This week’s Podcast features an in-depth interview with Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose latest feature, The Secret Agent, is in select theaters now. The film was a highlight of both this year’s Cannes, where Mendonça won the Best Director prize, and this fall’s New York Film Festival. The Secret Agent is set, like many of the director’s films, in his Northeastern Brazilian hometown of Recife, in 1977—“a time of mischief,” as a title card tells us early on. Wagner Moura (Cannes Best Actor winner) plays Marcelo, a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles. The Secret Agent is an endlessly inventive, lively, and frightening excavation of the specifics of past and place. And like the filmmaker’s recent work, including the scathing genre hybrid Bacurau (2019, co-directed by Juliano Dornelles) and the autobiographical documentary Pictures of Ghosts (2023), it’s in thrall to the history and possibilities of cinema.
Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute spoke to Mendonça about the film, his tendencies to set his stories in familiar locales, his fascination with recording technology and voices out of the past, and how he managed to blend fantasy and humor into this chilling political thriller.
All content for The Film Comment Podcast is the property of Film Comment Magazine and is served directly from their servers
with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
This week’s Podcast features an in-depth interview with Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose latest feature, The Secret Agent, is in select theaters now. The film was a highlight of both this year’s Cannes, where Mendonça won the Best Director prize, and this fall’s New York Film Festival. The Secret Agent is set, like many of the director’s films, in his Northeastern Brazilian hometown of Recife, in 1977—“a time of mischief,” as a title card tells us early on. Wagner Moura (Cannes Best Actor winner) plays Marcelo, a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles. The Secret Agent is an endlessly inventive, lively, and frightening excavation of the specifics of past and place. And like the filmmaker’s recent work, including the scathing genre hybrid Bacurau (2019, co-directed by Juliano Dornelles) and the autobiographical documentary Pictures of Ghosts (2023), it’s in thrall to the history and possibilities of cinema.
Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute spoke to Mendonça about the film, his tendencies to set his stories in familiar locales, his fascination with recording technology and voices out of the past, and how he managed to blend fantasy and humor into this chilling political thriller.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, with Miriam Bale and Adam Piron
The Film Comment Podcast
1 hour 28 minutes 25 seconds
1 month ago
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, with Miriam Bale and Adam Piron
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another has been the talk of the town since its wide release last month—from critics to filmmakers to audiences, the reception has been nothing short of euphoric. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, the film opens in an unspecified present, detailing the activities of a militant group led by a Black revolutionary (played by Teyana Taylor). Years after her disappearance, her partner (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their daughter (newcomer Chase Infiniti) are hunted down by an old enemy, Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. The chase takes them across California, with an assortment of other characters becoming embroiled along the way.
The movie is an unabashedly fun, feel-good action flick—one that also calls back to films as disparate as The Searchers, Commando, and Running on Empty. But is it among the greatest of the decade, as some have claimed? Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited critics and programmers Miriam Bale and Adam Piron on the Podcast to discuss the film’s successes and failures, how it fits into PTA’s larger body of work, and its engagement with American history and the present. If there’s one thing the four agreed on, it’s that One Battle After Another is indeed a “very rich text.”
The Film Comment Podcast
This week’s Podcast features an in-depth interview with Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose latest feature, The Secret Agent, is in select theaters now. The film was a highlight of both this year’s Cannes, where Mendonça won the Best Director prize, and this fall’s New York Film Festival. The Secret Agent is set, like many of the director’s films, in his Northeastern Brazilian hometown of Recife, in 1977—“a time of mischief,” as a title card tells us early on. Wagner Moura (Cannes Best Actor winner) plays Marcelo, a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles. The Secret Agent is an endlessly inventive, lively, and frightening excavation of the specifics of past and place. And like the filmmaker’s recent work, including the scathing genre hybrid Bacurau (2019, co-directed by Juliano Dornelles) and the autobiographical documentary Pictures of Ghosts (2023), it’s in thrall to the history and possibilities of cinema.
Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute spoke to Mendonça about the film, his tendencies to set his stories in familiar locales, his fascination with recording technology and voices out of the past, and how he managed to blend fantasy and humor into this chilling political thriller.
