political

THE SECRET AGENT: we’re all back in 1977, and he’s running for his life

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Photo caption: Wagner Moura in THE SECRET AGENT. Courtesy of NEON.

The Secret Agent is both a superb movie and an unexpectedly original immersive experience. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho embeds his slow burn thriller into 1977 Brazil, and Mendonça creates an unsurpassed sense of time and place, which is absolutely absorbing.

Wagner Moura plays a man traveling under an assumed name, making his way across the country in a VW Beetle. Eventually, we learn that his name is Armando, and he’s returning to his home city of Recife. He’s on the down low now, on the run from something, but when he later learns the particulars of the threat against him, his flight becomes increasingly urgent and cloak-and-dagger.

In the first scene, at a rural gas station, Mendonça tells us three things about the setting. Disorder reigns. Life is cheap. The police are unabashedly corrupt.

Mendonça doesn’t paint a picture of a regime like Pinochet’s Chile, where th state itself is hunting down its perceived dissenters and eliminating them by imprisonment, torture and extra-judicial execution. Rather, Mendonça’s 1977 Brazil is chaotic, where the government, casually and without much organization, tolerates or even perpetrates murder at the private whims of the rich. While the rich and their henchmen call their targets “communists”, this isn’t ideological, it’s for the most personal of interests, such as revenge and greed. Indeed, Armando isn’t a dissident activist; he’s a technology professor whose success at his job has become inconvenient for a crooked industrialist.

The cops are portrayed, often comically, as vulgar louts; the ongoing feeling of menace in The Secret Agent stems from their unaccountability. The Secret Agent simmers with tension until Mendonça brings the story to a boil with Hitchcockian suspense in a humdrum government office and an explosively thrilling chase through the sidewalks and alleys of Recife.

In juxtaposition to the life-and-death stakes of Armando’s story, it is Carnival time, and the population at large is embracing boisterous partying and carefree sensuality. The local media has created a fantastic bogeyman to sell newspapers, which Mendonça hilariously brings to life. There are recurring themes of sharks, dismembered legs and movies.

One of the movies (also shark-themed) is Jaws. Besides the movies and popular music, Mendonça brings us the cars and the dress of 1977, down to details like a Nadia Comaneci poster in the background. I have no idea how he filled the street of Recife with hundreds of extras, all dressed as in 1977 fashion. It’s very, very hot, and the men wear their shirts open, or not at all.

We’re jarred when we see an iPhone on a tabletop, Mendonça’s clever tipoff that he has jumped the story 48 years into the future.

The plot is about what will happen to Armando, and Mendonça reveals the answer in a surprisingly non-exploitative way. It’s underplayed, and it’s really perfect.

Wagner Moura carries the film, emanating Armando’s unusual decency, intelligence, and determination (and maybe too much stubborness for his own good).

As good as is Moura, The Secret Agent astounds with its amazingly deep cast and pitch-perfect performances. We come to know even the most minor characters as distinct individuals without tereotypes, and there are over 20 indelible performances. In particular, the child actor Enzo Nunes, playing Armando’s six-year-old son, gives a strongly textured performance reacting to Armando’s explanation of his mother’s death. Their are eight villains, each loathsome in entirely singular ways. This is the first year that the Academy Awards are granting an Oscar for casting, and The Secret Agent is justifiably nominated.

Mendonça had a US arthouse hit in 2016 with the Sonia Braga showcase Aquarius. That film was critical of the political status quo, and the Brazilian government’s refusal to submit it for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar created a controversy, detailed in this New York Times article.

The Secret Agent is nominated for four Oscars: Best Picture, Best International Picture, Best Actor and Best Casting. It should have been nominated for Best Director. You can stream it from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.

COVER-UP: muckraking back in the day

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Photo caption: Seymour Hersh in COVER-UP. Courtesy of Netflix.

Cover-Up is a biodoc of the hard-charging investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib abuses, and reported on the Nixon-Kissinger secret war in Cambodia and Watergate. These were important stories, and Hersh demonstrated remarkable resourcefulness and determination in his work.

