Entertainment
Essay: As American democracy is in peril, Brazilian films offer perspective
When Brazilian journalist Tatiana Merlino watched “The Secret Agent” — one of this year’s Oscar nominees for best picture — it felt like seeing scattered scenes from her own life.
As the movie follows Marcelo (played by Wagner Moura) — a professor fleeing from a vindictive businessman during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985), the story skims through old audio tapes and newspapers, reviewed by a researcher looking into how he died. Like her, Merlino also dug into the past to piece together how her uncle, Luiz Eduardo Merlino, a communist activist, was killed by the right-wing regime in 1971. Though it was initially reported as a suicide, the family soon found his corpse with torture marks in a morgue.
“It became necessary to fight for memory, truth, and justice, because these crimes committed by dictatorship agents weren’t punished at that time, and have not been to this day,” says the 49-year-old journalist, who first saw “The Secret Agent” in São Paulo, and made a career from investigating human rights abuses.
“When a country does not come to terms with its past,” she adds, “its ghosts resurface.”
Recent dictatorship-themed movies like “The Secret Agent” and “I’m Still Here,” which won the Oscar for best international film in 2025, were instant blockbusters back home in Brazil. While both films honor those who, like Merlino, still seek justice for the regime victims, their popularity also got boosted by the country’s zeitgeist.
To many Brazilians, these movies served as reminders of what could have been had former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, himself a retired Army captain and a dictatorship nostalgic, succeeded in his 2022 attempt at a coup d’etat.
On Jan. 8, 2023, encouraged by Bolsonaro, hundreds of vandals stormed into the Three Powers Plaza, a square in the country’s capital, Brasília, that gathers the congress, the supreme court and the presidential palace. Neither he nor the vandals accepted the 2022 election — won by the veteran leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as “Lula.”
The uprising followed the same blueprint as the pro-Trump rioters behind the Jan. 6 insurrection in the United States. Although President Trump himself was federally prosecuted for election obstruction, the case was dismissed after his reelection in 2024.
Unlike the U.S., however, Brazil has charged, judged and arrested the conspirators — including Bolsonaro and members of his staff who participated in the coup plot.
“Bolsonaro doesn’t come from Mars,” said “The Secret Agent” star Wagner Moura to the L.A. Times in February. “He’s deeply grounded in the history of the country.”
In 1964, a U.S.-backed coup enacted a violent, 21-year autocracy run by the military, whose effects still resonate today, says Alessandra Gasparotto, a professor at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPEL).
“It was a dictatorship that worked from a perspective of building certain legitimacy, keeping the congress functioning, but of course, after purging dissent,” explains the Brazilian historian.
“I’m Still Here,” for example, dramatizes the real-life quest of Eunice Paiva, a housewife whose husband Rubens Paiva, a former leftist congressman who had his tenure revoked after the coup, then disappeared in the hands of the military in 1971. To this day, his body still hasn’t been recovered.
In 2014, Bolsonaro, then just a congressman, spit on a bust of Paiva erected to honor his memory during the coup’s 50th anniversary in Congress.
“The cinema of all countries has the role of preserving memory, so if you take a look at the Holocaust, the American Civil War, or World War II movies, it has this role of almost an ally of history,” says writer Marcelo Rubens Paiva, son of Rubens Paiva and author of the book from which “I’m Still Here” is based. “There’s an old saying: History is the narrative of winners, while art is of the defeated.”
In the case of Brazil, the militaries who led the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship got away with torture and murder through a 1979 amnesty law. It was initially enacted to pardon alleged “political crimes” committed by the regime opposition and allow a transition to democracy — but it was also used to pardon the dictatorship’s human rights violations. Then, in the late 1980s, the military oversaw a slow, gradual shift to democracy, stepping down from power only in 1985.
“This new republic had more continuity than novelty, since many politicians who were central to the dictatorship moved to central roles in the democratic government,” explains Gasparotto. “That’s why they built this pact [to forgive the regime’s crimes].”
For that reason, these movies still feel contemporary. “The Secret Agent,” for example, blends past and future through the records analyzed by a researcher, while “I’m Still Here” highlights Eunice Paiva’s post-regime fight for the recognition of Rubens Paiva’s death; without any corpse to officialize his death, he was just deemed disappeared.
When Merlino watched the movie, for example, Eunice reminded her of her grandmother, Iracema Merlino.
“I’m the third generation of my family fighting for memory, truth and justice,” says Merlino. “It started with my grandmother, who passed away, then it was handed to my mother, who’s now very ill, then to me.”
Nowadays, she awaits trial for the third lawsuit attempt of the family to hold her uncle’s torturer, Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, accountable — the two other cases against the accused were dismissed over the years.
Since Ustra’s death in 2015, the Merlino family is now suing his estate for reparations. Yet he still remains a hero to some; in 2016, while Bolsonaro was still a congressman, he shouted a dedication to the memory of the torturer during the voting of the impeachment of Brazil’s former President Dilma Rousseff — herself one of the victims of Ustra in the 1970s, but among the few who survived.
