Review: 'The Secret Agent,' a paranoid thriller for a new era, puts Wagner Moura in a perfect role — a man thinking his way out of deadly trouble

I’m going to keep my synopsis for “The Secret Agent” as brief as I can manage, because it’s best not to know too much going into writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s a slow burn of a thriller — a movie that rewards the audience’s patience.

It’s 1977 in Brazil, which Mendonça Filho refers to as “a time of great mischief.” It’s here where we meet Marcelo (played by Wagner Moura), who’s driving across Brazil to his old home town, Recife. He settles into an apartment building where Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), an old rebel, provides housing and sanctuary for refugees and other immigrants.

Why has Marcelo returned to Recife? That’s left deliberately under wraps for a while. The one hint Mendonça Filho provides is a scene where an old rich man (Luciano Chirolli) is paying two hitmen (Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone) to find and kill Marcelo. The old man’s reasons seem to be both monetary and personal — and, in later flashbacks, we find out why.

It’s in those flashbacks that we also learn what Marcelo — if that’s his real name — is doing back in Recife. For him, also, It’s personal on several fronts, including a reunion with his son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who’s obsessed with the movie he’s not allowed to see: “Jaws.” A news report about a severed leg found inside a shark’s belly doesn’t do anything to dissuade Fernando, but the thought of the shark feeds Marcelo’s nightmares.

When Marcelo gets a job in a government archive, he is befriended by Chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes), Recife’s corrupt head of the police. Euclides, flanked by two young thugs, doesn’t seem to know that people — powerful people the chief knows — want Marcelo dead.

Mendonça Filho steeps “The Secret Agent” in the film language of the ’70s — “Jaws,” obviously, but also early Brian de Palma movies and the paranoid thrillers of the era, like “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View.” The tension here, though, is also woven into Brazil’s history, and a time of a military junta that stifles dissent through censorship and forced disappearances. 

Moura gives a smoldering performance, one that earned him a Best Actor award at Cannes in May — where Mendonça Filho also was awarded Best Director. Moura keeps his emotions locked down, but in flashes he reveals a lot about what’s brought him back to Recife and what he’s determined to do.

Mendonça Filho also includes a framing story, involving a current researcher (Laura Lufési) transcribing tapes from Marcelo’s time for some government project. It’s a grace note that reminds us that the bad days of authoritarianism aren’t that far removed from today, and can sneak back up on us if we’re not careful.

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‘The Secret Agent’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 12, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for strong bloody violence, sexual content, language, and some full nudity. Running time: 161 minutes; in Portuguese, with subtitles. 

Review: 'Ella McCay,' occasionally funny and earnest to a fault, falls to director James L. Brooks' habit of being too nice to his characters

The thing about James L. Brooks, as a writer and as a director, is that he likes all his characters — sometimes to a fault, as seen in his shaggy, sloppy, overstuffed new comedy, “Ella McCay.”

The man behind “Terms of Endearment” and “Broadcast News” hasn’t directed a movie since “How Do You Know” in 2010, and there’s a certain creakiness in the way he conjures up these characters, many of them well-meaning and charming when taken separately but a little too much when flung together in one movie.

Our title character, played by Emma Mackey, is a young politician in Albany, N.Y., who’s better at policy details than the glad-handing and horse-trading of modern politics. She started out as aide to Bill Moore (Albert Brooks), a Democratic politician who is a natural at shaking hands and fund-raising — and when Moore became governor, he made Ella his lieutenant governor. 

Before we get to that, though, there’s a prologue showing the teen Ella coping with the death of her mother, Claire (Rebecca Hall), and the unfaithfulness of her father, Eddie (Woody Harrelson). Ella keeps her anger in check, to protect her younger brother, Casey, as they move in to live with their aunt, Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis). 

Back to the present: Gov. Moore gets the call to join the president’s cabinet, making Ella the governor. Ella tries to apply her head for policy to the state’s economic problems. Unfortunately, her lack of skill as a negotiator starts to unravel her governorship just as it’s starting. Compounding her problems is her husband, Ryan Newell (Jack Lowden), who owns some local pizza restaurants and wants to finagle his way into her administration. 

Then more family problems intrude. Eddie pops up unexpectedly, for starters. And Casey (played by Spike Fearn), now an agoraphobic sports-betting wizard with an unusual amount of recreational marijuana on hand, is pining for the woman (Ayo Edebiri) he let get away a year earlier.

