Courtesy of NEON.

Courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center (MUBI).

New York Film Festival 2025:

The Secret Agent/O Agente Secreto
Below the Clouds/Sotto le nuvole

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi

The timing of these three 2025 New York Film Festival dispatches has only gotten later and later, and I’m getting this in right before the new year, which in a way feels apt. Writing these words more than three months and over two thousand miles away from where I first encountered Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds—two key films of this year that exist in entirely different registers yet share a marked kinship—I can still remember much of the sensation, if not the specifics of seeing both in the Walter Reade press screenings. Granted, one film’s screening was much more full and has accordingly received something on the order of a thousand times more recognition, but both experiences were charged with a certain feeling of a continual awakening, one corresponding with both films’ ability to evolve their ever-broadening sense of place and time.

Only one of these films is by an established documentarian, but in an odd sense Kleber Mendonça Filho is the one to have marshaled a surge of interest in his past work, fiction and nonfiction alike. The Secret Agent is his first film in the former mode since Bacurau (2019, co-directed with his past production designer Juliano Dornelles), whose breakout potential was somewhat stymied by its US theatrical release coinciding with the pandemic. His follow-up, however, was the formerly too-little seen Pictures of Ghosts (2023), his second documentary after his debut/farewell to his past career as a film critic Crítico (2008). I had the fortune to see it and meet Mendonça Filho during its brief window of Oscar aspirations, with little knowledge of what was to come.

The Secret Agent distinguishes itself from all of Mendonça Filho’s prior films almost immediately. It is the first to take place mainly in the past, heralded by a chyron with a curious addendum: 1977, “a time of great mischief.” That sentiment, during a year smack-dab in the middle of Brazil’s military dictatorship, is some mix of playful irony and sober summation that runs through nearly every interaction in the film. It accompanies Armando (Wagner Moura) as he drives to Mendonça Filho’s hometown of Recife in the midst of a certain amount of strife: a large number of Carnaval-related deaths, the discovery of a human leg inside a shark’s stomach, a lawsuit involving a wealthy woman’s negligent killing of her servant’s child. Though further blood will be spilled, and Armando is initially held up at a gas station by a suspicious police officer, it becomes clear that Mendonça Filho is most interested in the atmosphere of the city, using every bit of The Secret Agent‘s two hours and forty minutes to delve into all that makes up the city he has already evoked in Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius. While this present film does focus in on certain enclaves, and the former two films had their fair share of perambulation, the scale afforded here allows for the most vivid canvas Mendonça Filho has ever painted on.

To match, The Secret Agent—whose title is (once more, and in amusing counterpoint to Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind) an ironic and yet oddly fitting for the star at its center, taken from a passing view of the trailer for the Jean-Paul Belmondo-starring Le Magnifique—operates according to a slowly unfurling narrative that can contain such myriad sights as covert telephone calls, bustling street celebrations, and a Holocaust survivor played by Udo Kier. Aside from saying the film makes it apparent that Armando is on the run from something, and that the main object of his visit to Recife is to reconnect with his son, it’s better to leave the exact details of his circumstances to be experienced. Indeed, one of the more potent cinematic sequences this year is a roughly half-hour stretch in the middle of the film where Armando tells his story to representatives of a political group in the room next to the projection booth where his father-in-law works, the only place currently safe for him. As he recounts his travails and flashbacks gradually intrude, presenting a long-haired version of the man the viewer has gotten to know over the previous hour, it thrusts the pains of history and cavalier oppression upon the viewer just as surely as it does to all those in the room.

Not just the room, but those outside of it as well. With the prominent use of the São Luiz Cinema, the resurgence of interest in Jaws prompted by the news item, and an increasingly important subplot that I won’t go into here, The Secret Agent reconfigures itself yet again as a film about memory—and in turn film’s capacity for housing said memory—one where every building in the city carries the weight of its past that in turn is in danger of being forgotten. It’s not for nothing that Pictures of Ghosts has been rediscovered and rightly hailed as a valuable precursor to this film: the few cinemas that he chronicled in that documentary that are still standing have received a movie steeped in the cinematic grammar of its time period, yet defiantly local and proud of its own heritage. After the fireworks of the climax, there is an air of wistful assurance that suffuses the coda, where the past lingers even among those who can no longer remember it.

That past is as present as ever in Below the Clouds, Gianfranco Rosi’s latest endeavor. Rosi presents a curious case in contemporary non-fiction cinema: by at least one standard, he is the most successful documentarian alive, having come within a Palme d’or of completing the Golden Treble—now that Thierry Frémaux seems to be willing to have non-fiction films in Cannes Competition, who’s to say what might happen. At the same time, his footprint is largely unknown in the US, with his previous, somewhat controversial Notturno (2020) getting mired in the pandemic and his Golden Bear-winning Fire at Sea (2016) barely making a splash. Both films dealt directly with topical issues—Middle Eastern war zones and Mediterranean refugees, respectively—in what has become Rosi’s signature, kaleidoscopic style, cycling between various unrelated subjects within a relatively constrained sphere of operation, comparing and contrasting their respective situations.

