Wild wild life: "Hoppers"

Hoppers is both Pixar's maddest and sanest animation in some while - and I'm tempted to add the company's strongest since their turn-of-the-millennium golden age. The madness lies in its story. Director Daniel Chong and co-writer Jesse Andrews present us with the saga of how the consciousness of one Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda), a young woman with anger management issues, finds its way into being uploaded into a laser-printed beaver whose natural habitat is being concreted over by the authorities so as to build a bridge for the easing of commuter traffic. It is, as they say, a lot to swallow. But after overseeing a run of varyingly futzing propositions - most recently last year's sweet but compromised Elio - the fabled Pixar story department is noticeably on its A-game from an early stage here: not just making this narrative work, but making it appear to work effortlessly, without clunking gear changes or awkward tonal shifts. As in the hall-of-fame Pixars, a complex concept becomes mere sport or child's play before our very eyes; the transmigration of souls is here rendered so simple even the six-year-old sitting behind me could comprehend it. 

Much has already been made of the trailer-ready line "this is just like Avatar", one of those winking throwaway references a studio gets to make when its parent company has swallowed the referent's studio whole. Yet that same scene demonstrates the simplification process going further, into hyperdrive almost, via a three-word mantra ("this into this") repeated with increasing levels of comic delirium until everybody in Screen One is on the same page. (No child left behind.) Having made things elementary, the movie can then start to make jokes, to relax more fully into its environment. Hoppers has great linguistic gags (as the species-hopping Ratatouille also did). Though Mabel-as-beaver speaks American English, she's not quite on the natural world's frequency to begin with; her urgent need to force change hits a furry brick wall in the form of Ralph, the beaver equivalent of a beach bum, who just wants to spend his afternoons sat on his behind chewing sticks. The film also has my favourite sight gag in anything for a long while - the kind of flourish that remains the exclusive domain of cartoons. When these creatures are inhabited by human souls, their faces take on anthropomorphised, recognisably Pixarian features; yet when the upload link drops or cuts out, they return to being currant-eyed scrabblers, background characters essentially, like the turtle Mabel liberates from a schoolroom tank in the opening sequence. (Even the faces help to explain the plot, who's in where; it's this into this, converted into visual form.) The marvel is that all this chicanery and sophistry never entirely overwrites the movie's emotional core: the calming effects of the natural world, an element this animated film itself has to slow down to appreciate, and the promise Mabel made to her grandma, the only relative who fully understands her, to look after and protect said world. Having set all this up inside its exceptionally efficient first half-hour, Hoppers is free to crank the madness dial up once more. The second-act complication is that the heedless Mabel-as-beaver unwittingly initiates an uprising among the animal kingdom - a pixellated January 6th - causing fish, fowl, insect and invertebrate alike to try and wipe out (or as they call it, "squish") the human race. Had the events of the third act been recounted in any other public place, its tellers would surely be sectionable under the Mental Health Act.

The film's sanity, however, resides in its subtext. Faced with the incomparable stupidity and venality of Man, Hoppers proposes a retreat into nature; it's Walden with processor chips, and it may prove as generational a green moment for kids in 2026 as Disney's Bambi was back in 1942. Pixar aren't the first animators to set up their easels (or routers) in the woods, yet Hoppers improves on DreamWorks' too-pristine, look-don't-touch The Wild Robot: where that film gazed adoringly at the natural landscape, this one plugs us directly into it, obliging us to observe both the wonder and the threat at close quarters (as, indeed, Avatar did in its turn). Mabel's new identity allows her to channel her rage more effectively, and to go undercover while continuing a previously two-legged feud with image-obsessed Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm, because of course Jon Hamm), characterised not unreasonably as another white guy in a suit, representing both wanton construction and destruction. It's Jerry who unlocks Hoppers' most pertinent March 2026 imagery: that of humans dynamiting everything in sight. Against him, though, Chong and Andrews can set Mabel's efforts to build more strategically: first a replacement dam, then a coalition, then a movement, then a better world. (Weirdly, Hoppers starts to feel like a dramatisation of that Rebecca Solnit profile that was circulating over the weekend: it's plugged into all kinds of sockets.) If the film remains altogether loopy, it's loopy in a way that speaks coherently, stirringly, even movingly to what is a fundamentally loopy moment in human development: what this script is wrestling with, deep down, is the question of where to put our anger so that it will be most effective. For Pixar, apparently, the answer has been to push their creativity beyond the usual multiplex centreground and towards a new extreme: by the end of Hoppers, the company's pixel-pushers are proposing solutions not just to forest fires but to the rise of populism itself. We can but wonder what miracles these folks might achieve in the Middle East; for now, however, they've gifted us a film that transcends story to become the kind of rigorously satisfying parable James Cameron wishes he was still telling.

