Trevor Perri

In The Secret Agent, the latest film by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, the main character leaves the cinema during a screening and steps almost seamlessly into a street party. Marcelo, who lives under the alias Armando, is a dissident professor in the dictatorially ruled Brazil of the 1970s. Fleeing a planned assassination attempt, he chooses the cinema as a hiding place to hunker down and consider his next moves. Mendonça Filho’s choice of the cinema is more than just a striking detail.

“A good story can be told in a few sentences,” it says in the newspaper. In other words, a good story has a core that’s so clear and distinct that it can be summarized concisely without detracting from it – a few sentences suffice to indicate what it’s really about. The story of Hong Sangsoo’s What Does That Nature Say to You? (2025) can also be summarized simply: In the course of a single day, a young man drives up a mountain, enters a house, goes back outside, and then drives back down the mountain. The question is whether that says it all.

The Mastermind (2025), Kelly Reichardt’s new film, has been characterized as playing with genre, “a heist flick for an arthouse crowd.” Her films are often associated with genres. Meek’s Cutoff (2010) is said to be an “indie western,” Night Moves (2013) an “anti-thriller,” and Wendy and Lucy (2008) a “road movie.” These are genres that have shaped the North American film landscape and allow viewers to orient themselves within it. Reichardt’s cinema thus moves in a space filled with familiar landmarks.

If Laxe’s true subject is detachment and indifference, and his film is a form of punishment, then that results in a peculiar cruelty. In various interviews, Laxe says that Sirât arose from a “wound,” which he traces back to Gestalt psychology. “Art is pushing boundaries, spirituality is pushing boundaries, and that’s where you get to know yourself,” he says. The word “wound” also encapsulates the duality of the film: wounds can be healed and inflicted. Strangely enough, Sirât does both.

Criticism was both a public and daily activity for Bazin. In the postwar years, he was involved in just about every magazine that had anything to do with early film culture. This was a process that would culminate in his founding, along with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951. It was also around this time that his fragile health first became critical. It is for this reason, among others, that Bazin, stuck in his bed, turned to television. He came to see the tube as an important part of the visual world, and he wanted to describe it.

Jean Baudrillard described obscenity as an excess of visibility, an excess of transparency in which nothing more is suggested or concealed, where there’s no room for seduction as a game of distance and mystery. Maestro succumbs to exhibitionism in this sense: Cooper forces all his effort and skill on the viewer unasked. The illusion – Cooper plays Bernstein – remains incomplete. The film is a constant reminder of the performance itself, of the blood, sweat and tears that made Maestro possible. The acting process is emphatically exposed, as if revealing something that should have remained hidden, something that doesn’t need to be seen.

Van der Keuken makes a world exist, he creates a reality. Describing then is not representing something that already exists but rather realising “a” reality. By creating forms, he creates a world of things that comes to life in our imagination. Herman does exist, as form. The good fortune Van der Keuken makes us part of is just that magical realisation of the world on the screen, where the inner suddenly becomes outer.

During that first period, he wanted to be the physicist of the photogénie, during the second he became its chemist. For these experiments, the director was free to ignore the general public. Film also became more and more inaccessible to the crowd, understandable and enjoyable only to a small circle of insiders. However, once those trials had given him a thorough knowledge of technique, the director naturally returned to nature, to man. He returned to the street. It wasn’t the street of the studio that fascinated him, the street of cardboard, but the real street where life teems in a thousand forms, where it can be caught and filmed directly.