He was a hyper-competitive practitioner of gotcha journalism, who himself was once gotten when duped by a salacious forgery

In Cover-Up, we hear about Hersh’s life and career, chiefly from Hersh himself, so we get a flavor of the man. I thought I was familiar with the My Lai massacre, but we hear about details that emerged after the initial sensation – details that I wish that I still didn’t know.

Today, we have a 24-hour news cycle, publication of gossip and fabrications, facts denied as fake news, media empires that are essentially propaganda, infotainment and so-called news obsession with celebrity. Seymour Hersh is an important figure in an era of journalism – the Woodward and Bernstein Era – that we have have moved past., IMO for the worst So, his story, while a notable episode in US political history during the Vietnam War, just isn’t that relevant today.

Cover-Up, which may interest some Baby Boomers, is streaming on Netflix.

ORWELL: 2+2=5: we didn’t get the message

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Photo caption: ORWELL: 2+2=5. Courtesy of NEON.

The impassioned and innovative documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 is less a biopic of the author George Orwell than a cry of alarm, imploring us to heed Orwell’s message about resisting totalitarianism and its tools of propaganda and repressive violence. It’s a distress signal – and an urgent one.

Primarily through clips from movie versions of 1984 and Animal Farm, we are reminded of Orwell’s revulsion at those who deny objective fact and try to pervert public opinion. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Big Brother. Thought Police. Newspeak.

Historical clips illustrate figures like Hitler, Stalin, Franco and Pinochet employing these methods. And contemporary news clips focus on the evil deeds of today’s authoritarian nationalists in Russia, China, Myanmar, Hungary, Italy, France and, notably, in the US.

Orwell: 2+2=5 takes us from Orwell’s work to instances of book burning from the Nazis through to today, including a jarring list of books banned in American libraries. Orwell found goosestepping particularly offensive, and Orwell: 2+2=5 shows us plenty of contemporary examples of that, too.

When Orwell wrote Animal Farm and 1984, he had seen Goebbels’s Big Lies in action and experienced Stalinist thought-oppression. But, although he hadn’t seen AI, election deniers or corporate hegemony of television news, Orwell: 2+2=5 makes it clear that his guiding principles still apply.

We do get just enough content about Orwell’s life to help understand what shaped him. He spent five years in his early twenties as a colonial policeman in Burma, which caused him to understand (before his peers) that European colonization was exploitation based on white supremacy and that he himself had been an instrument of repression. He fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, where his leftist unit was purged by communists. Physically disabled from wounds in Spain, he got another chance to fight fascism in World War II by working for the BBC, ironically, as a propagandist.

Orwell: 2+2=5 is the work of Oscar-nominated documentarian Raoul Peck. His James Baldwin biopic I Am Not Your Negro was also innovative; Peck chose to present Baldwin’s thinking through only his own words, in archival recordings or voiced from Baldwin’s writings, unadorned by talking heads. As in I Am Not Your Negro, the editing in Orwell: 2+2=5 is brisk.

Orwell: 2+2=5 is a fine film and an important piece of advocacy. It’s playing in arthouse theaters, but difficult to find.

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT: trauma, revenge and complications

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Photo caption: Ebrahim Azizi (right) in IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT. Courtesy of NEON.

The powerful (and often funny) drama It Was Just an Accident begins with a minor driving incident that triggers memories of traumas Those memories spark a new life-and-death situation.

Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) is a workaday auto mechanic with a dodgy back. We later learn that he was locked up by the Iranian government and repeatedly tortured. Vahid was blindfolded during his ordeal, but he remembers the voice of the secret policeman who tormented him and the squeaky limp of his prosthetic leg. Now he hears what he believes is that voice and that squeak – and he impulsively kidnaps the man, intending revenge.

Problem is, the guy (Ebrahim Azizi) denies being the torturer and his explanation of his prosthetic leg is plausible. So Vahid tracks down former fellow prisoners to confirm the guy’s identity.