Hoppers is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

USA for Africa: "Soul to Soul"

Here's a good example of a leftfield yet complementary reissue: a 1971 concert film less frequently spoken about than its contemporaries Woodstock, The Last Waltz and Soul Power, not out of any dip in quality or absence of comparable star names, more likely that the rights expired and it dropped out of general circulation. Soul to Soul retains its intriguing origin story. In March 1971, while Paul McCartney was mulling the contradiction of being supremely famous yet suddenly unemployed and Elvis was scooping up divorcees from the front rows of his Vegas residency gigs, a small band of African American musicians set out from New York to Ghana for a day-long concert to mark the country's first decade of independence, an event through which some of the travellers hoped to reconnect with their roots. The title came from a song by the second-billed act Ike and Tina Turner. The director was the workmanlike documentary pro Denis Sanders, passing the midpoint of a career that spanned paranoid Hoover-era shorts on the dangers of marijuana (1951's Subject: Narcotics) and early user guides for home computers (Computers: The Friendly Invasion and Computers Are People, Too!, both 1982); more pertinently to this project, he'd just wrapped on Elvis: That's the Way It Is, outtakes of which have now found their way into Baz Luhrmann's EPiC. A crack team of cameramen - including DoP Erik Daarstad and Les Blank - were sent out to preserve on celluloid the colours, moods and textures of this cultural mission: the curtains in the plane carrying these readily smoking troubadours to their destination (Tina is spotted getting some much-needed shuteye), the visible culture shock that awaited everybody on landing. The music here would be only one element; equally relevant are the people, the history, the customs, the fashions and the attitudes. When headliner Wilson Pickett launches into "In the Midnight Hour", he does so before a sea of delighted kids, but also one beaming policeman, evidently enjoying his most relaxed posting in years; by the time of "Land of 1000 Dances", the locals are kicking off their sandals onstage in order to better bust a thousand moves.

The era being captured is pre-entourage and pre-footage approval: these musicians can be seen mucking in, in a spirit of adventure, learning and open-mindedness. It's a two-way street. Before the concert, the locals put on their own performance for the visiting dignitaries (Tina joins in; Ike looks on, unsmiling) while Sanders and crew prove as interested in Ghana as a place as they are in its latest visitors. This version restores an audio interview with Mavis Staples in which the singer describes the eerie experience of touring a storage facility once used to house slaves at the height of the slave trade, while the exteriors describe a land found in the middle of a makeover. (A billboard advertises the so-called "007 Shirt", promising to combine "comfort with elegance".) Increasingly, though, the focus is on the concert itself, presented without obvious hiccups as proof Ghana could both attract and successfully stage such an event. (Zaire, site of the future Rumble in the Jungle and its attendant Soul Power concerts, had to have been watching on enviously.) Santana's rhythm section, for one, had clearly absorbed what could be heard going on around town, to the extent the film's Wikipedia page cites their performance as a formative influence on today's Afrobeats: here, that two-way street becomes an active back-and-forth, a cultural dialogue that apparently shaped an entire genre. Les McCann and Eddie Harris - representing the jazz contingent - take the politics up a notch via "The Price You Gotta Pay To Be Free". Then insouciant Ike (letting the guitar do all his talking) and Tina (in diaphanous outfit) give "River Deep, Mountain High" another runout, this time to a vastly more receptive audience than the US record-buying public. One possible cavil: there's an awful lot of drumming for a 96-minute movie. (Of course, if you love percussion, you'll be quids in.) Yet even before Pickett's last-reel efforts to convert the stage into a level playing field, what strikes the 2026 viewer is the unity on show. Time and again, Sanders returns us to the sight of performers and crowd simultaneously lost (or otherwise caught up) in the music; both are a source of curiosity and fascination for this camera. That apt title reflects how, unlike Woodstock or (heaven help us) Altamont, this modest gathering really was soul to soul: American superstars and Ghanaian spectators connecting, with no steeper hierarchy than a well-lit raised platform, amid a vastly more idealistic climate. Contemporary musical megastars can have their three-hour concert movies - shot on quick-and-easy digital, with tie-in Slurpee cups and elevated ticket prices - but I worry they're not going to tell future generations much about our world, beyond that we lost our heads for celebrities.

