous ones to kill Marcelo, but in the meantime, Filho fills his world with fantastical detours — at one point, the film stops to act out an urban legend about a disembodied hairy leg terrorizing men cruising in a city park — and charmingly eccentric side characters.