Vahid and his peers were not dissident ideologues, but just factory workers who complained about not being paid for months. Nevertheless, they were all severely traumatized by their experience, and each of them really, really hates their torturer.

Their suspect is sedated and trussed up inside a box in Vahid’s van, as Vahid picks up each of his witnesses. All of them have different personalities. Vahid is impulsive (obviously), and the photographer Shiva {Mariam Afshar} is clear-headed and decisive. One of them, Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), is in her wedding dress for a photo session and comes with a bewildered would-be groom (Majod Panahi). The most volatile one, Hamid (Mohammed Ali Elyasmehr) seems to be seriously mentally ill.

Mohammed Ali Elyasmehr, Majid Panahi and Hadis Pakbaten in IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT. Courtesy of NEON.

The motley group faces a moral question – is it just to kill the man who committed atrocities against them? Or would that act of violence lower them to the moral level of the hated regime?

And Vahid’s impulsiveness has presented them with a practical problem. There is the matter of kidnapping, whoever this guy is, so could they get away with letting him go? Would it be suicidal to release a vicious killer who knows where Vahid works? There doesn’t seem to be any way to put the toothpaste back into the tube.

As they careen around Tehran in a van with a live body in a box, circumstances get unpredictably more complicated – and absurdly funny – all the way to the emotionally devastating ending.

Mariam Afshari in IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT. Courtesy of NEON.

Written and directed by the acclaimed Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident is a harsh critique of the Iranian government, both for its worst human rights violations and for its petty corruption. Making this film was an act of incredible courage by Panahi. Remarkably, Panahi shot this movie secretly, including even some scenes in in plain sight on the streets of Tehran.

Panahi is a critical and industry favorite because he is persecuted by the Iranian government. By supporting Panahi, the cinema world supports free expression and human rights in Iran.

He’s also a damn fine filmmaker, the only director to win the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, the Golden Lion at Venice, the Golden Leopard at Locarno and the Palm d’Or. How Panahi shot a movie this great IN SECRET is miraculous.

It Was Just an Accident won the Palm d’Or at Cannes and is high on my list of the Best Movies of 2025 – So Far. It’s now in theaters.

KISSINGER: he sought to justify the means

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The exceptional American Experience biodoc Kissinger brings a balanced perspective to one of the most visible and important figures in 20th Century US history, Henry Kissinger. It neither canonizes or vilifies Kissinger, but presents a clear-eyed, unsparing look at his career. That’s important, because Kissinger’s genius at public relations may have exceeded his formidable diplomatic skills and distorted his image during his lifetime.

Kissinger is solid, well-sourced history. We hear directly from several former Kissinger staff members with an intimate, inside view of Kissinger the man and his work, We also hear from Kissinger’s son, who adds insightful personal stories about his father. And, of course, we hear and see archival footage of Kissinger himself, although perhaps never candidly. Kissinger is told in two parts over three hours.

Kissinger emerged into American public consciousness seemingly fully-formed in his mid-forties, a Harvard brainiac with a heavy German accent. Kissinger brings us his German childhood, family emigration to the US and the WW II and college experiences that molded him.

Naturally, Kissinger details the two great foreign affairs triumphs of Kissinger’s partnership with President Richard Nixon. First, there was the historic opening of relations with China, a hitherto mysterious and sinister closed society, The story of Nixon’s original idea, of the ping pong diplomacy and Kissinger’s secret trips is still exciting.

Second, once Nixon and Kissinger had established a relationship with China, they had outflanked the Soviet Union. That resulted in detente with the USSR and the SALT negotiations leading to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the first limitation of the proliferation of nuclear arms.

These were real, groundbreaking achivements that sprang from Kissinger’s brilliance, but also his sense of realpolitik. He was all about superpower positioning, which he prioritized above other considerations. Along the way, Kissinger found tradeoffs acceptable that had undeniably momentous consequences.

