THE SECRET AGENT*****

Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho has created an operatic, beautifully acted, and fascinating film in THE SECRET AGENT. I am utterly unsurprised that it has wowed critics and is cleaning up this awards season.  

The film is basically about corruption, oppression and memory, and it takes place over many time periods to show us the corrosive nature of autocracy.  The heavy cloud of violence is shot through by an on-going absurdist folk-tale of the "hairy leg" and jaunty popular music, both of which seem to say, look what happened, isn't it insane?

As the film opens we are in the late 70s in Brazil.  The state is corrupt at every level.  The actor Wagner Moura (CIVIL WAR, Pablo Escobar in Narcos) is driving his beaten up car to his home town in the middle of carnival. He pulls into an isolated gas station where a decaying corpse lies under cardboard.  Pretty soon the police pull in but they aren't here for the body and provide no help to the petrol pump attendant. Rather they just want to shake our protagonist down.  Welcome to Brazil.

As the film goes on we realise that our "secret agent" is just a university professor called Armando and he's on the run because a local corporate boss with govenment contacts wanted the value of his research.  He shows up in Recife and stays in a safe house full of similar political "undesirables" including a couple who have fled from Angola. The eccentric den mother/landlady fits them out with new identities. In flashback, we see our young idealistic professor get ensnared in the corruption of the system.  In a third timeline we will see a young idealistic researcher uncover audio recordings and newspaper clippings describing the escape lines run by our den mother, what happened to Armando and to his now grown son, who claims to have no memory at all of the events.  Is he lying? Is it a coping mechanism? Is it just safer?

The film is beautifully constructed, not least in its visual and musical evocation of late 70s Brazil. The costumes, cars, locations, score are all superb in evoking a beautiful but oppressive culture. I loved the interweaving of the hairy leg stories and the patience to tell us about Angola and the various ways in which cruelty suffuses the world - not least in an iconic final performance from Udo Kier as a jewish immigrant. I also loved the construction and scoring of a final act chase scene.  But ultimately this film rests on the shoulders of Wagner Moura, who plays two roles in three timelines and captures the idea of a good but not perfect man caught in an inescapable trap. His performance is mesmerising and deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Leo DiCaprio in ONE BATTLE.  Speaking of which, there's an essay to be written on the thematic and plot similarities between the two films, and the sense in which the late 70s paranoia provides the perfect analogy to our present time.

THE SECRET AGENT is rated R and has a running time of 161 minutes. It played Cannes, where Wagner Moura won Best Actor, Telluride, Toronto and London 2025. It was released in the USA in November and will be released in the UK on February 20th 2026.

EAST OF WALL****

Writer-director Kate Beecroft's debut EAST OF WALL is a really fascinating and affecting drama set in a horse ranch in the Dakotas. Much like Chloe Zhao's NOMADLAND, the film mixes actors and a fictionalised story with real people and a real place. The result is a film that gives the audience a glimpse into a world they might not otherwise see.  

The real life, ludicrously charismatic horse trainer Tabatha Zimiga stars as a lightly fictionalised version of herself.  In life as in this film, she runs a ranch that takes in troubled teenagers and gives them purpose, all the while raising her own kids as a widowed mother. Her real life daughter Porshia also stars as an incredibly talented horse-rider who shows off the ponies that they try to sell for a profit.

Beecroft places two real actors into this real situation. The first is Jennifer Ehle (SHE SAID) as Tabatha's straight-talking mother.  It's a character that could be a bit of a cliche - feckless, not exactly top-draw parenting, but a heart underneath it all. Ehle makes her credible in comparatively short screen time.

The second fictional character is the rich rancher Roy Waters, played by Scoot McNairy (A COMPLETE UNKNOWN). He offers the financially struggling Tabatha the chance for financial security but it's no free lunch: he has emotional needs that he has to fulfil. 

This is a film that takes us deep into a slice of life we might not otherwise see. The cinematography is stunning - both of the landscape and in capturing the incredibly skilled riding. The characters are credible and charismatic.  It adds up to something unique and memorable.

EAST OF WALL is rated R and has a running time of 97 minutes. It played Sundance 2025 and was released in the USA last summer. It is available to rent and own in the USA and UK.

EEPHUS***

Writer-director-cineatographer-editor Carson Lund's EEPHUS is a low-key funny, low-key melancholy film about male friendship and baseball. The entire film takes place over the course of a day and in a single location - a local baseball ground where two local rival teams are playing their last match before their ground is lost to redevelopment.  We see them banter with each other as a desultory group of spectators watches. There's low-key shit-talking and some home truths about how far any of them are actually friends and will keep in touch beyond the singular bond of playing sports together.  In the film's final act we see the last holdouts attempt to keep playing, even though night has fallen and they're relying on car headlights to light the pitch. It's a none too subtle metaphor for trying to cling onto something that's lost.  It's a charming enough film but too meandering and ultimately weightess for its running time. But hey, at least I learned what an eephus is, and maybe the gentle, unhurried pace of this film is the point.

