Starting this year’s collection in which our authors support for one Academy Award candidate, our principal movie critic on why the Brazilian drama-thriller is the most risky and totally realised movie in the race
As ever, this year’s Oscars have their half-dozen or two frontrunners and favourites, some really impressive motion pictures amongst them. The one that has remained in my mind is a knight’s step away from the talking-point agreement: an extremely innovative, careless and garrulous movie from Brazil, a movie regarding love and resistance, tyranny and parenthood, and coming to terms with the past. It is digressive and risible and yet in its last act escalates stunningly from lugubrious mystery to cold-sweat tension and violence.When the most effective image Oscar is announced, my heart would sing to see its husband-and-wife manufacturers Emilie Lesclaux and Kleber Mendonça Filho go on phase to accept it for their drama-thriller The Secret Agent. Directed by Mendonça Filho, it’s a film made with uncomplicated style and touched with pure motion picture motivation. The opening scene alone, with its restless black-comic unease, is itself a sort of masterpiece. It resembles Antonioni’s The Passenger combined with Leone and Peckinpah and a pulp surprise by Elmore Leonard. It has a kind of novelistic, anecdotal top quality– an awesome, discursive self-awareness. You could call it a little wonder, although at near-epic length( 2hrs 40mins), it’s actually a large wonder. Continue analysis … Source: The Guardian