The Secret Agent is a thrill ride through Brazil’s dictatorship

The Secret Agent is a thrill ride through Brazil’s dictatorship

Many of the critics writing in the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s eventually made movies themselves: Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette, for starters. That has rarely happened elsewhere – in the US, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich, anyone else? – and perhaps never in this country, where film-makers and film critics rarely seem to have much in common at all. The Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, though, began his …