Ella is not without support, chiefly from Aunt Helen, who acerbically cuts down anyone who dares to run afoul of her niece. Also in her corner is the state trooper who drives her (Kumail Nanjiani), and her cantankerous secretary, Estelle — played by Julie Kavner, who applies her Marge Simpson tones to the role of narrator.

That’s a lot of people to juggle in one movie, and maybe Brooks had it in mind to let things play out on the set and then cut a couple of characters in the editing bay. If Brooks is familiar with the advice given to writers, to “kill your darlings,” he didn’t heed it here.

Mackey gives a nice performance, though sometimes so subdued that she fades into obscurity amid her louder, wackier co-stars, like Curtis and Harrelson. Among the supporting cast, the standout is Brooks, in fleeting moments, who’s funny as the old-time politician who tries to mentor Ella. 

“Ella McCay” is a movie that hits on five interesting ideas when three would be enough. It’s an unfortunate example of subtraction by addition. 

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‘Ella McCay’

★★

Opens Friday, December 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong language, some sexual material and drug content. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Hamnet,' a tale of William Shakespeare and his wife, beautifully captures how nature and grief are lived and translated into art

Director Chloe Zhao opens “Hamnet” in a forest, the sort of magical place where William Shakespeare could have set one of his lighter comedies, like “As You Like It” or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — which makes the emotional ride this imagined drama about Shakespeare’s personal life all the more moving.

Anne Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), referred to here as Agnes, spends her time in this forest collecting medicinal herbs and training her falcon — both talents she learned from her mother, who was labeled a forest witch. It’s also where Will (Paul Mescal), who teaches Latin to Agnes’ brothers to pay off his family’s debt to her father (David Wilmot), encounters Agnes. 

On their first meeting, he kisses her and she sends him away. On their second meeting, she asks him to tell a story — and he recalls the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which charms her. They have sex, and Agnes becomes pregnant. Her parents banish her, and Agnes and Will marry and have a daughter, Susanna.

Time passes, in an ethereal way that suits Zhao’s beautifully meditative style, and Agnes becomes pregnant again. Will is miserable trying to write in the country, so Agnes agrees that Will should go to London to pursue writing plays and staging them.

Agnes then gives birth to twins — a daughter, Judith, who seems at first to be stillborn but gradually comes to life, and a son, called Hamnet. All three children are a joy to their mother, and dote on Will when he occasionally comes home. In one scene, the three kids portray the witches from Will’s play, “Macbeth,” and he laughs heartily.

I do not intend to spoil what happens next, suffice it to say it involves how young Hamnet is connected to Shakespeare’s similarly named play — a play about parents and children dealing with grief and loss, and the expression of those emotions through some of the most soulful words ever put to paper. (In the film, the two also are connected by blood: The young actor who plays Hamnet, Jacobi Jupe, is the brother to Noah Jupe, who in the film’s shattering climax plays the actor performing as Hamlet in Will’s company.)

The script — which Zhao wrote with Maggie O’Farrell, on whose novel the movie is based — doesn’t tell when it can show, and Zhao shows with subtlety and quiet inference. This is a movie that gives its rewards to those willing to sit with it, to follow Agnes as she brings their children together with nature and grieves when tragedy strikes, and to listen to Will turn those emotions into poetry.

Mescal is ferociously good as the brooding Will, but it’s Buckley who becomes the heart and soul of “Hamnet” — as she channels Agnes’ bond with nature, and primarily as she lets waves of emotions play out quietly on her face in the movie’s brilliant ending. 

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‘Hamnet’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 5, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic content, some strong sexuality, and partial nudity. Running time: 125 minutes.

Review: 'Merrily We Roll Along' captures the joys of the Broadway revival — including Jonathan Groff's impossibly good looks and Daniel Radcliffe's neuroses

Since most of us don’t have the ready cash or proximity to New York to experience the magic of a Broadway musical, the next best thing is a movie like “Merrily We Roll Along,” which nicely captures the live show in a bottle.

Shot in June 2024 at New York’s Hudson Theatre, the movie features the Tony-winning revival of composer Stephen Sondheim’s smartly conceived musical about a playwright, Frank Shepard (played here by Jonathan Groff), and his two best friends, musician Charley Kringas (Daniel Radcliffe) and magazine writer-turned-novelist Mary Flynn (Lindsay Mendez). 

When Sondheim and playwright George Furst initially wrote the musical in 1981, they kept the story structure from the source material, a 1934 Kaufman/Hart play: Telling the story in reverse chronology — showing Frank, Charley and Mary first as older and disillusioned, gradually catching them younger and more idealistic.