EEPHUS has a running time of 99 minutes. It played Cannes and London 2024 and was released in the USA last spring.

REBUILDING***

Writer-director Max Walker-Silverman's REBUILDING is set in the American West, amidst a community whose houses and land have been destroyed by wildfire.  They now find themselves living in FEMA trailers, attempting to rebuild their lives. There's a well-meaning but ultimately useless bureaucrat who needs them to fill out the right paperwork and submit it online - absurd when they don't have computers or wifi.  And a loan officer who delicately informs our protagonist that it will be years before his farm will be productive again.

The film is centred around Dusty - a farmer who has inherited a farm that has been worked by generations of his family. It feels as though Dusty has a romantic sentimental approach to making a living, something his ex-wife calls him out for.  As the film opens, he has to take care of his daughter Callie Rose after a long hiatus, and a lot of the gentle joy of the film is seeing them try to re-establish a relationship, and for both to come to appreciate the ramshackle group of people they are living with.  It's a film about refound actual family, and newly adopted found family.  

The film is not without its longeuers in its central chapters, but I found myself really rooting for the characters and moved by the film's resolution.  I appreciated Josh O'Connor's central performance, eschewing the theatrics of an exxagerated accent, and allowing his subtle facial reactions to do the talking.  I also liked Meghann Fahy as his ex-wife. It was also to a pleasure to see True Detective's Kali Reiss back on screen.

REBUILDING is rated PG and has a running time of 96 minutes. It played Sundance 2025 and opened in t the USA in November.  It will open in the UK in April 2026.

FAMILIAR TOUCH****

FAMILIAR TOUCH is the deeply affecting directorial debut from Sarah Friedland featuring a stunning award-winning perfomrnace from Kathleen Chalfant (OLD).  Chalfant plays Ruth - an old woman suffering from dementia - and the movie centres her experience as she leaves her own house and moves into a dementia-care facility.  The performance is stunning because Ruth moves between moments of apparent clarity and her old sassiness and moments of bewilderment.  We learn about her situation as she discovers it - the gentle realisation that Steve (H Jon Benjamin - ARCHER) is actually her son, and that she had actually toured and approved moving into the facility some week's prior.  We watch Ruth amused by the memory games her nurse plays with her, and part of the film's sadness is knowing that while she thinks she's figuring it out, she doesn't really know what's going on. We watch her ask for a menu as if she's at a restaurant rather than in a nursing home, and later try to relive her life as a chef, cooking in the kitchen and even attempting to buy groceries. So much of the joy of this gentle, patient, film is just spending time with Chalfant's Ruth. Perhaps as befits her theatre background, she has an ability to infuse melody and clarity into the simplest sentences.  There's a real poetry and magic in how she lists different foods in her recipes.  And a melancholy in knowing that while these evocative lists are what she can still remember, she no longer recognises her son. This is a unique and beautiful film, and it's delightful to see that a performance like this can beat out contenders from bigger, better marketed and distributed films. It's really worth seeking out. 

FAMILIAR TOUCH has a running time of 90 minutes. It played Venice and London 2024 and was released in the USA last summer. Chalfant recently won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress.

ONE OF THEM DAYS****

There aren't enough genuinely funny, genuinely heartwarming buddy comedies out there, let alone buddy comedies starring black women. So it's a pleasure to report that ONE OF THEM DAYS, directed by Lawrence Lamont and penned by Insecure's Syreeta Singleton, is a really good time. It came out almost a year ago and I am utterly unsurprised that it was such a commercial hit and that it's getting a sequel. I am equally unsurprised that it has been nominated for Independent Spirit awards. 

The film stars Keke Palmer (HUSTLERS) as Dreux, a hard-working fast-food worker applying to become a franchise manager. She lives with her best friend Alyssa, a talented but uncompromising artist played by the musician SZA in her screen debut.  The plot is set in motion when the two girls need to make their rent by 6pm to avoid being evicted, because Alyssa's feckless boyfriend squandered the money.  Added to this, they need to get Dreux to her interview and avoid a local gangster who thinks they nicked his rare kicks. So the movie is set up as a zany caper full of madcap adventures and setbacks and quirky characters. My favourite of these are the loan-shark played by Larry David's Curb nemesis Keyla Monterroso Mejia and the madman standing outside her loan-shop called Lucky. Everything resolves beautifully, as we would expect, thanks partly to a white girl ex machina played with disarming earnestness by Euphoria's Maude Apatow. 

This film has a lot to say about how this economy is screwing over Gen Z - about housing unaffordability, gentrification, unequal opportunities, and the prison system of credit scores.  But it does so with gusto and fun and I really found myself rooting for, and believing in, the female characters. I will definitely be watching the sequel.

ONE OF THEM DAYS has a running time of 97 minutes and is rated R. It was released last winter.