Soul to Soul is now touring selected cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of February 27-March 1, 2026):

1 (new) Scream 7 (18)

2 (1) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

3 (new) EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (12A) ****

4 (2) GOAT (PG)

5 (3) Crime 101 (15)

6 (5) The Secret Agent (15) *****

7 (4) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

8 (new) The Audience - NT Live 2026 (12A)

9 (new) Pegasus 3 (PG)

10 (new) The Testament of Ann Lee (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Hoppers

2. Hard Boiled [above]

3. Crimson Gold

4. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

5. Soul to Soul

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (8) Predator: Badlands (12) **

2 (12) Wicked: For Good (PG)

3 (2) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

4 (24) I Swear (15) ****

5 (1) The Housemaid (15)

6 (5) Sinners (15) ****

7 (19) One Battle After Another (15) ****

8 (new) The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (PG) ***

9 (26) Scream VI (18)

10 (11) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Sisu: Road to Revenge

2. Good Boy

3. The Ugly Stepsister

4. Keeper

5. Anemone

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Sunday, BBC Two, 12 noon)

2. The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Monday, BBC Two, 12 midnight)

3. Sound of Metal (Saturday, BBC Two, 12 midnight)

4. No Other Land (Monday, Channel 4, 2.15am)

5. Blade Runner 2049 (Saturday, BBC One, 11pm)

"Mother's Pride" (Guardian 05/03/26)

Mother’s Pride **

Dir: Nick Moorcroft. With: Jonno Davies, Martin Clunes, James Buckley, Mark Addy. 93 mins. Cert: 12A

The Fisherman’s Friends team have found a modestly profitable post-Brexit niche: tales of culturally endangered Anglo-Saxon endeavours, nudged towards gentle uplift via a few songs and laughs, dollops of sentiment and some rabble-rousing populism. First it was half-forgotten sea shanties; now it’s the dwindling pub trade, represented here by rival West Country premises. On one streetcorner, spit-and-sawdust local The Drover’s Inn, overseen by salt-of-the-earth (read: emotionally repressed) widower Martin Clunes, slowly being strangled by his grasping brewery’s supply chain. On the other, that same brewery’s poncy gastropub, owned and somewhat implausibly operated by posho Luke Treadaway, introduced sipping from one of those teeny cappuccino cups issued as standard to all metropolitan elites.

The scene may have shifted indoors – gone, alas, is the Cornish scenery – but the formula remains much the same: clunky exposition, upper-case Issues, variably groansome dad gags. Tension emerges between Clunes and prodigal son Jonno Davies, until the latter proposes a radical idea to save the business: homebrewing. Davies has an awkward reunion with old-flame Gabriella Wilde, who’s now shacked up with Treadaway, doubtless eating swan for breakfast. But the resolutions really are arbitrary: it takes barely ten minutes for the villager who sabotages the microbrewery to crowdfund its replacement, a rapid U-turn even for Starmer’s Britain. Co-writer/director Nick Moorcroft must be praying audience sympathy for rickety, no-frills structures like the Drover’s will extend to the film itself.

The cast nurdle matters along to the climactic Real Ale Awards, scene of recent cinema’s least surprising surprise result. Clunes at least troubles to cobble a character together out of whatever was set before him, while Mark Addy – as the town drunk – commits gamely to an asthmatic running gag involving disco-infused Morris dancing. Josie Lawrence and Miles Jupp, briefly glimpsed, could have improvised a funnier film between them. Would-be cheeky nods to TikTok and dogging are delivered in the manner of a backbench MP, and there surely has to be a stronger case for preserving our pubs than “last refuge for middle-aged depressives”. Ken Loach and Paul Laverty almost made it with 2023’s The Old Oak, but Moorcroft’s mild variant is weak beer, to say the least.

Mother's Pride opens in cinemas nationwide today.

