Film at Lincoln Center announces The Secret Agent Network, a weeklong series of nine films chosen by Kleber Mendonça Filho, running January 7–13, 2026. Timed to the theatrical release of his award-winning NYFF63 Main Slate selection The Secret Agent, the program showcases works that informed and inspired the film’s vision. Mendonça Filho will appear in person for Q&As following a screening of The Secret Agent on January 7, the opening night of the series, and on January 8 for a rare New York screening of Eduardo Coutinho’s Man Marked For Death, 20 Years Later, long regarded as one of Brazil’s greatest documentaries. 

With his sweeping and shape-shifting The Secret Agent, Mendonça Filho confirms himself as one of today’s most vital and visionary filmmakers. As the acclaimed film continues its run at Film at Lincoln Center, the director turns to some of the works that have long shaped his imagination for this special series. Drawn from far-flung corners of cinema yet united, in their own ways, by their examinations of how power operates—how authority can conceal itself, distort perception, and manipulate the conditions of everyday life—his selections move from modernist noir to prismatically reflexive documentaries to a blockbuster spectacle and an over-the-top B movie. Each forms a new vantage onto the cinematic network that underlies Mendonça Filho’s sensibility and, taken together, offers audiences a deeper way of seeing the ideas, images, and tensions running through The Secret Agent.

The series gathers together newly restored works—including Brazilian landmarks such as Iracema and Lúcio Flávio as well as Karel Kachyňa’s long-banned The Ear—alongside large-format presentations of Close Encounters of the Third Kind on 70mm, Eric Red’s phantom-limb-horror Body Parts on 35mm, and a new remaster of the gloriously unruly killer-whale film, Orca.

“What a great pleasure to put together a program of films that have been part of dreaming up, writing and making The Secret Agent,” said Mendonça Filho. “My amazing Film at Lincoln Center co-programmers Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson invited me and helped me put this together with a true sense of generosity and curiosity. One of the hardest questions to answer as a filmmaker is ‘tell me about your references for this new film,’ so I hope this unusual set list gives you an idea of what goes on as you develop a new film out of very personal feelings about films from the past.”

Kleber Mendonça Filho was born in Recife, Brazil, studied journalism at the Federal University of Pernambuco and spent nearly two decades as a film critic and programmer. He wrote for leading Brazilian outlets, oversaw the cinema section of the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation, and now serves as artistic director of the Janela Internacional de Cinema and chief film curator at the Instituto Moreira Salles.

He began making films in the 1990s, with early shorts that won more than 100 awards. His debut feature, Neighboring Sounds (2012), screened at over 100 festivals, including New Directors/New Films, won 32 prizes, represented Brazil at the 2014 Oscars, and was named one of The New York Times’ “10 Best Films of the Year.” Aquarius (2016, NYFF54) reached audiences in more than 100 countries. He co-directed Bacurau (2019, NYFF57), winner of the Cannes Jury Prize, and Pictures of Ghosts (2023, NYFF61), which premiered at Cannes after seven years in production.

The Secret Agent won Best Director, Best Actor, and the FIPRESCI Prize on its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. It was recently named Best International Film and awarded Best Actor by the New York Film Critics Circle and nominated for three Golden Globes, including best picture (drama) and best actor.

Organized by Kleber Mendonça Filho, Florence Almozini, and Tyler Wilson.

Acknowledgments: NEON; Gullane+ and Montanha Russa Cinematográfica; Myra Babenco, HB Filmes

Tickets are now on sale! Tickets are $18; $15 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $13 for FLC Members. See more and save with an All Access Pass for $110 ($90 for Students) or a 3+ Film Package ($16 for GP; $13 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $11 for FLC Members), excluding The Secret Agent (standard new release pricing applies). Single tickets for Close Encounters of the Third Kind on 70mm are $20; $17 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $15 for FLC Members (eligible for All Access Pass).

FILM DESCRIPTIONS
All films screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W 65th Street) except where noted at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (144 W 65th Street)

Opening Night
The Secret Agent
Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025, Brazil/France/Netherlands/Germany, 159m
Portuguese with English subtitles

The Secret Agent. Courtesy of NEON.

Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who has gifted us such breathtakers as Aquarius (NYFF54) and Bacurau (NYFF57), 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, 1967, U.S./U.K., 92m

Point Blank

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, and transforms the Organization into an embodiment of diffuse, indestructable institutional power that erases Walker’s personhood even as he guns down its underlings one by one.
Sunday, January 11 at 6:15pm
Monday, January 12 at 9:00pm

4K Restoration
The Ear / Ucho
Karel Kachyňa, 1970, Czechoslovakia, 94m
Czech with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere of 4K Restoration

The Ear

Already on edge in the wake of an ongoing Communist purge, a government official, Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý), and his soused wife, Anna (Jiřina Bohdalová), 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 of them bicker, booze, and crawl the walls with fear. Could Ludvik be the next party member to disappear? Completed in the uneasy aftermath of the Prague Spring and immediately banned for its unvarnished depiction of state surveillance, Karel Kachyňa’s The Ear—unseen publicly until 1990—compresses an entire police state into one sleepless night, revealing how authoritarian power hides in plain sight, twists perception, and corrodes the fragile boundary between safety and fear. 

Digital restoration of this film, funded from the donation of Mrs. Milada Kučerová and Mr. Eduard Kučera, was carried out by Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in collaboration with the Národní filmový archiv, Prague and the Czech Film Fund in UPP and Soundsquare. The Ear was produced in 1969, when its public screenings were not allowed, and the film did not premiere until 1990. On this occasion, the opening title placing the story into 1952 was cut from the film at the director’s request. The 1990 premiere version was used as the reference for the digital restoration. The sources for the digitization were the original image negative and original magnetic mixing tapes. Film materials are preserved by the Národní filmový archiv, Prague. The restoration was done in 2022.
Saturday, January 10 at 5:45pm
Tuesday, January 13 at 6:15pm

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
Elio Petri, 1970, Italy, 115m
Italian with English subtitles

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Elio Petri’s masterpiece remains one of cinema’s most caustic and crazed dissections of institutional power. A newly promoted police inspector (Gian Maria Volonté) 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 takes the framework of a crime thriller and pushes it toward Brechtian estrangement (or as Petri himself described it, a “grottesco”) to expose the psychological and structural logic of unchecked authority. Volonté’s unnervingly elastic performance drives this shift, playing the inspector as both swaggering strongman and unraveling paranoiac. The result is a feverish blend of satire and procedural in which the law exists only to protect itself, and the machinery of “order” becomes indistinguishable from the abuses it claims to prevent.
Thursday, January 8 at 3:30pm
Sunday, January 11 at 8:15pm

4K Restoration
Iracema / Iracema, uma transa amazônica
Jorge Bodanzky, Orlando Senna, 1974, Brazil, 99m
Portuguese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere of 4K Restoration

Iracema

Shot along the freshly carved Trans-Amazonian Highway in the early years of Brazil’s dictatorship—a showcase project sold as national destiny—Iracema captured a country violently remaking itself through state-backed “development” and the accelerating destruction of the Amazon, including some of the earliest filmed images of the forest burning. An Indigenous teenager drifts into Belém do Pará, scraping by as a sex worker, and falls in with Tião Brasil Grande, 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. With unsparing clarity, Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna expose the extractive logic driving the dictatorship’s grand projects, which led to the film’s banning by the military government. 

Restoration production and technical coordination by Alice de Andrade; produced by Montanha Russa Cinematográfica; Artistic Director Jorge Bodanzky; image restoration by Cinegrell; sound restoration by José Luiz Sasso, JLS Studios; restoration supervisors Débora Butruce and Martin Köerber; with support from CTAV, Mnemosine, IMS, PUC-Rio, Instituto Guimarães Rosa, and Cinemateca Brasileira.
Wednesday, January 7 at 4:00pm
Sunday, January 11 at 1:30pm

4K Restoration
Lúcio Flávio: The Passenger of Agony / Lúcio Flávio, o Passageiro da Agonia
Héctor Babenco, 1977, Brazil, 121m
Portuguese with English subtitles
New York Premiere of 4K Restoration

Lúcio Flávio: The Passenger of Agony

Released at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Héctor Babenco’s mean, street-level thriller charts the rise and fall of Lúcio Flávio (Reginaldo Faria), a charismatic bank robber whose headline-grabbing holdups, jailbreaks, and fugitive celebrity unfold alongside the covert operations of the Esquadrão da Morte, the regime’s notorious police death squad. As Flávio slips between safehouses, negotiates with corrupt detectives, and watches allies disappear into custody or turn informant, the boundary between outlaw bravado and state-sanctioned violence begins to dissolve. Adapted from José Louzeiro’s investigative reportage and shot in Rio’s sun-flecked streets and cramped police interiors, the film’s grit and near-documentary immediacy made it a popular sensation at the time, and a daring portrait of a society where criminal enterprise and official power operate in quiet tandem. A visual and tonal precursor whose imprint runs through The Secret Agent.
Friday, January 9 at 6:15pm
Sunday, January 11 at 3:30pm