Such an approach is used to ever-greater effect in Below the Clouds which is no less engaged with the problems of the present yet situates them in a more discernible, nearly serene context: the city of Naples. The title presumably refers to the emissions from Mount Vesuvius, the shadow that looks over more than a million people every day. Shooting in black-and-white for the first time since his debut Boatman (1993), Rosi begins by taking stock of the place he and the viewer will inhabit for the next two hours with super-long shots of the city’s many buildings and the volcano, before suddenly tunneling into one of many increasingly disparate perspectives.

Even more than most documentaries, Below the Clouds cannot be talked about in terms of a traditional narrative, considering the polyphonic nature of its development and little individual rhymes. A brief recounting, then, of (most of) its key narratives: an emergency call center that fields serious incidents, fears over an impending eruption, and people who just want to know the time alike; police officers investigating a spate of tombaroli break-ins in what feels like a mild riposte to Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera; a group of Japanese researchers delving further into the ruins of Pompeii; a curator in the catacombs of a museum, looking over the statues and other material; a shopkeeper who opens his doors to watch over a number of students as they study various topics; and, in something of a coup of topical issues, a cargo ship staffed by Syrians who deliver grain picked up from Odesa, Ukraine. Woven throughout these are shots from within a metro train winding through the city and shots within a decaying, empty cinema as scenes from films related to Naples play on the screen: Journey to Italy is easily the most prominent of these, though I think I also saw the 1913 silent film The Last Days of Pompeii; at least one appears to be an industrial documentary.

Many of these storylines are of sufficient interest that an entire (albeit shorter) documentary could be made about each of them, but Below the Clouds is most in thrall to the push-pull of the past and present, the way a textbook entry about Pompeii formerly being a major trader of grain in the shopkeeper narrative can suddenly illuminate the cargo ship story, or the continual eeriness of watching people interact almost interchangeably with statues and people volcanically sealed into stasis. Sometimes Rosi can be a bit too eager to dot his i’s, like in one scene in the museum where the curator muses about how being in an especially dark and statue-filled room feels like stepping into the past. But the beauty of his digital images, with flashlight beams cutting through darkness and fragmented shots of the city lit up at night, only enhances the feeling of a film, like The Secret Agent, which belongs to a city out of time.

Courtesy of Late Film LLC.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

New York Film Festival 2025:

Late Fame
Peter Hujar’s Day

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kent Jones
Directed by Ira Sachs

One of the presumably unintentional but noticeable trends that arose during the first week of the 63rd New York Film Festival’s press screenings was a consideration of art’s place in the world, often accompanied by an aesthetic that might be said to constitute a throwback. Films like Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which utilized thriller elements in tandem with a tumultuous ’70s backdrop, also featured extended meditations on how the experience of cinema and painting, respectively, can capture the spirit of then-modern sociopolitical currents. Two other films took 1970s artistry as their main subject: Kent Jones’s Late Fame and Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day.

Though my familiarity with their work is roughly equal—both films are the second I’ve seen by their respective directors—and they belong to the same generation of Americans, the two filmmakers couldn’t be more dissimilar. Anyone who came to cinephilia in the past few years could be forgiven for not knowing the name Kent Jones, but there’s little excuse for anyone even remotely plugged into American film culture before then, considering his work as a longtime film critic—I routinely cite his piece on John Ford for Film Comment as one of my favorite articles of criticism—archivist (including for Martin Scorsese), and, most pertinently, director of the New York Film Festival for a surprisingly abbreviated term from 2013 to 2019. Though that span of time may be too short and recent to accurately judge, his tenure, especially considering Dennis Lim’s continual presence on the selection committee during that time, certainly helped usher along NYFF’s evolution into an ever more open and exploratory festival. In terms of his own filmmaking, Jones has already made a number of documentaries, and his fiction feature debut Diane (2018), a somber consideration of a woman near the end of her life, led him to leave film programming behind to make directing his main pursuit.

Ironically, I’m less familiar with Sachs: despite being five years Jones’s junior, he has already made nine features, starting with The Delta (1997). A mainstay of Sundance, with such celebrated works as Married Life (2007) and Love Is Strange (2014), along with a Cannes competition berth with the Isabelle Huppert-starring Frankie (2019), he had something of an unexpected mid-career resurgence with Passages, the only other film of his I’ve seen so far. A seemingly more overtly sensual work starring three of Europe’s most celebrated arthouse actors in Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adéle Exarchopoulos, it drew a seemingly larger than usual audience with its frank depiction of a queer love triangle inextricable from its apex’s bad behavior and badder outfits.