The King is alive: "Baz Luhrmann's EPiC"

Elvis Presley is just about the only pop star in cinemas right now who isn't having a quote-unquote moment. Baz Luhrmann's characteristically brash EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert returns us to a Presley at his post-'68 Comeback Special peak: relatively slender, visibly re-energised, sitting on top (or close to the top) of the showbusiness tree. (His moments were yet to come.) Stitched together from footage Luhrmann dug up while researching his Elvis biopic - outtakes from 1970's Elvis: That's the Way It Is and 1972's Elvis on Tour, archiving the star's Vegas residency in rich Metrocolor textures - the results merge two recent trends in music documentary. As per the title, it's first and foremost a concert movie, an "event", a designation that enables our beloved exhibitors to charge us double for the privilege of attending: not quite Ticketmaster-level gouging, admittedly, but a bit galling when you're sat in the same seats you'd sit in for any common-or-garden fillum, watching a performer who's been dead for the better part of fifty years. It's also another chance to hear a subject in his own words, and here EPiC starts to run in parallel with Man on the Run. Much as that film felt obliged to open with a brief Beatles recap, so too Luhrmann begins with a potted Presley history, a "previously on Elvis": the hips, the hits, the army, the movies (which appear every bit as trivial and silly in 2026 as they would have done in 1966). Having provided some context for newbies, the director resets the stage and proceeds to the night's main event. Ladies and gentlemen, all rise for the King.

Even before this Presley breaks into an ad hoc rec-room performance of "Yesterday" (a song choice that carries a poignant charge, given how some felt the Beatles had blown Elvis away), early Seventies Elvis is shown to have much in common with post-Beatles McCartney: mired in an increasingly unhappy contractual situation, yet determined to return to doing the thing he loves most after the distractions of the previous decade. The loveliest footage EPiC returns to us is that of Elvis in rehearsal, clad in a series of extraordinary shirts: after personally greeting band, backing singers and onlooking camera crew, he starts to exercise that voice, sometimes making arrangements in the manner of a Brian Wilson, often plain goofing off. Luhrmann must have known he was onto something magical here, because the rehearsal sequences are the first time this manic, antic assemblage takes a breath and appears to relax into its archive. This Elvis - unlike, say, Austin Butler's pouting pretty boy or Jacob Elordi's brooder - is funny, courteous and charming; personality-wise, he's the Elvis Nicolas Cage might have played in the immediate wake of Honeymoon in Vegas. The gig footage, which will do little to dissuade those who insist Seventies Elvis is the best Elvis, comes to seem like an extension of the interview footage: in both, a more rounded and seasoned version of the lean, thrusting whippersnapper Elvis presented as in the 1950s figures out how best to express himself, what works for him and what doesn't. One abiding memory of EPiC: watching Elvis stamping his own name - in fifteen-foot high, vibrantly sparkling rhinestone - on any number of songs previously recorded by other artists: "Yesterday", yes, but also "Something", "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water". At this point, every song had the potential to be an Elvis song; those savvy arrangements repurposed a whole suite of tunes into jumpsuits he could effortlessly slip inside. Part of you wants to shout requests for the era's other popular standards at the screen: do "Son of My Father", Elvis! Try "Mama Weer All Crazee Now"!

Just as a stage presence, this Elvis really is box-office and VFM: simultaneously singer, stand-up, screen idol and stripper-in-waiting, forever poised to give the yelping ladies in the front row just what they've come for. (The only trouble with Seventies Elvis, from a contemporary perspective, is that he is very Seventies; the gaudy blue-and-yellow leisure suit he wears to perform "Burning Love" in rehearsals is so Dave Nice the singer should have been shot from the hairline up.) Luhrmann, ever the evangelist for all things camp and chintzy, revels in it; his creative choices are generally sound, though a few missteps reveal themselves. After the hellzapoppin first half - most of the hits, in enveloping Dolby surround - the second half leans heavily into Goddy Elvis and Gospel Elvis, which can only ever be a matter of personal taste. And Luhrmann messes up the ending: just when you think you've finally got through a 21st century music doc without encountering Bono, up the little fella pops to read us an Elvis poem. Amid the dazzling bright lights, though, the director also catches pools of darkness and signs of Elvises to come. A glimpse of Colonel Tom Parker cues a wry montage set to "(You're the) Devil in Disguise"; an end credits card points out that Elvis never toured outside North America. (Imagine having a live act like this on your books and not sending him overseas - but then touring doubtless entails some loss of control.) The star's vacillating weight is made only more conspicuous by Luhrmann's tendency to slap disparate performances of the same song together: a chorus started by Seraphim Elvis can be finished by (what looks like) Freddie Starr's Elvis. And every now and again, one or more of these cameras catches Elvis lapsing into something like self-parody, where he doesn't seem to be trying, where it's just another song in another show in another run. For the most part, though, EPiC honours its subject's unmatchable charisma and stagecraft. It's a fan's film, possessed of a fervour and intensity that means to convert agnostics into admirers. Yet it does more than anything I've seen for quite some while - including Luhrmann's own biopic - to bring Elvis back to life before our eyes. There is, finally, no acceptable stand-in or substitute for the real deal.