70mm Director’s Cut
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Steven Spielberg, 1977, U.S., 70mm, 137m

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

One of the great works of American science fiction, Steven Spielberg’s visionary fourth feature contemplates the possibility of life beyond Earth with a singular blend of awe, fear, and post-Watergate skepticism. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond in Panavision anamorphic, the early passages unfold with a lived-in realism that makes the film’s escalating wonders feel entirely believable. When UFOs appear in Muncie, Indiana, electrician Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) becomes seized by visions he can’t explain, while a multinational team led by Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut) works to decipher what the visitors may be saying, and what the government may be concealing. In classic Spielberg fashion, this blend of domestic drama and operatic spectacle—vast light formations, eerie silences, and John Williams’s now-iconic five-note motif—recasts paranoia as a pathway to revelation rather than a closed loop. Presented here in its newly restored, director-approved version on 70mm.
Saturday, January 10 at 8:00pm
Monday, January 12 at 6:00pm

New 4K Master
Orca
Michael Anderson, 1977, U.S./Italy, 92m

Orca

A gloriously unruly entry in the post-Jaws wave of “nature attacks” movies—one that Kleber selected instead of Spielberg’s shark—Michael Anderson’s Orca opens with a gentle mating pair of killer whales before vaulting into operatic revenge. After a fisherman (Richard Harris) botches an attempted capture and hauls a mortally wounded, pregnant whale onto his deck, her mate surfaces to witness the death and follows him back to a small Newfoundland village. What begins as a simple encounter spirals into a cycle of retaliation where boats sink, houses collapse, and the town’s uneasy alliance with the fisherman fractures as the orca methodically draws him out to sea. Shot along the rugged Newfoundland coast and dappled by Ennio Morricone’s mournful score, the film, in its own pulpy way, gradually opens into a much more serious expression of grief… and features a quite memorable leg-severing set piece.
Thursday, January 8 at 9:00pm
Friday, January 9 at 4:00pm

Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later / Cabra Marcado para Morrer
Eduardo Coutinho, 1984, Brazil, 119m
Portuguese with English subtitles

Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later

In 1964, Eduardo Coutinho was at work on a film about João Pedro Teixeira, who was murdered by the police as a result of his efforts to organize farm workers in northeast Brazil. The director cast non-actors in the production, including Teixeira’s widow, who plays herself, but shooting was cut short in the wake of the military coup that same year; footage was seized, and a number of participants imprisoned. The project resumed 20 years later, as the country was transitioning to a democracy, but had begun to take a rather different shape: Coutinho incorporated the earlier material as well new interviews with those originally involved and reflections on the injustices of the interval, yielding a prismatically reflexive, genre-defying essay on political commitment and life under dictatorship.
Thursday, January 8 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Kleber Mendonça Filho
Tuesday, January 13 at 3:45pm

Body Parts
Eric Red, 1991, U.S., 35mm, 88m

Body Parts

After a criminal psychologist (Jeff Fahey) loses his arm in a car accident, he’s fitted with a transplanted limb, only to discover that it belonged to an executed serial killer whose impulses may still be alive under his skin. Director Eric Red stages the premise with a smeary neo-noir visual style, sound design that lands with an almost physical force, and the occasional burst of splattery action, while playing the film’s absurdity straight into a conspiracy involving other recipients of the killer’s dismembered anatomy, including an artist played with unhinged precision by Brad Dourif. Made on a Paramount Pictures budget with a B-movie sensibility, Red’s gleefully over-the-top, high-concept thriller winds up as a gruesomely funny, totally outrageous parable about external control and bodily autonomy, and the ways surveillance works its way under the skin. Experience it loud and on 35mm.
Friday, January 9 at 9:00pm
Tuesday, January 13 at 8:30pm

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER

Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) is a nonprofit organization that celebrates cinema as an essential art form and fosters a vibrant home for film culture to thrive. FLC presents premier film festivals, retrospectives, new releases, and restorations year-round in state-of-the-art theaters at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. FLC offers audiences the opportunity to discover works from established and emerging directors from around the world with a passionate community of film lovers at marquee events including the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films.  

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