The Secret Agent

From 20 February 

Set during the waning days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, The Secret Agent is a dynamite political thriller from Bacurau director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Wanted by police for crimes unknown, research scientist Armando Solimoes (Wagner Moura) abandons his home in São Paulo and heads for Recife, in Brazil’s tropical northeast, where his son has been living since the death of his wife. Taken in at a home for political refugees by a gran (Tânia Maria) with anarcho-communist sympathies, Armando is rechristened Marcelo and handed a job at the local ID card office. Here he runs into the local chief of police, a Nazi wannabe who harasses an elderly man he assumes was a German soldier in the war (Udo Kier, unexpected to the last in his final film role.) Meanwhile in São Paulo, an old acquaintance with ties to the regime orders a hit on Armando, who must decide whether or not to flee the country once his fake passport shows.

Mendonça’s film is tense and surprisingly comic, conjuring a world where the grotesque rubs shoulders with the routine. It’s charismatically performed by Moura, who plays Armando as a man who can’t quite believe what’s happening – never more so than in the brilliant opening scene, where Armando stops in at a garage only to find a dead body on the forecourt, lightly wrapped in newspaper. The man was a thief, explains the pump attendant, shot by the night manager and left out in the sun to rot for three days, with the police nowhere to be found. Of course, when the police do finally show up later in the scene, you can bet it’s not the body they’re interested in. The Secret Agent probes at how such a world came to be – and, by implication, how it might be coming back, if stories like Armando’s are no longer heard.

Twinless

From February 6

“They say there’s nothing worse than losing a child,” says grieving mum Lisa (Lauren Graham) in writer-director James Sweeney’s second feature, an award winner at Sundance. “But maybe there is.” That something turns out to be twinlessness, the loss of a twin as experienced by their sibling and the subject of this engagingly offbeat indie flick. Sweet-natured jock Roman (Dylan O’Brien, a brilliant performance) is mourning the death of his brother Rocky (also O’Brien), a young gay man killed in a road traffic accident. He strikes up a bond with the acerbic Dennis (Sweeney), a man completely unlike him in outlook and temperament, when they meet at a support group for bereaved twins. But Dennis is harbouring a secret that sits like an unexploded bomb at the heart of the relationship: what follows is a wicked black comedy with surprising things to say about friendship, forgiveness and how we all look to plug missing pieces in our lives. 

Sirāt

From 27 February

Far and away the strangest film to compete at this year’s Oscars, Sirāt is the blazingly intense fourth feature from Galician filmmaker Oliver Laxe, a radical in full visionary flow. In the Moroccan desert, father Luis (Sergi López) and his son Esteban (Bruno Nuno Arjona) embark on a dangerous journey in search of his missing daughter, led by a group of misfit ravers. Here, on the outskirts of humanity, news filters through of an impending third world war, but Louis and co have even more pressing concerns at hand – at which point we’ll say no more, and implore you to see this film on the biggest possible screen, armed with only the barest of plot details.

The Chronology of Water

From 6 February

Kristen Stewart’s first film as a director is certainly a bold one; adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name, it’s the story of a young girl’s attempts to reckon with her abusive childhood that actively resists trauma-porn cliches. As with the novel, Stewart’s film employs a free-associative, almost aggressively non-linear approach to its story, in which Lidia (Imogen Poots) leaves home to take up a swimming scholarship at a college in Texas. When Lidia spirals into heavy drink and drug use, she is thrown off the course, but soon finds kinship in the eccentric figure of Ken Kesey (James Belushi), who draws her into his fold as a writer. Punishing to watch at times, it’s a debut every bit as mannered and eccentric as Stewart’s screen persona, but Poots makes it count with a performance of fierce and focused intensity.

My Father’s Shadow

From 6 February

Written with his brother, Dale, with their own late father in mind, My Father’s Shadow is a beautifully shot meditation on memory, family and cultural identity from British-Nigerian filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr. The film charts a day in the life of brothers Aki and Remi (real-life siblings Godwin and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo), whisked up on a trip to Lagos with their dad (Sope Dirisu), who must confront his boss about a pay packet some six months overdue. On the streets as at home, trouble is brewing, with tensions mounting in the run-up to the 1993 Nigerian election crisis. But such worries simply melt away into the background as the two boys bask in the presence of their dad, a joy the film signals beautifully through vibrant use of colour and a searching eye for composition.