The opening scene is in Frank’s Hollywood home in 1977, when he’s a successful producer of lucrative but dumb movies. Director Maria Friedman, who also directed the stage version, starts by putting Groff’s impossibly handsome face in tight closeup, even when he’s not the one singing — and Frank’s feelings of self-loathing and self-centeredness play out on his face.

Mary is on the sidelines, drunkenly acting as Frank’s conscience, making acerbic comments about the hangers-on trying to get Frank’s attention. She’s also watching as Frank’s wife, Broadway actress Gussie Carnegie (Krystal Joy Brown), is figuring out that Frank is having an affair with the ingenue of his latest show (Talia Robinson, part of the play’s versatile ensemble). Charley is missing, because he and Frank haven’t spoken to each other in four years.

A musical transition takes the story back to 1973, and the last time Frank and Charley talked. It was on live TV, when the two, then a successful songwriting duo, were promoting their latest Broadway show. The interviewer lets slip something Frank hadn’t told Charley yet: Frank has signed a three-picture deal, which will mean a move to Hollywood. Charley unloads to the interviewer about his frustration with Frank’s pursuit of money over art. The song, “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” is a fast-moving ball of lyrical rage, and Radcliffe knocks it out of the park.

Then it’s 1968, and Frank has a new apartment overlooking Central Park, welcoming his son, Frankie (Max Rackenberg), who he hasn’t seen since a bitter divorce from Beth (Katie Rose Clarke). The reason for the divorce: Frank’s affair with Gussie, then married to Joe (Reg Rogers), the producer of Frank and Charley’s breakout stage hit, “Musical Husbands.” Mary, who we figure out has long carried a torch for Frank, learns of the affair and takes up drinking.

Each step backwards in the timeline, the story shows us the friendships as they started, grew and grew apart. We also see how Frank and Charley’s youthful enthusiasm, and their desire to make art that means something, took the blows that life usually delivers — family responsibilities, financial survival and the messiness of having other people depend on you. And all of it is delivered through some of Sondheim’s best compositions, with complex rhyme schemes and intelligent wordplay.

All three leads are a joy to watch. Mendez builds a mask of sarcastic wit to hide the pain of loving Frank and not feeling that love returned. Radcliffe shows Charley to be a jittery ball of anxiety, a perfect foil for the glad-handing Frank. And Groff dominates as he portrays, in reverse, Frank’s slow slide into artistic compromise. Seeing all three together, in this time capsule of a movie, is sheer theatrical delight.

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‘Merrily We Roll Along’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 5, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for drug use, some strong language, and smoking. Running time: 149 minutes.

Review: 'Five Nights at Freddy's 2' is fan service at its worst, a horror thriller that will bore all but the die-hards

Two years ago, director Emma Tammi had it both ways with her cinematic take on Scott Cawthon’s video game “Five Nights at Freddy’s” — delivering the characters and jump-scare shocks the game’s fans demanded, while trying to craft a plausible and fairly good horror thriller that newcomers could enjoy. 

Now, the inevitable sequel, “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” goes all in with the fans, and leaves anyone on the outside wondering why anything this tedious and incoherent ever made it to theaters. And, what’s worse, the whole thing ends with an obvious attempt to set up a third movie.

The prologue sets up what’s ostensibly different about this chapter of the story. It’s a flashback to 1982, in what we quickly learn is the original location for Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, where animatronic animal characters entertain kids amid the arcade games, ball pit and pizza parties going on around them. These scenes focus on one introverted girl, Charlotte (Audrey Lynn Marie), whose obsession with one animatronic creature — The Marionette — ends badly.

Fast-forward 20 years, and we’re back with the characters from the first movie. Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) is trying to raise his kid sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), who’s now 11 and has a not-so-healthy fascination with robotics. Mike is also, as we see early, about to go out on a first date with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), the cop who helped take down the possessed animatronics in their local Freddy’s restaurant.

Vanessa is dealing with bad dreams, mostly involving her dead father, William Afton (Matthew Lillard), the creator of the original Freddy’s and its creepy animal figures. She hasn’t been entirely honest with Mike about everything she knows about her father’s work, but it all comes spilling out when a group of young ghost-hunting social-media stars (led by “Regretting You’s” McKenna Grace) accidentally unleash the Charlotte-possessed Marionette, which aims to kill parents everywhere by remotely controlling the original Freddy robots.

