The Secret Agent
Neon | Release Date: November 26, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
91
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 40 Critic Reviews
Positive:
40
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The IndependentPatrick SmithFeb 19, 2026
At 160 minutes, the film teeters on self-indulgence, but it moves freely from scene to scene, propelled by Mendonça’s energetic camerawork and a performance that elevates Moura to the top table. Read full review
100
Little White LiesRafaela Sales RossFeb 18, 2026
The Secret Agent is, of course, a film of its own, and feasibly Mendonça Filho’s most refined, outright-auteurist work yet. Moura anchors this tale of history as an afterlife with a terrific encapsulation of the kind of hopelessness that masks itself as resilience, his gaze infused with the aching longing of a future condemned to remain possibility. Read full review
100
EmpireSiddhant AdlakhaFeb 17, 2026
With images of violence brushing against understated strength — amid a search for love, safety and self-actualisation — this is an astonishing cinematic experience that lures the past into the present. Read full review
100
Washington PostMichael Andor BrodeurDec 19, 2025
From its opening shakedown to its final takedown, “The Secret Agent” wanders a world consumed by corruption. Read full review
100
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesDec 18, 2025
Anchoring all the wild plot machinations and shocking, garish violence is Wagner Moura’s focused and forceful lead performance. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonDec 10, 2025
All in all, “The Secret Agent” feels like a memory play filtered not only through its director’s reminiscences but through the cinema’s past as well. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneKatie WalshDec 5, 2025
For Mendonça Filho, who has poured his love for his city, his country and its people into this masterpiece of a film, his favorite way to process anything is through making and watching movies. It’s his best film, and the best film of the year. Read full review
100
Original-CinLiam LaceyDec 3, 2025
Mendonça, a former film critic, has crafted a film steeped in seventies’ cinematic references, especially Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, David Cronenberg’s body horrors, and the paranoid American political thrillers of the era, stuffed with affectionate care for depicting the fashion, cars, décor and music of the era. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithNov 28, 2025
Rich, evocative, crafty and exciting, it’s one of the few standout movies of the year. Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreNov 26, 2025
In The Secret Agent, there’s no line between a refugee and being part of a resistance movement — there’s only the state and the people who’ve been designated its enemies. Read full review
100
Rolling StoneDavid FearNov 26, 2025
What initially seems like a series of cryptic aside soon turns into a bigger-picture revelation about what Filho has been chasing all along: the passage of time, and how it never really heals all wounds. That’s not really a secret. But it is a point that bears repeating, especially when its echoed in a movie as graceful and gratifying as this one. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzNov 26, 2025
If you’re willing to bend with the story, The Secret Agent will take you places movies rarely go. Read full review
100
The New York TimesManohla DargisNov 26, 2025
For his latest knockout, The Secret Agent, the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho embraces a freewheeling sensibility, and finds laughter amid the terror. Read full review
100
The New YorkerRichard BrodyNov 26, 2025
The movie’s writer and director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, crafts a tight story with startling freedom, leaping between characters in order to conjure their fateful interconnections, while giving them all, persecuted and persecutors alike, an identity and a voice. In the process, he brings history to life with bracing immediacy—a feat all the rarer for the audacious twists of cinematic form with which he renders the movie an act of archival reclamation. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 20, 2025
This movie, visually and dramatically superb in every way, moves with unhurried confidence across the screen, pausing to savour every bizarre bit of comedy or erotic byway, or note of pathos, on its circuitous path to the violent finale. Read full review
100
The PlaylistCarlos AguilarMay 19, 2025
All of Mendonça Filho’s aesthetic, genre proclivities, and ideological concerns coalesce in this larger period canvas. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyMay 18, 2025
It’s a major achievement, and for my money, sure to be one of the best films of the year. Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubNatalia KeoganSep 15, 2025
By delicately weaving the veracity of archive, the reverie induced by celluloid, and the inevitability of corruption into its narrative, The Secret Agent becomes a career-spanning treatise that cozily situates itself amid the staggering cinematic epics that Mendonça pays respect to. Read full review
91
The Film StageLeonardo GoiMay 22, 2025
The Secret Agent doesn’t just exist in conversation with the genre films from the decade in which most of it unfurls; it also testifies, time and again, to the director’s unwavering belief in cinema’s capacity to disquiet and mesmerize. Read full review