TWINLESS****

TWINLESS is a slippery, dark, brilliantly constructed dramedy about co-dependence and the lies we choose to believe. It stars Dylan O'Brien (MAZE RUNNER) in a superb performance as a twin grieving the death of his brother in a car accident.  He finds comfort in the friendship of Dennis (writer-director-actor James Sweeney) who he meets at a support group for newly winless grieving siblings.  Dennis also sets Roman up with his co-worker Marcia (Aisling Franciosi).  The problem is that Dennis is a deeply lonely, sad, and unstable young man, who becomes unnaturally obsessed with Roman, and is seeking far more than mere friendship.

The resulting film is genuinely funny but also really dark, and its construction really keeps you guessing as to where Sweeney is going to take us.  It would pair well with Alex Russell's LURKER as it covers some of the same subject matter. I won't say more for fear of spoiling it. Suffice to say that this is a film of astonishing assuredness and dexterity for a new director. I also feel that the central double-performance of O'Brien deserves a lot of praise.

TWINLESS is rated R and has a running time of 100 minutes. It played Sundance 2025 where TWINLESS won the Audience Award - Dramatic. It  also played London 2025.  It was released in the USA last September. It will be released in the UK on February 6th.

SPLITSVILLE****

Writer-director-actor Michael Angelo Corvino has created an absolute banger of a romantic-comedy with SPLITSVILLE.  It's an absurd set-up and yet within that gets to some real deep truths about thirty-something marriages and contains one of the funniest punch-ups on screen. You can really tell that Corvinho and his co-writer and co-lead actor Kyle Marvin are best friends in real life.

The movie is about the relationships between and within two couples. The first couple comprises Carey (Marvin) and Ashley (Adria Arjona).  Carey thinks they are happily married but Ashley actually wants a divorce because she doesn't feel physically fulfilled.  She drops this bomb on Carey when they're on their way to see good friends Paul (Corvino) and Julia (Dakota Johnson). We think Paul and Julia are happily married, and they even have a young son, but we discover that they are in an open marriage.  Thus inspired, Carey and Ashley decide to start seeing other people, leading to a tour de force scene in which we see the camera move between the various partners that Ashley is hooking up with.  Apparently this was shot in one take which is truly impressive.

What we learn from this scenario pushed to an extreme is that there are real feelings involved when you cheat or even just hook up after a break-up.  These people are all flawed but they're fundamentally good and all care for each other. There's a lot here about insecurity and ageing and feeling that you have to be more for your partner. More hopefully, there's also something rather lovely in the community that comes together of the people Ashley is seeing.

It struck me watching SPLITSVILLE that despite the craziness, it all feels way more credible and relatable than THE MATERIALISTS, in which Dakota Johnson also stars. It's also far far funnier.  Adria Arjona proves that her hilarious performance in HIT MAN was no accident. Johnson is allowed to be real. And the two male leads are just absolutely superb. This truly is one of the funniest films I've seen in a while.

SPLITSVILLE is rated R and has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Cannes 2025 and opened in the USA last summer. It will open in the UK on February 20th.

A LITTLE PRAYER****

A LITTLE PRAYER is a rare film of quiet humanity, compassion and nuance. It's a family drama in which believable real people face real challenges with no easy answers.  It's unafraid to confront dark material and yet left me feeling deeply hopeful. 

Writer-director Angus Maclachlan (JUNEBUG) situates us in contemporary North Carolina.  David Strathairn (GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK) and Celia Weston play Bill and Venida - two quietly decent straightforward Boomers and small business owners. They don't seek out confrontation but neither are they blind to what's going on around them.  The smallest pieces of dialogue hint at an emotional hinterland and past marital struggles.  

Bill and Venida not only share a business with their feckless son David (Will Pullen) but also live with David and his wife Tammy (Jane Levy).  The film is really centred around David's fondness for his daughter-in-law and disapproval of his son's affair with their co-worker Narcedalia (Dascha Polanca).  We also get the family rhythms disrupted by the arrival of Bill and Venida's self-absorbed and chaotic daughter Patti (PITCH PERFECT's Anna Camp) and her young daughter Hadley.  But even as Patti might be a caricature of a distracted and careless mother, we realise that she may also be dealing with a dark home situation scare by opioid abuse.

The movie is really about parenthood.  Bill has an amazing conversation with Narcedalia where he disabuses her of her expectation that parents can control their kids and that a parent-child relationship provides a more secure kind of love than that between romantic partners. He seems bewildered and exasperated by his own children and incredibly tender toward Tammy.  And Tammy, while conflicted about her own infertility and ability to bring a child into such a difficult relationship, seems like more of a mother to Patti's young daughter than Patti is. 

I love how patient and nonjudgmental this film is.  The character of David might easily have been a villain, but even he is granted a scene of humanity.  Narcedalia could have been seen as a villain too but her story is heartbreakingly credible and admirable.  But really this film belongs to Jane Levy and David Strathairn, and a central pivotal scene really shows Levy's talent. I am not surprised that she has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. It's one of the most affecting performances I have seen this awards cycle. 

A LITTLE PRAYER is rated R and has a running time of 91 minutes. It played Sundance 2023 and then went into distribution hell. It was finally released in the USA last fall and is available to stream. It does not have a UK distributor. (I watched it on a FISA streamer).