The man in the Beetle is Marcelo, a research scientist who crossed the wrong government minister and now has professional killers on his trail. Wagner Moura<\/a> plays him with a matinee-idol magnetism, suave yet rugged in the face of mortal danger. Still grieving his late wife F\u00e1tima, whose death weighs on him constantly, Marcelo is holed up in a safe house run by Dona Sebastiana (T\u00e2nia Maria), a principled resistance operative with a whisky-soaked rasp who shelters refugees and arranges new identities. His young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes), staying with cinema-owning grandparents, represents his only reason to keep fighting. Sebastiana finds Marcelo a job at a government records office \u2013 the irony isn\u2019t lost \u2013 where he searches for traces of his own disappeared mother while trying to stay invisible. The hitmen are closing in; the corrupt police captain they\u2019re drinking with knows exactly where to find him.<\/p>\n Moura, star of Netflix\u2019s Narcos<\/a> and Alex Garland<\/a>\u2019s ever more prescient Civil War<\/a>, won Best Actor at Cannes<\/a> for this and is up for the Oscar; you can see why. Playing it close to the bone, Moura is by turns soulful and seductive, letting grief and paranoia simmer beneath that preternatural composure rather than boil over. He\u2019s flanked by scene-stealers: Maria, all gravelly authority and cigarette-roughened wisdom, and Udo Kier, who died late last year, in a brief but forceful cameo as a tailor and Holocaust survivor.<\/p>\n Mendon\u00e7a, whose unhinged dystopian western Bacurau won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019, is working at the top of his game. The Secret Agent pulses with heat and colour \u2013 carnival reds bleeding into coastal golds, sun catching on bright Beetle bodywork and people\u2019s faces, every frame saturated with summer. It\u2019s visually ravishing, making dictatorship-era Recife feel tactile and immediate. Mendon\u00e7a drools over period detail in ways that feel transporting: manual typewriters shrouded under plastic dust guards, bubble-shaped phone booths that seem plucked from a modernist fantasy, faded cinema marquees advertising The Omen. Movie theatres \u2013 the subject of his 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts \u2013 double as resistance hideouts. <\/p>\n At 158 minutes, the film teeters on self-indulgence, but it moves freely from scene to scene, propelled by Mendon\u00e7a\u2019s energetic camerawork and a performance that elevates Moura to the top table. Towards the end, we\u2019re dropped into the present day: archivists are studying old tapes, and we realise Marcelo\u2019s story has been preserved across generations. It\u2019s clever and bold. Few thrillers this year will risk this much, or land it so powerfully.<\/p>\n Dir: Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho. Starring: Wagner Moura, T\u00e2nia Maria, Enzo Nunes. Cert 15, 160 minutes.<\/p>\n \u2018The Secret Agent\u2019 is in cinemas from 20 February<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433891,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-433890","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433890\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Matinee-idol](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/THE-SECRET-AGENT_Still-1.jpeg\")
Matinee-idol magnetism: Wagner Moura is Oscar-nominated for his role in \u2018The Secret Agent\u2019 (Mubi)<\/p>\n