#brazilian-military-dictatorship

#brazilian-military-dictatorship

Unusually for a political period drama that is not in the English language, runs nearly three hours and peppers its authentic portrayal of a military dictatorship with sight gags and gory shootouts, The Secret Agent has transpired to be quite the awards magnet. Best picture and best actor, for its star Wagner Moura (who recently won a Golden Globe), are two of the four categories in which it will compete at next month's Oscars.

At a gas station en route, he tells inquisitive cops he's just traveling to attend the local Carnaval celebrations. But we suspect his mission is more urgent, a threat of discovery underlined not just by the officers' casual insistence on a bribe, but by the presence of a rotting corpse on the premises. The attendant says it's just a would-be robber who failed to get away.

Walter Salles' " I'm Still Here," which won the Best International Feature Film Oscar earlier this year, calmly but powerfully observes a real-life personal struggle under a dictatorship in Brazil during the early 1970s. While never overlooking the grim and horrific aspects of that time, the movie stays focused on small but resonant human moments, and these intimate interactions become all the more poignant to us as the story eventually arrives at its two-part epilogue.