Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Brazil, France, Germany, Netherlands | 2025 | Fiction | 158 min | Portuguese w/subtitles
Sponsored by Todd Lockwood
Sunday, October 26 | 7 PM | FH
Jaws turned 50 this summer, and no one is celebrating harder than Kleber Mendonça Filho. Spielberg’s classic is all over Filho’s Cannes-fêted smash-in-the-making. It’s 1977 in Recife, Brazil, and everyone is whispering about the shark that was caught with a human leg in its stomach. The local theater, the fulcrum around which this twisty story turns, is even rerunning Jaws to capitalize on the frenzy. But beyond all the allusions to hungry man-eaters, Filho (who won Best Director at Cannes) is also flexing his facility with large-scale entertainment, telling a canny and expansive espionage potboiler through masterful restraint, sustained tension, crackerjack set pieces, and unabashed eccentricity, while embracing and subverting the genre in all kinds of clever ways. And of course, at the heart of this grandiose thriller lies a heartfelt story about broken families and the bond between a father and son viewed through the prism of cinema. Wagner Moura smolders in the lead role as Marcelo (or is it Armando?), an academic and technology expert on the run and in hiding (Moura picked up Best Actor at Cannes this year, the first performer from South America to do so.) He reunites with his son while trying to start a new life under the radar. But he soon realizes that the city is not the refuge he’d hoped for, and apex predators are circling. ~OO