Review: "The Secret Agent" is a mischievous masterpiece

by Cláudio Alves

Today, The Secret Agent begins its Oscar-qualifying run, ahead of an awards season it enters full of high hopes. And why not? At Cannes, Kleber Mendonça Filho won the Best Director trophy while Wagner Moura was picked as Best Actor by the Main Competition jury, a set of honors complemented by the FIPRESCI prize, which made it the Croisette's most awarded film. Between critical acclaim and yet more festival hardware, The Secret Agent was announced as Brazil's official submission for the 98th Academy Awards, where it surely hopes to replicate some of I'm Still Here's success from last year. Right now, it's up for two Gotham awards, competing in the categories of Best Original Screenplay and Outstanding Lead Performance. 

All that said, at this time of the year, it's easy to let oneself think about cinema exclusively in these terms. The race for gold is a thrilling diversion, yet it shouldn't distract us from appreciating the art for what it is. Nor should it flatten how we look at film. In The Secret Agent's case, this is especially true as it's a work much greater than any award could hope to be. Pardon the hyperbole, but I'd easily call it a masterpiece, an instant classic even…

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Gotham Awards Revue: The Breakthrough Performer Category

by Nick Taylor

Sebiye Behtiyar in Bing Liu's PREPARATIONS FOR THE NEXT LIFE | © Amazon MGM Studios

First, I’m bummed I wasn’t able to see Preparation for the Next Life before this article was published. Hopefully the film and Sebiye Behtiyar’s performance will raise my baseline appreciation of the Gotham Awards’ choices even further. I also have no idea if anyone notably missed out, what with the Gotham’s broad eligibility requirements and my lack of awareness about this year’s major debuts. Miles Caton in Sinners, Cary Christopher in Weapons, and... I don’t know! With these caveats in mind, I still say they’ve kicked off the year with a solid Breakthrough Actor category.

All four of these performers help to serve and strengthen their films, and I look forward to seeing them again on the silver screen...

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Gotham Awards Revue: "The Perfect Neighbor"

by Nick Taylor

Geeta Gandhbir’s The Perfect Neighbor has to be one of the most widely accessible films nominated at this year’s Gotham Awards, premiering only a few weeks ago on Netflix. With a title so banal as to signal immediate dread, the true-crime subject matter made it priority viewing to some even before it received this citation. My own queasiness with the genre kept me from watching it until now, and it's an intriguing object to consider in how it relates to other activist documents. Assembled almost exclusively of footage collected from police bodycams, security cameras, drone footage, news archives, and court tapings, the film chronicles the boiling tensions in an Ocala, Florida neighborhood over two years that culminated in the killing of Ajike Owens by Susan Lorincz on June 2, 2023. It’s an upsetting document of an all-too-familiar American tragedy, streamlined into a more broadly resonant object but possibly verging on exploitative and under-contextualized in the process . . . . 

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Gotham Awards Revue: "Familiar Touch"

by Nick Taylor

First, let me express how happy I am that, at least from my filmgoing corner, the Gotham nominations have encouraged more people to watch some of their lower-profile selections. The number of folks I’ve seen log Familiar Touch and Lurker and East of Wall on Letterboxd this past week has been extremely heartening. Hell, I never would’ve prioritized Familiar Touch without Nick Davis’s glowing review, I finally got our own Cláudio Alves to watch it last night, and now everyone who’s going to see it after today will obviously have done so because of me, so trust the power of good word-of-mouth reception! If anything I should have had Sarah Friedland’s film on my radar after she won the Someone to Watch award at the most recent Indie Spirits. Oh, and the three prizes the film won in the Orizzonti selection of last year’s Venice Film Festival.  

Friedland’s clearly got a great pedigree even before factoring in the Best Feature and Breakthrough Director nominations from the Gothams. Luckily for those of us who’ve caught up to Familiar Touch, this adulation is fully deserved, and the crafty, intelligent film is proof enough of her talent . . . .

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2025 Gotham Award Nominees

by Nick Taylor

With yesterday's announcement from the Gotham Awards, our very first nominees of the 2025 awards season have arrived. Setting aside my inherent disdain for the big-budget American films now allowed to compete alongside genuine independent cinema across the world, this looks like a pretty neat set of films! Let's dive into the nominees, and as always, share somoe verbose opinions despite not seeing all these features . . . .

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