If you've spent any time in a dictatorship — I've had that happy experience — you understand why your high school teachers were always praising democracy. You quickly learn that authoritarian states are all about violence, inescapable corruption and a sense of free-floating anxiety.

You get a masterful portrait of what that's like in The Secret Agent , an unsettling yet very enjoyable new movie by Brazil's leading filmmaker, Kleber Mendonça Filho. Set in 1977, near the middle of his country's two-decade dictatorship , this smart, brutal, often funny thriller uses the travails of one ordinary man to capture a reactionary era in its daily realities and surreal absurdities, its public cruelty and private decency.

The superb Brazilian actor Wagner Moura — who became famous in the U.S.

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