In the decade from 1965 though 1975, American society was torn apart by the Vietnam War. Taking responsibility for the war in 1969, Nixon and Kissinger based their policy on “peace with honor”, which meant they wanted to avoid the unpleasant optics of Vietnam falling to the Communists. But, from 1968, at the latest, it was always apparent that the Republic of Vietnam would fall to North Vietnam as soon as the US abandoned their South Vietnamese allies. Wanting to avoid the PR consequences of South Vietnam’s ignominious collapse, Nixon and Kissinger extended the war for another six years. That six-year extension of the cost 38,094 American and countless Vietnamese lives, all to achieve exactly the same outcome as a withdrawal in January 1969.

Kissinger references, but does not emphasize something even worse – that Kissinger and Nixon encouraged the Vietnamese Communists NOT to settle with the US in 1968, but to hold out for a better deal with Nixon.

Kissinger does document, in the greatest detail I’ve seen, the Kissinger-Nixon secret war in Cambodia, and their paranoid and unconstitutional concealment of it. And it covers Kissinger’s role in the overthrow of Chile’s leftist, but democratically elected government, leading to decades of human rights violations by the repressive Pinochet regime. Kissinger also presents voices from Cambodia and Chile, pointing out how, over fifty years later, the two nations remain traumatized by Kissinger policy.

And then there’s Watergate. Kissinger shows how the Nixon Administration’s secret wiretapping of Americans was started b.y Kissinger, wiretapping his own staff suspected of leaks to the press. Of course, the paranoid and vindictive Nixon took it from there. Ironically, this led to Nixon’s downfall, while Kissinger remained at the heart of US foreign policy in the successor administration. Of course, Kissinger was always Teflon to Nixon’s Velcro.

While in government, Kissinger’s public image was shaped by his sickening manipulation of the press, who made him popular celebrity. The public thought of Nixon’s War in Vietnam and Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, while ,lauding Kissinger for diplomatic wins with China and the USSR. It culminated with Kissinger actually winning a Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that he had extended for six years. The guy with whim Kissinger negotiated, Le Duc Tho, turned down his Nobel, rightfully noting that the war was still going on, albeit with Americans having left.

So, Kissinger lays out the history and lets us connect the dots and assesses the legacy of Kissinger’s pragmatism and opportunism. We are able to talk with the Chinese government today, although the relationship is wary at best. We were able to avoid a nuclear showdown with the USSR up to the disintegration of the Iron Curtain in 1991, although Russia remains our most volatile foreign enemy. But at what cost?

If your goal is to project American influence around the world, it’s a fair question to ask, just what does America stand for? If you think that America stands for democratic values, why destroy a democratically elected government? If you think that America stands for freedom of thought and expression, why persecute Americans for their advocacy?

Kissinger is currently airing on PBS’ American Experience. You can watch on PBS, on the American Experience website and on its YouTube channel.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER: sometimes hilarious, sometimes thrilling, always outrageous

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Photo caption: Leonardo DiCaprio in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie so over-the-top as Paul Thomas Anderson’s broad satire One Battle After Another. It’s sometimes hilarious, sometimes thrilling and always outrageous.

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Bob, the tinkering bomb-maker in French 75, a group of far-left revolutionaries led by Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), charismatic and oversexed and too in love with her own badass flamboyance. Sure enough, once they piss off the nation’s repressive law enforcement establishment, French 75 is destined to go the way of the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army. In a shock-and-awe campaign led by Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), the revolutionaries are all neutralized or driven underground. Bob is able to get away and hide out under a new identity with Perfidia’s newborn daughter Willa.

The story resumes sixteen years later, with Bob and Willa living in a Northern California forest cabin. Bob is still a stoner underachiever, but he’s a devoted dad, and Willa (Chase Infiniti) has blossomed into a young woman of uncommon intelligence and curiosity. Suddenly, Lockjaw leads a military assault team to capture them, and the two are off on a two-hour race for their lives. When they become separated, Bob, despite his sparse hero skills, tenaciously tries to find her. Why has Lockjaw reappeared after sixteen years? He has his reasons, which I won’t spoil.