Tammi is back directing this sequel, and she manages to create a few good movie scares. The key weakness here is the script, credited solely to Cawthon, the game’s creator, who’s good at referencing his past work but terrible at setting up a movie scenario more complicated than a jump scare. Those tricks may work repeatedly in a video game, where they catch you because your mind is busy trying to figure out the gameplay, but get old fast in a movie.

Then there are the copious Easter eggs, which are given more thought than the movie’s actual plot. One sequence involves the Freddy character attacking a family on Elm Street (get it?). YouTuber CoryxKenshin returns in a cameo as a disbelieving cab driver. And horror movie fans will get a chuckle, maybe, when they see the actor who plays Charlotte’s father: Skeet Ulrich, Lillard’s partner in crime in the original “Scream” back in 1996. 

Winking references, though, do not a good movie make. Neither do telegraphed “twists” that are included only to set up a third movie. If the point of the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” franchise is that observers are supposed to survive in this creepy scenario, the makers should really make sure those entering Freddy’s world don’t die from boredom first.

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‘Five Nights at Freddy’s 2’

★

Opens Friday, December 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violent content, terror and some language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Wake Up Dead Man,' the third 'Knives Out' whodunnit, has Daniel Craig solving a murder and pondering the mysteries of faith

Benoit Blanc — the dapper, drawling detective that Daniel Craig plays for the third time in the delicious “Knives Out” sequel “Wake Up Dead Man” — has a great “impossible murder” on his hands, further complicated because the person on the scene helping him may in fact be the killer.

Though Blanc is the first person writer-director Rian Johnson shows us in the movie, he doesn’t come into play for a good 40 minutes or so. To get there, we start with the narrator, Father Jud Duplenticy, played by Josh O’Connor. Father Jud, a former boxer who punched out a deacon, is assigned to a remote church in upstate New York, Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. That church is ruled with an iron hand by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), whose fire-and-brimstone sermons are a far cry from Father Jud’s gentle pastoral view of the Roman Catholic Church.

The core of the parishioners seem to favor Mons. Wicks’ approach. Those include: Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), a sharp-eyed attorney; Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), the town’s physician, who’s in a funk since his wife left him; Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), a cellist who thinks Wicks’ prayers can cure her chronic pain; Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a formerly successful science-fiction author who’s turned into a conspiracy-mongering conservative; and Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), Vera’s stepson and a cynically internet-savvy Republican political candidate.

There’s also Wicks’ always lurking assistant, Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), who sternly oversees the church’s records and helps him keep discipline over the flock. Her one weakness is her love for the church’s groundskeeper, Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), who would rather watch a baseball game than listen to Wicks berate newcomers over their sinful ways.

Father Jud aims to make some changes, to bring some New Testament tenderness to Wicks’ Old Testament fearfulness. The ensuing conflict takes a grim turn when, in the middle of Mass on Palm Sunday, Wicks is stabbed to death in a small storage room near the altar, a space where it seems impossible for anyone to enter or leave without being noticed. The first one to get to Wicks is Father Jud, and soon he becomes the only suspect that the local police chief, Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis), has on her list.

Here’s where Blanc enters the picture, and from there it’s an exhilarating mystery — a game, as several characters call it, in which Blanc combs through the evidence, picks through people’s alibis and unravels the dark secrets of every parishioner.

Johnson is also playing a serious game here, in which Jud and Blanc discuss and sometimes debate the differences between faith and science, between giving oneself over to a higher power and devoting oneself to reason and empirical data. Those moments make “Wake Up Dead Man” more than just a fun murder romp, like “Knives Out” and its first sequel, “Glass Onion,” but give the audience some deeper questions to ponder than just “whodunnit?”

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‘Wake Up Dead Man’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 26, in theaters; starts streaming December 12 on Netflix. Rated R for … Running time: 149 minutes.

Review: 'Zootopia 2' delivers more sharp humor and plot twists than the original, and flies the messages under the radar

It’s been nine years since Disney debuted “Zootopia,” a clever and good-hearted animated tale about a rabbit cop and a con-artist fox who team up, in a parable about fear, prejudice and acceptance that seemed well timed for the political winds of 2016.

With “Zootopia 2,” director-writer Jared Bush and co-director Byron Howard return with a sharper story that keeps the political messaging more subtle and instead wows with sharp humor and a smartly twisty plot.

Officer Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and her partner Nick Wilde (voiced by Jason Bateman) are partners in the Zootopia Police Department — though the big bullies on the force, including Chief Bogo (voiced by Idris Elba), remain skeptical that the case they cracked to save the city wasn’t a fluke. Bogo is even less happy when Judy and Nick intervene in a customs bust, which ends in a chaotic car chase.

