“The Secret Agent Network”
January 7–13, 2026
On the occasion of The Secret Agent’s theatrical release at Film at Lincoln Center, Kleber Mendonça Filho programs a selection of works that informed his ambitious new film, with Q&As at The Secret Agent (Jan. 7) and Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later (Jan. 8).
For tickets and more information, visit:
https://www.filmlinc.org/series/the-secret-agent-network/?tab=films
THE SECRET AGENT / O AGENTE SECRETO
A film by Kleber Mendonça Filho
(Brazil/France/Netherlands/Germany, 2025, 159 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who has gifted us such breathtakers as Aquarius and Bacurau, returns with a thrillingly unpredictable, empowering political fable about people swept up in forces beyond their control. A dynamic, shape-shifting epic set in Mendonça’s hometown of Recife during the late 1970s, The Secret Agent earned him the Best Director award at Cannes. Wagner Moura was also deservedly honored as Best Actor at the festival for his magnetic performance as a widowed former university researcher whose life has been violently upended by the greed and vengeance of a government bureaucrat. On the run and living under an alias during the country’s military dictatorship, he tries to escape while also reconnecting with the young son he had to leave behind. Even this brief description cannot fully prepare the viewer for the zigzagging subplots and delights of Mendonça’s eccentric and affectionate ode to the movies and the Brazil of his youth—and to maintaining individuality amid abuses of power. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection. A NEON release.
Wednesday, January 7 at 6:15pm – Q&A with Kleber Mendonça Filho
POINT BLANK
(John Boorman. USA/UK, 1967, 92 min. In English)
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Left for dead after a heist gone wrong, Lee Marvin’s aptly named Walker crosses Los Angeles with an eerie resolve to find the money and men who betrayed him: a faceless corporate syndicate known only as “the Organization.” Boorman takes this ostensibly straightforward revenge plot and turns it into a kind of modernist ghost story through abrupt flashbacks, unexplained shifts in mise-en-scène, long stretches that unfold under ambient noise or near-silence, and widescreen anamorphic compositions that estrange the city around Walker. The cumulative effect places us in the liminal headspace of a man who may already be dead, transforming the Organization into an embodiment of diffuse, indestructible institutional power that erases Walker’s personhood even as he guns down its underlings one by one.
THE EAR / ECHO
(Karel Kachyňa, Czechoslovakia, 1970, 94 min. In Czech with English subtitles)
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Already on edge in the wake of an ongoing Communist purge, a government official, Ludvik, and his soured wife, Anna, return home from a political soirée to discover that their keys are missing, their electricity has been cut, and “the ear” of the regime may be listening in on their every word. So begins a long night’s journey into dread as the two bicker, booze, and crawl the walls with fear. Completed in the uneasy aftermath of the Prague Spring and immediately banned for its unvarnished depiction of state surveillance, The Ear compresses an entire police state into one sleepless night, revealing how authoritarian power hides in plain sight and corrodes the fragile boundary between safety and terror.
Saturday, January 10 at 5:45pm; Tuesday, January 13 at 6:15pm
U.S. Premiere of 4K Restoration
INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION
(Elio Petri Italy, 1970, 115 min. In Italian with English subtitles)
4K Restoration
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Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Elio Petri’s masterpiece remains one of cinema’s most caustic dissections of institutional power. A newly promoted police inspector murders his mistress and then brazenly scatters evidence, daring his own department to accuse him. Born of the political unrest of 1968 and the hardening reflexes of Italy’s security state, the film pushes the crime thriller toward grotesque satire to expose the psychological and structural logic of unchecked authority. Gian Maria Volonté’s unnervingly elastic performance plays the inspector as both swaggering strongman and unraveling paranoiac, yielding a feverish blend of satire and procedural in which the law exists only to protect itself.
