SECRET AGENT

A likely nominee for best international film at next year’s Academy Awards, “The Secret Agent” looks back to the late 1970s and Brazil’s military dictatorship. There, actor Wagner Moura plays Marcelo, a technology researcher on the run from government assassins who hides out during Carnival in the coastal city of Recife, hoping to escape to asylum. Director Kleber Mendonça Filho (“Bacarau”) captures a distinct ‘70s look on Panavision lenses that evokes that era’s paranoid thrillers, to which this electric Cannes Film Festival favorite pays richly satisfying homage.