90
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzDec 4, 2025
The Secret Agent is not only mining the director’s own personal cinematic education – it is rich in homages to everything from The Parallax View and McCabe & Mrs. Miller to Shivers and, of course, Jaws – but also excavating an entire nation’s past. Read full review
90
The Travers TakePeter TraversNov 29, 2025
Take a look at leading man Wagner Moura. That’s a movie star, right there. An Oscar nomination for this political thriller that truly thrills is his next step. Just watch, it’ll happen. Read full review
90
The Daily BeastNick SchagerSep 7, 2025
Mimicking the form, and channeling the spirit, of ’70s big-screen blockbusters, it’s a bravura tale of community, persecution, and the way in which memory is both stolen and recovered. Read full review
88
The Associated PressLindsey BahrNov 25, 2025
Like the infectious and haunting needle drops, from Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” to local hits of the time, “The Secret Agent” is the best kind of personal film, imbued with so many things that Mendonça Filho loves, both resurrection and elegy. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 19, 2025
With The Secret Agent, Filho exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up. Read full review
80
The TimesTom ShoneFeb 25, 2026
The sidewinding rhythm of the film will probably throw some, but that’s all the more reason to see it in the theatre: a lot goes on beneath the surface, the lack of signposting has a cumulative power, and the ending is a beauty, mixing heartbreak, hope and the boy, Fernando, who has been patiently waiting for his father all along. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesTara BradyFeb 19, 2026
In Mendonça Filho’s slippery moral universe, revelation offers neither catharsis nor closure, only the squeamish knowledge that some nightmares end, and others are obscured by history. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinJan 23, 2026
Like carnival itself, The Secret Agent sucks you in and buffets you along, with every swing and sway making it harder not to submit. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesTim GriersonDec 8, 2025
If Mendonça Filho overstuffs his accomplished picture, it’s a fitting rebuke to a violent regime that would have tried to tamp down his voice. He finds a worthy partner in Moura, who embodies the rugged sex appeal and muffled anguish of a principled individual in a world gone mad. Read full review
80
IONCINEMA.comNicholas BellNov 26, 2025
Elegant, moody, and intense The Secret Agent mines through the rubble of the past, reconstructing the beauty and terror of a time long gone but still haunting the present. Read full review
80
The RevealScott TobiasNov 26, 2025
The Secret Agent has a warm affinity for communities like the one that adopts Armando—Dona’s apartment building echoes the lo-fi resistance of Baktan Cross in One Battle After Another—but it doesn’t sugarcoat the immense loss that history can deliver. Read full review
80
Film ThreatAlan NgOct 21, 2025
Filho masterfully turns a tale of survival into a deeply human story about love, loyalty, and the cost of integrity under tyranny. Read full review
80
ColliderRoss BonaimeOct 20, 2025
The Secret Agent is a remarkable work from Mendonça Filho; a beautifully composed film that features some of the best directing, editing, and writing of the year, as well as an enthralling performance by Moura that deserves its accolades. Read full review
80
BBCNicholas BarberMay 23, 2025
Set in the military dictatorship of 1970s Brazil, this buzzy crime drama, which has premiered in Cannes, "makes up in pulpy excitement what it lacks in subtlety", and "bursts with sex, shoot-outs and sleazy hitmen". Read full review
80
Time OutDave CalhounMay 21, 2025
The Secret Agent is vicious and vivid in its sense of place and danger. But it also has a streak of weirdness and offers a very human take on the political-crime thriller genre. Read full review
80
Screen RantGraeme GuttmannMay 20, 2025
Despite the film’s title, though, The Secret Agent isn’t your typical espionage thriller, but it’s all the better for how it plays with genre, tone, and expectations. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeMay 19, 2025
Mendonça crams the film with vivid time-capsule details. Read full review
80
Screen DailyWendy IdeMay 19, 2025
The fourth fiction feature from Kleber Mendonça Filho is a sweat-saturated riot of a movie: a dual-timeline thriller powered by the kind of anarchic, erratic energy that you would expect to find at the end of a two day bender. Read full review
78
TheWrapSteve PondMay 19, 2025
Its messiness is part of its charm and part of the point; a film that took itself more seriously than this one wouldn’t let a climactic gun battle turn into an almost cartoonish grand guignol splatter-fest. Read full review
75
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenJan 6, 2026
Moura captivates as the quietly seething central figure, while Filho’s use of saturated colors and lively diegetic music make The Secret Agent a sumptuously unsettling experience. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineMark HansonSep 5, 2025
More broadly appealing than Kleber Mendonça Filho’s past films, The Secret Agent is still unmistakeably the work of an artist who’s deeply fascinated with the ways in which cinema, politics, and personal history co-mingle. Read full review
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