Thursday, January 8 at 3:30pm; Sunday, January 11 at 8:15pm at the Walter Reade Theater
IRACEMA / IRACEMA, UMA TRANSA AMAZÔNICA
(Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, Brazil, 1974, 91 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
4K Restoration
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Shot along the freshly carved Trans-Amazonian Highway during the early years of Brazil’s dictatorship, Iracema captures a country violently remaking itself through state-backed “development” and the accelerating destruction of the Amazon. An Indigenous teenager drifts into Belém do Pará and falls in with a swaggering trucker who parrots the regime’s optimism while hauling contraband hardwood through a forest disappearing in real time. Their uneasy bond becomes a road movie through a ravaged landscape, where progress reveals itself as displacement. Banned by the military government, the film remains one of the clearest cinematic indictments of extractive ideology ever made.
LÚCIO FLÁVIO: THE PASSENGER OF AGONY / LÚCIO FLÁVIO, O PASSAGEIRO DA AGONIA
(Héctor Babenco, Brazil, 1977, 126 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
70mm Director’s Cut
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Released at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Héctor Babenco’s street-level thriller charts the rise and fall of a charismatic bank robber whose celebrity exploits unfold alongside the covert operations of the regime’s notorious police death squad. As alliances fracture and loyalties dissolve, the boundary between outlaw bravado and state-sanctioned violence collapses. Adapted from José Louzeiro’s investigative reportage, the film’s near-documentary immediacy made it a popular sensation—and a daring portrait of a society where criminal enterprise and official power operate in quiet tandem.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
(Steven Spielberg, USA, 1977, 137 min. In English)
New 4K Master
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One of the great works of American science fiction, Spielberg’s visionary fourth feature contemplates the possibility of life beyond Earth with a singular blend of awe, fear, and post-Watergate skepticism. When UFOs appear in Indiana, an electrician becomes seized by visions he can’t explain, while an international team works to decipher what the visitors may be saying—and what the government may be concealing. Blending domestic drama with operatic spectacle, the film recasts paranoia as a pathway to revelation. Presented here in its newly restored, director-approved version on 70mm.
Saturday, January 10 at 8:00pm; Monday, January 12 at 6:00pm at the Walter Reade Theater
ORCA
(Michael Anderson, USA/Italy, 1977, 92 min. In English
A gloriously unruly entry in the post-Jaws wave of nature-attack movies, Orca opens tenderly before vaulting into operatic revenge. After a fisherman botches an attempted capture and kills a pregnant whale, her mate follows him back to a Newfoundland village, unleashing calculated destruction. Shot along the rugged coast and underscored by Ennio Morricone’s mournful score, the film evolves into a pulpy but surprisingly serious meditation on grief and retribution.
Thursday, January 8 at 9:00pm; Friday, January 9 at 4:00pm at the Walter Reade Theater
MAN MARKED FOR DEATH, 20 YEARS LATER / CABRA MARCADO PARA MORRER
(Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil, 1984, 119 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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In 1964, Eduardo Coutinho began a film about a murdered labor organizer, casting non-actors—including the man’s widow—before the military coup shut production down. Twenty years later, Coutinho resumed the project, weaving the original footage together with new interviews and reflections. The result is a genre-defying essay on political commitment, memory, and the lived consequences of dictatorship—one of Brazilian cinema’s most profound acts of reckoning.
BODY PARTS
(Eric Red, USA, 1991, 88 min. In English)
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After losing his arm in a car accident, a criminal psychologist receives a transplant—only to discover it once belonged to an executed serial killer. Director Eric Red stages the premise with smeary neo-noir visuals, aggressive sound design, and bursts of splattery action, playing the absurdity straight into a conspiracy involving other transplant recipients. A Paramount Pictures production with B-movie audacity, Body Parts is a gruesomely funny, high-concept parable about bodily autonomy and control. Experience it loud and on 35mm.
Friday, January 9 at 9:00pm; Tuesday, January 13 at 8:30pm at the Walter Reade Theater