Baz Luhrmann's EPiC is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

Letting go: "Man on the Run"

A quirk of the release schedule means the new doc Man on the Run begs reading as Paul McCartney's The Moment. Scholar of pop Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom) here revisits one of the most compelling stories in the Macca biography: what Paul did once the Beatles, surely the toughest ever act to follow, cracked and fractured at the turn of the 1970s. If you know your music history, you'll already know the answer (Wings, ultimately, hence the title), yet Neville recounts how it all played out month by month and year by year; by way of a guide, he has his subject's own words, McCartney having sagely devoted his golden years to setting the record straight once and for all. As the latter has it, this was both retreat and restart, the 27-year-old McCartney hunkering down on a farm in the Scottish Highlands with a young family and several fields' worth of sheep and chickens. Stepping away from the eyes of the world, the jostling entourage and the predatory hangers-on (notably the lawyer Allen Klein, busy sinking his teeth into the ex-Beatles), the singer could here turn his back on the pandemonium and restless experimentation of his former life, instead pledging to get back (as it were) to basics: writing songs - silly love songs, in some cases; songs for mums and dads like him and Linda, rather than for the kids or the heads - while starting a band to carry these songs out on tour, and hopefully coming to enjoy it once more. This McCartney is a man determined to put down roots and potter round inside his own wheelyard for a bit: the first track recorded in this new solo guise started with the sound of his kitchen door opening (not "Let 'Em In", but the same principle applies), his first hit was the Beatley "Another Day", and a press release for his first album, 1970's McCartney, asserted its maker's only ambition was "to grow up".

The key themes here, then, are maturation and settling down, which are arguably less grabby and sexy than breaking through and making it big; the film's soundtrack, certainly, is far more Radio 2 than Radio 1. (My theory remains that Wings couldn't have survived into the MTV era, with its heightened visual scrutiny: the haircuts alone are those of musos who've found their other half and no longer give a shit, a response - whether conscious or unconscious - to the rigorous image maintenance of the Brian Epstein years.) If this project isn't quite in the first rank of recent Beatles memorabilia, it's at least more dramatic than I was expecting. Before finding his sought-after peace, this Paul has to dodge critical brickbats and - perhaps more woundingly - the acid-tipped bullets being fired in his direction by his erstwhile writing partner. As the doc goes on to show, Lennon and McCartney would make up by the time of the former's murder in 1980, but an at least friendly rivalry persists even today: Man on the Run is surely McCartney's response to 2024's acclaimed One to One: John & Yoko, which retold the story of Lennon's Seventies. More arresting yet: the film's opening movement, a potted recap of everything you'll have seen when the Beatles Anthology appeared on streaming just before Christmas, leans heavily into those rumours that McCartney had died circa Sgt. Pepper in order to underline its subject's sudden absence from the limelight. While those rumours obviously proved unfounded, Neville floats the thesis that Paul had at least to die creatively - to embrace irrelevance, become someone other than Paul McCartney, Superstar Musician, see his singles chart for one week at #39 - so as to relieve the pressure and permit himself the time and space for a full creative rethink. For a brief while back there - thanks to the efforts of Messrs. Simon and Anka - he was no longer the most famous Paul in the universe.

