Between an Oscar, a Silver Bear, and THE SECRET AGENT's sterling reviews, Brazilian cinema is having a moment.
The 2025 Cannes Film Festival is almost over, so I've got to get going with this miniseries. After the directors already discussed in parts one and two, it was Richard Linklater's turn to present his latest creation. Nouvelle Vague purports to tell the making of Godard's Breathless, paying homage to the vanguard's aesthetic in a fashion some have compared to Michel Hazanavicius' Oscar-winning pastiche. Lynne Ramsay proved polarizing, as usual, with her Die, My Love, a literary adaptation that's gotten critics raving about Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. But the best-reviewed title of this batch has to be Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent, a period thriller of epic proportions with Wagner Moura in the leading role. Then there's Tarik Saleh's supposedly underwhelming Eagles of the Republic and Julia Ducournau's follow-up to her Palme d'Or victory. The AIDS crisis allegory Alpha divided audiences and disappointed many of the director's fans, but that's to be expected with such a provocateur.
For this chapter of Cannes at Home, I invite you to revisit Linklater's Waking Life, Ramsay's Morvern Callar, Mendonça's Aquarius, Saleh's Cairo Conspiracy, and Ducournau's Titane…
WAKING LIFE (2001) Richard Linklater
I've often found that Rotoscoping produces a derealization effect on the viewer, suggesting not just uncanniness but a dereliction of material truth in pursuit of something that can feel both essential and essentially wrong. Few directors have taken more advantage of this than Richard Linklater in his few forays into animation. And though Waking Life doesn't go as far into the weeds of the technique as A Scanner Darkly, it still deserves recognition as the director's first attempt. Not only that, but I'd argue that, at a conceptual level, the project is fairly more interesting than its successor, going for philosophical musings, thought exercises, oneiric revery, as the conduit for detachment rather than recreational drug use.
This is also the closest Linklater ever came to an experimental verve in his work, breaking the form and the expectations associated with it to invoke a mood that's unlike anything else out there. Images float above themselves, pedestrian two-shots of dialogue turned into hallucinations where every shift in motion or angle creates a new barrier between us and the actuality of the scene as shot between a director and his actors. Rather than a gimmick, the approach appears to be in complete synergy with the text, a meandering thing whose diffuseness can't be anything but deliberate. Imagine the cineaste's earlier Slacker reimagined as a dream play and you'll get close to what Waking Life's up to. I, for one, am a fan.
Waking Life is available to rent and/or purchase from Amazon Video, Apple TV, the Microsoft Store, and Fandango at Home.
MORVERN CALLAR (2002) Lynne Ramsay
A dead body on the kitchen floor, a suicide note and an unpublished manuscript left on the computer, an apology and a box full of savings, Christmas lights twinkling in the background – thus starts Lynne Ramsay's seminal masterpiece, Morvern Callar. It's also, in fundamental terms, the entirety of the film's story condensed in its opening salvo. There's a mocking quality to such simplicity, as if the screen itself were snubbing those who look upon it and expect a delivery system for narrative and little else. Just like the chintzy holiday décor mocks the titular character as she ponders her boyfriend's demise, so does the film mock those unprepared for what it's about to deliver.
While it's adapted from an experimental first-person novel by Alan Warner, Morvern Callar expresses itself as a manifestation of pure cinema applied to character study. We don't so much assess the woman or her behavior, her radical choices, as we are led down a path of visceral understanding, the sort of which can only be articulated in images and sounds rather than words. At least, as they are manifest here, where composition is more insightful than a monologue, and the contradictions inherent to Morvern's actions make perfect, if inexplicable, sense. What better way to showcase the brutality of a gesture than to fragment it, looking away while also staring unblinkingly at the thing?
Then again, violence and its presentation have always fascinated Ramsay, who might well be the most crucial portrayer of such things in modern cinema. Her revelations through omission are unbeatable, graceful while ruthless, weaponizing the limits of the cinematic frame, its soundscape, to great effect. Much the same could be said about every observation made on Morvern, who Samantha Morton brings to life in a miraculous, near-wordless performance that's easy to take for granted. But breaking Morvern Callar into parts to praise individual achievements misses the point of a creation that exemplifies something akin to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, as approached through unassuming cinematic devices, more incisive than spectacular and all the better for it.
Morvern Callar is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Fawesome, Kanopy, Metrograph, and the Roku Channel. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video.
AQUARIUS (2016) Kleber Mendonça Filho
Few films have as seamlessly embodied their protagonist's core values and disposition as Aquarius does with Clara. Played by a never better Sônia Braga, this 60-something former music critic and widow presents herself to the camera with a fearless stare, uncompromising and confrontational, even when merely existing in an intimate moment by herself. Facing thoughts of mortality, she's more alive than ever, looking back at a life of accumulated memories while still trying to hold on to the present and forge a future, whether emotionally or in matters of the flesh. Vital is a way to describe her, but it also feels insufficient. In any case, she's one of the 21st century's great characters and we're lucky to know her.