Both Late Fame and Peter Hujar’s Day, then, come as something of a pivot for both filmmakers. While the latter premiered, as usual, all the way back in Sundance—bypassing its predecessor’s summer MUBI release for this late but fitting New York fall festival spot—the former, contra the prior film’s Tribeca premiere, bowed in the Venice Orizzonti competition, an unexpected but deserved berth for an American independent film. The star is far more recognizable this time: Willem Dafoe plays the incongruously named Ed Saxberger, a poet of some minor renown in the late 1970s who works in today’s New York City as a post office employee, having settled into a comfortable routine of sorting letters and hanging out with barflies unaware of his past life. One day, he encounters Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), the de facto leader of a young literary group known as the Enthusiasm Society, who has staked out his apartment and, over the course of a few effusive meetings, expresses his admiration for the erstwhile poet and asks him to join the society. As they gear up for a statement event and Saxberger attempts to write for the first time in decades, he draws closer to Gloria (Greta Lee), the only female member of the group, whose commitment to her acting aspirations and exaggerated mannerisms set her apart from the would-be mavericks.

Unlike Diane, Jones didn’t write the script for Late Fame, which was already penned by May December scribe Samy Burch, adapted to a modern American setting from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. Though I had completely forgotten about this fact before the closing credits—and the screenplay doesn’t try to match the fiendish machinations on display in Todd Haynes’s film—it goes some ways in accounting for the renewed sense of relaxation that suffuses this film. From the opening montage, a stream of late-’70s New York avant-garde images that suggest the milieu in which Saxberger briefly practiced his craft, it is clear that Jones is interested in a much larger sense of place than the snowy woods of his previous film, and he takes care to recognize its hustle and bustle while also finding room for his hero’s own, more sanguine experience. The camera is wilder in its greater commitment to handheld, often used in tandem with rapid cutting during some of the larger group scenes, where a split-second shot of a minor member’s smirk adds to the viewer’s (and Saxberger’s) confusion while trying to understand his newfound milieu. In between these dialogue-heavy sequences, there are occasionally some lovely, rapid dissolves of the skies of New York, occupied by birds and buildings, which suggest Saxberger taking the temperature of his assumed home, a poetic mind still at work even as the form has fallen away.

Late Fame is, above all else, an often thrillingly imperfect film, one more open to the possibilities of total failure than Jones’s last film. From the inherent critique of these pretenders to the literary throne—the camera noticeably locks down for a few searing scenes that capture Meyers’s and his associates’ wealth—to Lee’s performance, which is so stylized and self-consciously that the expected reveal of her in a “normal” guise still carries a certain charge, the film risks being insular and even mean-spirited in its takedown of privileged posers, especially as the planned reading spirals further out of control. But it is all united under Dafoe, as warm and playfully rueful as he’s ever been, a force of calm in the midst of the chaos of his peers and his city. Crucially, though his poem is quite good (to my ears) and he does enjoy being feted, Saxberger, and therefore the film that he anchors, is free to slip in and out of these different modes; some are more successfully handled than others, but the lightness of its aging spirit is often unexpected and welcome.

Despite opening with the same camera slate opening as Passages, Peter Hujar’s Day is even more of a left turn for Sachs. Unlike Late Fame‘s fictional poet (but real poetry scene), the film takes not only real people but a very specific occurrence as its subject: in December 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) attempted to embark on a project where she would record artists she knew talking in minute detail about the events of their previous day. For her first and only entry—as laid out in intertitles at the beginning of the film—she chose Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), a semi-prominent photographer; though the tape was subsequently lost, a transcript was retained, the contents of which provided the basis for this 76-minute film.

At first glance, Peter Hujar’s Day might seem even more self-satisfied, a 16mm-shot recounting of a fairly banal day in the life of a long-gone New York artist, with an extended anecdote about photographing Allen Ginsberg and stray references to Susan Sontag as perhaps the most readily discernible signposts to the average viewer. But though I can’t recall the precise wording of those title cards, they gesture towards what becomes compelling, even moving about this film. Because the transcript presumably contains no details as to the timespan of the recording, nor what may have transpired between its gaps, the film thus registers as a hybrid between audio reenactment of a documented event and an opportunity to imagine intimate, symbiotic actions of speaking and listening, full of little digressions, snacking, and movements between Rosenkrantz’s apartment and the building’s roof.

Sachs evokes this not only with a precision of framing within the Academy ratio frame, but also by constantly highlighting the inherently constructed nature of this production. Some are a bit more gratuitous than others—a recurring use of film rollouts, a few long shots where the slate and boom mic are visible, a handful of montages where preexisting music swells as Whishaw and Hall appear in poised repose—but they provide continual punctuation that remind the viewer of the work that must go into recreating Hujar’s attempt to recall his own past day. The film even appears to take place over the span of a few days, with a full day-night-day-night cycle, suggesting that to simply talk about one’s day in any detail at all itself takes more time than it does to live it. There, then is the crux of Peter Hujar’s Day‘s raison d’être: given that Hujar’s own recounting of his previous day’s happenings is inherently colored by his own perspective and the inevitable lapses in concentration and memory, the film is thus an imagining of a real event’s imagining of real events. That this all does not take away from the pleasures of existing in a long-gone artistic climate and of watching a gifted actor speaking and another strong actor intently listening is, in its own knowingly small way, more than a little impressive.