Wings, for their part, would be conceived as a very Seventies travelling (sometimes flying) circus; an embrace of the hippy ethos, notionally communal and beardily self-sufficient, going from town to town for big bags of fifty pence pieces. (Cash in hand, while the Beatles were bogged down in Klein's contract snarl-ups.) Yet even here Neville reveals backstage interpersonal drama. Linda and Paul were all right, but the latter - still a megastar, even as he donned a farmer's dungarees - proved ever so slightly dismissive of those session musicians who helped to get this show on the road. One unexpected development the film catches: the emergence of Nasty Paul, or at least Steely Paul, the musician burnt by experience into looking out for his own interests. (If he emerges somewhat sheepishly from this portrait, it's because even as he freed himself from one set of contractual shackles, he surely realised he was in danger of turning into another Brian Epstein.) The more personally settled and financially secure Paul became, the freer he felt to pursue creative independence; you can feel him easing himself into going fully solo again as the Eighties come around. (Neville cues up the glorious promo for "Coming Up": very funny, yes, but also a virtuoso's fantasy of playing all the parts simultaneously.) "Mull of Kintyre" now looks like a wildly successful warm-up for "Pipes of Peace"; the animated talking mouse in the Wings Christmas special of 1973 is the creation of a young father heading to Rupert and the Frog Song. By staying close to home and playing relatively safe, McCartney gave himself a future that Lennon never got. Neville tells the story in established pop-doc style (lots of photomontaging, some of which has the unfortunate air of Saturday morning kids' TV), omitting "Give Ireland Back to the Irish", which might have contradicted any idea Paul was seeking the quiet life; any British or Irish filmmaker would have addressed that as well as Wings' wonky-naff pop-cultural legacy (Alan Partridge bellowing "Jet", say, or the Trigger Happy TV sketches). In his narration, however, McCartney continues his project of late-life generosity: having gifted us these songs (and the memories attached to them), now he gives us his memories of how they came to be. Sam Mendes' upcoming Beatles films are going to have their work cut out turning up anything new or revealing - although it strikes me there is an obvious gap in the market for a Ringo movie. Have the requests for a career-spanning interview been tossed out with all the fan mail? Peace and love, man; peace and love.

Man on the Run is now showing at the Picturehouse at FACT, Manchester and streaming via Prime Video.

Swimming with sharks: "The Secret Agent"

The one unoriginal aspect of Kleber Mendonça Filho's generally astounding The Secret Agent is that it takes place in the Brazil of the late 1970s. If you begin to feel as though we've ventured this way before, and recently to boot, we have: in last year's I'm Still Here, another Brazilian history lesson that crossed the border separating the Oscars' Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture shortlists (and occupied more or less the same UK release slot). Yet that foursquare earlier film was what we might call a classical endeavour, the work of a seasoned movie veteran (Walter Salles) obliged to stay close to the contours of established biography and history. The Secret Agent, by striking contrast, is modernist fiction: expansive at 154 minutes, full of unexpected detours and deviations, an attempt not just to recreate and describe but inhabit a moment in which the country's democracy and citizenry were placed in supreme peril. This is unmistakably the bigger, fuller picture, undertaken by the same observant, story-hungry critic-turned-filmmaker who made the restless and rowdy Aquarius and Bacurau, emboldened here to take an even deeper rummage into and around his country's turbulent past. Mendonça Filho starts, however, with the simplest of images: a corpse lying on the forecourt of the Esso garage Wagner Moura's protagonist pulls into on Shrove Tuesday in 1977. ("A period of great mischief", as an opening title has it.) The corpse is the film's first sign of the craziness and carnage to come, and symbolic of what it might have felt like to pass through Brazil as it adjusted to and internalised military dictatorship. Life was going on all right - the film catches some two-and-a-half hours of it in a bottle, from carnival to chaos - but something somewhere was ever so slightly amiss. Any resemblance to life elsewhere in the West circa 2025-26 (or 2016-26, or - hell - 2001-2026) may not be entirely coincidental.