And, as mentioned before, Aquarius is a film in her image, not just a vessel for us to meet this woman or Braga's formidable interpretation of her. Because Kleber Mendonça Filho's approach replicates the mixtape qualities of Clara's cultural identity, her personhood as established in her life's work and house. Indeed, that space becomes the linchpin for the narrative, as Clara's immovability becomes an act of resistance against the changing times, capitalist interests imposing themselves on the Recife community, all too eager to demolish old homes to build luxury high-rises in their place. Stubborn to the bone, both Aquarius and its heroine flourish as pieces of political outrage, blazing bright and blinding over a backdrop of ultramarine waves and tropical heat.
That said, it'd be erroneous to reduce Clara or Aquarius to their rage. Mendonça is a deeply humanistic director, even when playing with genre or putting forward an activist message. And so, his magnum opus is as prone to instants of shapeless observation as it is keen on abrupt tonal changes whose quickness seems calibrated to set the audience on edge. Indeed, as the years go by, the contrasts between a memoirist opening and the termite-infested finale reveal a through line of complementary oppositions. One wouldn't make sense without the other. Together, joined by an unrushed sprawl of a narrative, they tell the story of a woman, a city, a country, and a director's vision of cinema in all its multifaceted potential.
Aquarius is streaming on Kanopy and the Kino Film Collection. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
CAIRO CONSPIRACY (2022) Tarik Saleh
Winner of the Best Screenplay award at the 75th Cannes Film Festival, Cairo Conspiracy, originally titled Boy from Heaven, would make a good introduction to Tarik Saleh's oeuvre. All of his strengths and weaknesses are present, encompassing his ease with thriller tensions and the didactic stumbles he so often commits along the way. The whole thing is also a tad cautious, tentatively gloaming unto a criticism of Islamic extremism that tries its best to avoid controversy while still making its political points clear enough that any viewer could ascertain them. That's not to say Cairo Conspiracy is a picture without internal tensions, smooth rather than abrasive in all the right places. Timidity doesn't preclude such qualities.
But what is this supposed thriller about, you may ask? Well, the best way to describe it in 2025 is probably as a Muslim spin on Conclave with a spy plot woven into the realpolitik of organized religion. The Grand Imam has died and elections are to take place, diverging interests between radicals and moderates and the government spinning a web of lies that a young student-turned-spy must navigate. He's got no other option, stuck between a rock and a hard place, desperate and in mortal peril if he should be found out. It's a juicy premise that the Swedish director realizes conventionally, with polished form and not a lot of risk-taking. The game cast is the foundation of the film's success, including Saleh's greatest muse and collaborator – Egyptian star Fares Fares.
Cairo Conspiracy is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Hoopla, Kanopy, Plex, Pluto TV, and the Roku Channel. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
TITANE (2021) Julia Ducournau
Julia Ducournau's second theatrical release and third overall feature shouldn't work. Titane tells the tall tale of a woman with the name of Alexia and a metal plate in her head who, one night, fucks a Cadillac and goes on a murder spree. After much bloodshed, including that of her parents, the serial killer finds refuge with a grieving firefighter who believes his missing son has come back home. Assuming a new masculine identity, Alexia develops a strange bond with her new parental figure, transcending familial tenderness into a strange homoeroticism where ideas of gender get torn to shreds and then some. Also, she's pregnant, and the father is a car. Talk about a high concept.
If only to make matters worse for herself, the French provocateur structures Titane so that it opens with some of its most invigorating scenes. Character introductions and table setters are manifest in a quasi-hallucinatory rush, bristling and bold in a way that should only result in a freefalling narrative, getting less interesting as it goes along. But then, Ducournau sustains it. Moreover, she deepens ideas, amps up the shock and awe as Titane unravels, appealing to grace when you'd expect brutality and vice-versa. To categorize this under the "so broad as to be meaningless" umbrella of body horror does a disservice to an experience that seems less concerned with horrifying the spectator than it is with suggesting transcendence.
Be that the miracle of transcending the self as it pertains to gender or one's body, one's desires or one's emotional baggage, memories and loss, trauma and other shackles around the soul. It's not inspiring in any sentimental terms, mind you. It spits on such nonsense even as it celebrates the mess of unconditional love, right down to the quasi-fetishist family portrait that concludes Ducournau's nightmare. As I previously stated in my 2021 top ten, Spike Lee and his Cannes jury got it right, delivering one of the wildest and most unusual Palme d'Or victors in the festival's history. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Would you?
Titane is streaming on Kanopy. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
You might have noticed I skipped Chie Hayakawa and Wes Anderson in this odyssey through the Official Competition auteurs. Well, since I've already reviewed the Japanese director's only other feature, Plan 75, at The Film Experience, a revisit seemed redundant. As for American cinema's whimsiest son, I have something prepared to honor him in a way that wouldn't fit into the Cannes at Home. Stay tuned for a complete Wes Anderson ranking, which includes The Phoenicean Scheme, coming your way very soon.
In the meantime, please share your most anticipated film from these directors' new offerings. Are you most psyched for Nouvelle Vague, Die, My Love, The Secret Agent, Eagles of the Republic, or the controversial Alpha? Sound off in the comments.