Paul Thomas Anderson, whose best movies are Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, has a body of work that ranges from the super-serious (The Master) to the silly (Inherent Vice). But his movies are always character-driven and always centered in empathy – we understand what makes his characters tick. In this case, he celebrates the resilience of his protagonists.

What I haven’t seen before from Anderson are the violent attacks and white-knuckle chases that we see in more conventional Hollywood thrillers. Anderson delivers here, with a movie that’s chock-filled with exciting set pieces. The final chase on an up-and-down road called the Texas Dip outside Borrego Springs, California, is spectacular. Is this a political satire embedded in a thriller, or the other way around?

And about that broad satire – principal photography took place in the first seven months of 2024, before Trump’s election and before his second-term weaponization of ICE and attempt to inflict martial law upon American cities. It’s chilling that reality is now mirroring what Anderson, as he was writing the screenplay, must have thought was far-fetched.

From the get-go, Anderson paints the government forces as fascist and white supremacist. But he skewers the wacko far-left as well. One of the scenes with the revolutionaries is as funny as the Liberation Front/Splinter scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a huge movie star who can carry a romantic drama (Titanic) or an action adventure (The Revenant) and, hell, play Jay Gatsby or Romeo. Here, his Bob shambles along, often terrified and klutzy, and none too strategic. It’s to DiCaprio’s credit that he turned down what became the righteous Jesse Plemons role in Killers of the Flower Moon to play a dumbass. And, again in One Battle After Another, he is racing for survival, always seemingly one step too slowly. It’s a fantastic, anti-Tom Cruise performance.

Sean Penn in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Penn’s Lockjaw is the most demented military character in the movies since Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) in Dr. Strangelove. As perverse and perverted as he is, you have to acknowledge his epic relentlessness. Penn is able to humanize the awful Lockjaw with his vulnerabilities – sexual and social-climbing yearnings that control him.

Chase Infiniti, in her first feature film, gives us a Willa with the latent ferocity of her mom, but with more grounding, discipline and self-awareness. More of Chase Inifiniti, please.

Chase Infiniti in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Teyana Taylor dominates the first chapter of One Battle After Another, with Perfidia’s stunning charisma and power. Benicio Del Toro and Regina King are excellent as two of Bob’s rescuers. Eric Schweig, an actor I’ve admired since The Last of the Mohicans (1992), shows up in a small but key role.

One Battle After Another has a Metacritic rating of 95. Although I’ve been singing its praises here, I initially found it a little too long for something so bombastic. Since then, I’ve thought about it more, and have placed it higher on my list of the Best Movies of 2025. Anyway, it’s so well-crafted and unusually outrageous that it’s a Must See.

AMERICAN AGITATORS: social justice doesn’t just happen

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Fred Ross (foreground left) and Cesar Chavez (foreground right) in AMERICAN AGITATORS. Courtesy of Cinequest.

American Agitators is the important story of legendary organizer Fred Ross, the mentor of Cesar Chavez, and essentially a saint of the social justice movement. American Agitators shows Ross being formed by the Great Depression and the left-wing politics, the union movement and the New Deal. As a fully formed organizer, Ross met Chavez; Ross’ organizing resonated with Chavez applied his own imagination to Ross’ tactics and launched his own historically essential movements for farmworker unionization and Chicano Rights.

Director Raymond Telles has sourced the film impeccably. The third act rolls out Ross’ legacy today, not just Chavez the icon and the Farmworkers movement, but the influence of Fred Ross, Jr. and then a more loosely configured compendium of recent and current labor campaigns..

Fred Ross and Dolores Huerta in AMERICAN AGITATORS. Courtesy of Cinequest.

LOCAL SAN JOSE INTEREST: Fred Ross met Chavez at Cesar’s home at 53 Sharff Avenue in San Jose, hired Cesar as his deputy and organized out of McDonnell Hall at Our Lady of Guadalupe on East Antonio Street.  Cesar’s son Paul (of San Jose) appears in the film as does Luis Valdes of Teatro Campesino, who has also had a significant presence in San Jose.

I screened American Agitators for its world premiere at Cinequest.