There are a lot of things in The Secret Agent that aren't where they're supposed to be, or where you'd expect to find them. In an early scene, the city of Recife's openly corrupt chief of police is called off a carnival float to investigate the case of a dead shark hauled into a classroom. The shark is revealed to contain a severed leg, which may have something to do with the shady types we encounter going around town tossing dead bodies into bodies of water. At the safe house to which Moura's Marcelo is travelling, there's a Janus-like cat with two heads, a trippy effect that may also be a cinema-obsessed filmmaker's arcane Jacques Nolot reference; Udo Kier pops up out of nowhere, in his final screen role as a German tailor who may have had reasons for fleeing to South America; and that severed leg will eventually assume a life of its own, booting film and viewer alike even further off the beaten path. In the meantime, you may even start to wonder what Marcelo is doing here, beyond being exceptionally charming to everybody he meets: the old dear who first takes him in, the upstairs neighbour he beds, the young son who's clearly been waiting for him, the colleagues at his new place of work, which happens to be a government building dressed up as something it's not. It's a puzzle, but the overall impression is that of a Brazil that's been forcibly stood on its head, shaking out all prior structures, mechanisms and certainties, the pieces left to fall where they may. It's down to Mendonça Filho to snap these scattered memories together, to find those internal connections that finally make The Secret Agent make sense. The shark, for starters, connects with the season's biggest cinematic hit Jaws, which has them queuing around the block at the Recife Odeon. A shifty-looking fellow, sat behind a desk, tells two hired thugs he wants someone to put a big hole in Marcelo's head at the very moment the latter is being checked for cavities by a dentist. Someone's in charge here, at least, and they're having a lot of fun making history rhyme, resonate and repeat itself in instructive ways.

The mischief of the period, then, extends to the filmmaking: it's infectious, and you catch it big time at the end of the film's first part - about 45 minutes in - upon the revelation that the above characters are being listened to on cassette by folks with smartphones. Mendonça Filho isn't here to torture or punish us - as so many contemporary arthouse directors do in hammering home a message - but he's also not averse to pulling the rug from under our feet or tossing in a sudden blindside. He needs us alert and on our toes, because something is unfolding before us, both on the cinema screen and in the wider world beyond it; the history bleeds through into present-day reality. Even so, The Secret Agent unfolds in such an idiosyncratic manner that it feels miraculous that it works. Its stroke of genius is to leave us to fend for ourselves for an hour or more in a world that's colourful and intriguing enough to keep us seated; let me tell you a story, the director states from the off, but I have to set the scene before I do. Only in the second hour, once a certain trust has been earned, does this script begin to explain what everybody's doing here, in the first scene where we see these characters sitting down for any length of time. Even the plot isn't where you'd expect to find it; as with the sunshine-yellow VW Marcelo putters about in, the film's engine is tucked away in the back. Still, what a caboose. You may well spend The Secret Agent's first half wondering where on earth this damn film is going. You will spend the second, and the gripping home straight especially, wondering why more films don't trouble to toss out the rulebook in such spectacular fashion.

I am aware that the above may make The Secret Agent sound tricky or hard work, yet nothing could be further from the truth; as with any good detective story, it takes some figuring out, but the clues are all there. Most visibly, Mendonça Filho retains a welcome eye for faces that tell half of the story before anyone's opened their mouth to speak. (The players deserve their 'You Have Been Watching'-style credits: Gabriel Domingues's kaleidoscopic casting makes Marty Supreme look like a late Nineties MTV movie.) And Moura - a little bit Ruffalo, a little bit Firth - does a lot with the codewords watchful and mournful; he's working harder than anybody else on the Best Actor shortlist to steady us, to provide a reassuringly fixed point, even as he shuffles through three different identities, distinguished by varying levels of hairiness. Like his Marcelo, who may also be known as Armando - as if his very name had been turned inside-out by all this brouhaha - you will still need to keep your wits about you: this is one of those grown-up, big-boy pictures your parents and grandparents may have told you about. But Mendonça Filho also pays us the compliment of recognising that history can be sprawling and complex and small and simple. A bust-up around a dinner table can have repercussions that last for years or decades; a life story can be told by two people either side of a desk. A whole nation can go doolally, and yet be brought back from the brink and restored to sanity by the actions (and sacrifices) of ordinary people. Take all that in your stride, and you will be entertained and stirred, perhaps even moved, by the sight of a small community uniting to resist tyranny, as well as educated as to why Brazil takes particular pains to lock up those authority figures who've been shown to engage in criminal activity: to deter others who would exploit and abuse, pillage and plunder. Draw your own conclusions - it's still, just about, a democracy - but there may be a wider lesson or two to be absorbed here.

The Secret Agent is now showing in cinemas nationwide.