Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent may have been smuggled into American cinemas late last year but it really had its cover blown this winter when it triggered considerable awards attention. At the Golden Globes it won Best Actor — Drama and Best Foreign Language Film and became the first Brazilian film to be nominated for Best Picture — Drama. At the 98th Academy Awards (which, by the way, have you started to think about how insufferable the 100th Oscars are going to be?) it earned four nominations, although it didn’t win any. While it may seem like a coup, once you see it, you can’t notice it has many of the hallmarks of the kinds of movies the Academy adores in the 21st Century – especially, and unfortunately, fellow 2025 critical darling One Battle After Another (with a tasteful splash of No Country For Old Men).

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Film critics, especially the kind that make Important Lists, typically overcorrect for recency bias, which I respect. You can never be too sure something that seems groundbreaking now will still feel that way in a generation, and it’s just as easily to dismiss something that ends up being iconic. This Criterion Month I’ve been thinking about François Truffaut a lot and the importance of his debut, The 400 Blows. A towering achievement, especially as a directorial debut, Truffaut’s coming-of-age story is often discussed as one of the greatest films of all time.

Boyz n the Hood is older now than The 400 Blows was when Boyz n the Hood came out in 1991. I think that’s why Criterion recently released his Hood Trilogy box set, enough time has passed that you can talk about both these movies in the same breath. But what do I know? I just saw it. Maybe it’s too soon for me to be making declarations.

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When it comes to civil rights cinema, most of the attention has historically gone down south, where the fight for equality was its most dangerous. John Waters’ Hairspray is a sobering reminder that while things maybe not have been as violent in the north, there has always been just as much struggle to end segregation and work towards a more just future.

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When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.

Has there ever been a more damning indictment of romantic French cinema than Michel’s line here in Breathless? When I think about pretentious French movies, it’s exactly that: a man and a woman in black and white, both monologuing into the void about whatever the fuck instead of having anything that could possibly resemble human connection. So I guess it took a film critic making his first movie to put that shit on blast. It’s stuff like that that makes Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless still an exciting movie to watch 66 years after its release.

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From Terence Malick’s Badlands to Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, one of the most beloved sub-genres cinema’s great auteurs inevitably explore is stories about young lovers on the run. Ingmar Bergman went there when he was 35, a bit before all the big titles in his filmography, but nonetheless Summer with Monika did achieve its own unique sort of infamy: two years after its Swedish release, a Time magazine article about “Sin & Sweden” inspired an edited-down version of the movie to be released in the US, where it was a poster child Swedish exploitation films. Hard to believe that was ever a thing! Against all odds did Ingmar Bergman of all people make an early erotic masterpiece? And can a movie from 73 years ago still titillate audiences in 2026?

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