Awards season has delivered two extraordinary films to UK screens this week, and both demand to be seen on the big screen. The Secret Agent (nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best International Feature) is out now and Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt (nominated for Best International Feature and Best Sound) is released on Friday. These are not films to wait for on streaming. They are cinematic experiences in the truest sense.The Secret Agent draws you in slowly, patiently, until you realise... Read more
Awards season has delivered two extraordinary films to UK screens this week, and both demand to be seen on the big screen. The Secret Agent (nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best International Feature) is out now and Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt (nominated for Best International Feature and Best Sound) is released on Friday. These are not films to wait for on streaming. They are cinematic experiences in the truest sense.
The Secret Agent draws you in slowly, patiently, until you realise how completely it has you. Wagner Moura is astonishing, carrying the film through stillness as much as action, every look suggesting history, compromise, and vigilance. It’s a performance of immense restraint and gravity. The world around him is dense, overheated, and astonishingly realised, with supporting characters who each arrive with a past, with contradictions and anxieties of their own.
What makes the film truly remarkable is how seamlessly it blends realism with surrealism. Set against the backdrop of 1970s Brazil under dictatorship and censorship, the uncanny moments feel not ornamental but necessary, with truth collapsing into rumour, folklore, distortion. The surreal sharpens the political. By the end, it feels less like a film you’ve watched and more like a place you’ve spent time in. Unsettling, immersive, and quietly devastating.
Sirāt is a vivid, near-dystopian road movie that transforms before your eyes into something almost transcendental. Oliver Laxe’s film is built around one of the year’s most remarkable sound designs, a woozy, hazy presence that becomes a character in itself, amplifying the tension and the mounting strangeness. Shocking moments shatter the spell, but they are always punctuated with real humanity.
A remarkable ensemble of mostly non-actors bring an intensity and individuality that only deepens the film’s power. It’s a beautiful fever dream, achingly sad, yet resilient and hopeful, conveying life in all its messy, heartbreaking, painful, and euphoric glory.
See both. You won’t regret it.
The Secret Agent draws you in slowly, patiently, until you realise how completely it has you. Wagner Moura is astonishing, carrying the film through stillness as much as action, every look suggesting history, compromise, and vigilance. It’s a performance of immense restraint and gravity. The world around him is dense, overheated, and astonishingly realised, with supporting characters who each arrive with a past, with contradictions and anxieties of their own.
What makes the film truly remarkable is how seamlessly it blends realism with surrealism. Set against the backdrop of 1970s Brazil under dictatorship and censorship, the uncanny moments feel not ornamental but necessary, with truth collapsing into rumour, folklore, distortion. The surreal sharpens the political. By the end, it feels less like a film you’ve watched and more like a place you’ve spent time in. Unsettling, immersive, and quietly devastating.
Sirāt is a vivid, near-dystopian road movie that transforms before your eyes into something almost transcendental. Oliver Laxe’s film is built around one of the year’s most remarkable sound designs, a woozy, hazy presence that becomes a character in itself, amplifying the tension and the mounting strangeness. Shocking moments shatter the spell, but they are always punctuated with real humanity.
A remarkable ensemble of mostly non-actors bring an intensity and individuality that only deepens the film’s power. It’s a beautiful fever dream, achingly sad, yet resilient and hopeful, conveying life in all its messy, heartbreaking, painful, and euphoric glory.
See both. You won’t regret it.