In the aftermath of that case, Judy thinks she’s found evidence that someone is smuggling a snake into Zootopia, a place where reptiles have been absent for a century. It was 100 years ago that a snake was believed to have killed a maid working for the city’s founder, Ebenezer Lynxley, credited as the inventor of the weather control system that allows so many different animals to live together peacefully in Zootopia.

As Judy digs deeper, with a reluctant Nick behind her, a bigger conspiracy unfolds involving the current Lynxley clan, who control the town and Mayor Winddancer (voiced by Patrick Warburton), a former action star horse. Soon, Judy and Nick are being framed for an attack on Chief Bogo, and are on the run with a refugee snake, Gary (voiced by Ke Huy Quan), the outcast member of the Lynxley family, Pawbert (voiced by Andy Samberg), and Nibbles Maplestick (voiced by Fortune Feimster), an overly eager beaver with a conspiracy podcast.

Bush’s script includes plot twists that would be welcome in any action thriller, as well as jokes that work for both the younger audience and the adults bringing them to the theater. (Just one example: When Judy and Nick go to the Zootopia jail, they encounter some of the criminals they helped put there, including the first movie’s main villain, the sheep Mayor Bellwether, voiced by Jenny Slate — who’s in a Plexiglass cell that evokes Hannibal Lecter’s room in “The Silence of the Lambs.”) 

There are some nice morals to this story, too — about being confident and trusting your partner, but also about using fear and propaganda to demonize outsiders — but in “Zootopia 2,” they sneak in under viewers’ defenses through the plentiful action and jokes. 

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‘Zootopia 2’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/violence and rude humor. Running time: 108 minutes.

Review: 'Eternity' presents a comic afterlife you wouldn't want to visit, with people you wouldn't want to hang out with forever

If, as the makers of the comedy-drama “Eternity” imagine it, I will get to choose one place to go after I die, I would not choose to spend my afterlife in the scenario depicted in this emotionally unbalanced movie — and certainly not with the shrill, plastic characters we spend time with here.

When we meet Larry and Joan Cutler, they’ve been married for 65 years (played by Barry Primus and Betty Buckley), and seem to be in a perpetual conversation that is dominated by griping, complaining and bickering. However, it’s also clear they love each other greatly, with Larry tending to Joan as she’s going through cancer treatments.

At a gender-reveal party for one of their grandchildren, Larry chokes on a pretzel and dies. When he realizes what’s going on, he’s on a train headed to a way station for the afterlife. He’s also now played by Miles Teller, as it’s explained that when people die, their physical form reverts to the time in life when they were happiest — which is why, as Larry’s “afterlife consultant,” Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), explains, the afterlife has a lot of 10-year-old children and very few teen-agers.

Anna tells Larry that he has one week to choose from the variety of eternities available — which are pitched in an exhibition hall like commercial goods at a trade expo. When Larry says he doesn’t want to decide until Joan arrives, Anna tells him he’ll have to get a job in this limbo, so he does. One person he befriends is Luke (Callum Turner), who’s been tending bar in this station for 67 years.

Joan dies shortly after Larry, so she (now played by Elizabeth Olsen) soon arrives at the station, where her afterlife coordinator, Ryan (John Early), has been waiting eagerly to meet her. The reason for Ryan’s eagerness is that he knows what Larry doesn’t: That Luke is no mere bartender, but Joan’s first husband, who died in the Korean War and has been waiting for her all this time.

Joan is now faced not only with the choice of which eternity to live in, but which husband she might pick to share it with. And Larry and Luke’s childish behavior toward each other doesn’t make Joan’s choice any easier.

Director David Freyne and his co-writer, Patrick Cunnane (a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama), land some substantial laughs setting up the terms and conditions for the afterlife — where one can choose to spend eternity in idealized versions of 1840s Ireland or 1960s Paris, or something called “Man Free World” (which is fully booked, but the expansion is coming soon). They’re less successful as they try to define these characters or sketch out the plot mechanics as they navigate an eternal love triangle.

Too much of “Eternity” depends on the charisma of the three leads, which they have in abundance. The most engaging of the three is Olsen, who brings a post-death sense of liberation to Joan — someone who, finally, gets to do what she wants rather than what’s expected of her. One hopes Joan eventually chooses an afterlife that’s not so regimented and nitpicky.

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‘Eternity’

★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sexual content and some strong language. Running time: 112 minutes.