JIMMY CARTER – “What people say they want”

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In PBS’ American Experience documentary Jimmy Carter, The New Yorker writer and former Carter speechwriter Henrik Hertzberg says:

Jimmy Carter was what the American people always SAY they want – above politics, determined to do the right thing regardless of political consequences, a simple person who doesn’t lie, a modest man, not someone with a lot of imperial pretenses.  That’s what people say they want.  And that’s what they got with Jimmy Carter.

And herein lies the rub. 

In 1976, Americans were reacting to Watergate and wanted a President the LEAST like Richard Nixon. We got him, in the form of Jimmy Carter; it turned out that Carter could deliver non-Nixonian decency, but not the leadership that the era required.

In Jimmy Carter, we hear from those who know Carter best – including his wife Rosalynn Carter, his vice-president Walter Mondale, and right-from-the-start Carter insiders Jody Powell, Pat Caddell and Bert Lance. How the times made this man, then propelled him to such improbable electoral success and then finally doomed his Administration, is a great and cautionary story.

Jimmy Carter is in two parts, which combine for two hours and 39 minutes. It’s available to stream from Amazon and AppleTV (I can find it on my app, but not on the website).

CARVILLE: WINNING IS EVERYTHING, STUPID!: rascal truth-teller

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Photo caption: James Carville in CARVILLE: WINNING IS EVERYTHING, STUPID!. Courtesy of CNN Films.

The CNN documentary Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid! brings insight into the colorful political consultant James Carville, today’s political environment and the example of his long-surviving marriage to another strong willed professional.

Carville is known as a strategic genius and earthy communicator, but the documentaryremonds us that he was an unaccomplished Baton Rouge lawyer who hadn’t won his first major election campaign until he was age 42. Then after producing some surprise US Senate victories, at 48, he created his masterpiece – the nine lives of the oft-doomed Bill Clinton presidential campaign. Just this much is a helluva story.

But Carville, who grew up poor, watching his single mother hustle for a living, selling encyclopedias door-to-door, has always appreciated the need to get people’s attention first. That’s why he is a grinning provocateur, unafraid to offend to make his point. And you will probably be offended by something he says in Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid!, especially when he argues that the Democratic Party can’t be too woke to win a national election; “Screw the ARGUMENT, win the ELECTION!’. Carville was ahead of the curve in recognizing that Democratic Party needed to dump Joe Biden in 2024, and he’s comfortable in the role of truth-teller (as he sees the truth).

Carville can be dead serious about politics without taking himself seriously. Sadly, his joie de vivre has become rare in today’s toxic political environment. That’s why his rascal persona is so refreshing.

Of course, Carville is half of a celebrity marriage to Republican political strategist Mary Matalin, and she is a major part of Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid! Matalin, as tough as nails and intolerant of bullshit, is the perfect foil for the blustering Carville. They share the tough episode when Matalin was back working in a GOP White House during Bush’s war in Iraq, which Carville bitterly opposed. Matalin comes off as very genuine and very wise about relationships.

I watched Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid! in its premiere on CNN. It is now in theaters.

THE GRAB: important, engrossing and sobering

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A scene from Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s THE GRAB. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The exposé The Grab is an important documentary at the level of An Inconvenient Truth. The Grab documents and clearly explains the global grab for food and water resources by corporations and nations. Think about water as a matter of national security. Imagine an OPEC for food.

The grab to control agricultural land and water rights is happening in secret – but in plain sight. It’s difficult enough to impose any accountable on actors of this scale – global mega-corporations and even nations – so The Grab’s bringing some transparency is essential.

Documentarian Gabriela Cowperthwaite is known for Blackfish, an exposé of Orca handling at SeaWorld and an arthouse hit in 2013. Cowperthwaite has also directed a narrative space station thriller, I.S.S., set for release in June 2023.

Cowperthwaite describes The Grab as a “6-year investigative deep dive“. Impressively researched, The Grab is engrossing and sobering.

I screened The Grab for the 2023 SLO Film Fest. It’s now available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.