“These films make connections with the present because understanding the past is important for understanding today’s contradictions,” says Marcelo Rubens Paiva. “What happened before interferes in the conflicts a country lives in today.”
So if authoritarians like Bolsonaro don’t come out of the blue, the same goes for other autocratic leaders, like President Trump.
Although founded on democratic principles, the U.S. itself has a long, muddled history with the concept. The authoritarian turn the country is reckoning with is part of a long legacy of inequality that stemmed from the 246-year institution of slavery. Following its abolishment in 1865 came a near-centurylong period of tension marked by racial segregation that we now refer to as “Jim Crow.”
“With some exceptions, the South was governed by a then-segregationist Democrat party — with [rampant] electoral fraud, authoritarianism, use of local police for political repression, and no chance for opposition, even [by] moderates,” says Arthur Avila, a history professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil.
Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended segregation and granted voting rights to people of all races — signed by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Southern Democrat who broke away from the party’s history to spearhead progressive domestic policy — the decades that followed were ridden with manipulations of the electoral system. For example gerrymandering, or the practice of manipulating electoral district boundaries to favor one political party, is an ongoing, albeit controversial tactic among both Democrats and Republicans.
President Trump himself was federally prosecuted for election obstruction. The indictment alleged that, upon losing the 2020 election, Trump conspired to overturn the results and manipulate the public by spreading false claims of election fraud on social media. It argued that this, in turn, stoked a mob of his supporters into leading the deadly Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol; but the case was dismissed upon his reelection in 2024.
In the lead-up to the midterm elections in November, Trump has pushed for federal control over elections, restrictions on mail-in voting and the addition of citizenship documents to vote, despite an existing federal law that already prohibits noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. (He tried implementing the latter through an executive order in 2025, but it was permanently blocked by a federal court; a voter ID bill called the “SAVE America Act” is currently stalling in the Senate.)
“There’s a strong local authoritarian tradition in the U.S. that Trump himself feeds from,” says Avila.
Besides that, according to Avila, the country faces a growing “de-democratization” process from within. This shows in the rising control and dismantling of institutions by reactionary sectors — including efforts to block professional, educational and athletic programs promoting DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion — from what many critics and scholars have cited as lingering resentment from desegregation, he says.
“We may see it as a slow authoritarian turn in North American politics that didn’t overturn the democratic regime yet,” Arthur considers. “But if this process goes on, and that’s a conjecture, in the next decade the U.S. may become a state of exception that keeps democratic appearances but has been stripped of any democracy’s substance whatsoever.”
As movies such as “The Secret Agent and “I’m Still Here” remind us, a great deal of maintaining a democracy has to do with keeping a good memory.
From Wake in Fright (1971) to Wolf Creek (2005) to The Royal Hotel (2023), the movies keep telling us that outsiders who travel to Australia looking for adventure or a vacation, well, they shouldn’t do that. Why? Because there’s probably a gang of ruffians looking to take you on a kangaroo hunt, rape you, or just generally slaughter you. That’s to say nothing of the dangerous terrain and wildlife, seen in Walkabout (1971) and Rogue (2007), all of which seems designed by Mother Nature to be deadly. Apex follows in this cinematic tradition. But as the title of this Netflix original suggests, the protagonist is better equipped to survive Aussie perils than most. Charlize Theron plays Sasha, an American thrillseeker who faces treacherous landscapes and shady characters in the Land Down Under. One might worry that she’s in trouble, except she’s Charlize Theron, star of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Atomic Blonde (2017). Chances are, anyone who tries to mess with her will find themselves in serious trouble.
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Deep Focus Review
If you were to go by “Saturday Night Live” hosting performance alone, you might think that the best way to ensure a memorable, well rounded and surprisingly funny show is to book a female pop star — preferably one with some child-acting experience.
With apologies to Harry Styles, it’s been pop stars including Ariana Grande, Sabrina Carpenter, Dua Lipa and now Olivia Rodrigo who’ve shown themselves to be naturals at adapting their on-stage talents to the Studio 8H stage for “SNL.”
And while she might not have crushed it to the degree of Grande (something about the Bowen Yang era of the show and Grande seemed in perfect lockstep with each other), Rodrigo was a very good host. Whatever she lacked in sketch comedy chops, she more than made up for as musical guest, world-premiering a new song called “begged,” and singing in several sketches, including a memorable one about a girl in a zoo on a planet of bug people (we’ll get to that).
After a charming monologue in which she also sang, Rodrigo played a scheming woman in a “Dynasty”-like nighttime soap opera from the 1980s, “Edge of Destiny,” where people kept falling down the stairs. The mix of physical comedy, distant cue cards and having to keep from breaking character as cast members flopped down a set of fake stairs seemed almost too much for the guest host. But she recovered nicely in another solid (and hilariously gross) “Shop TV” sketch about a baker (Rodrigo) who makes lava cakes that look a lot like anuses.
She also played a woman competing with her ex-boyfriend (Ben Marshall) at a birthday party by pretending to have a date (he does the same with a wacky Ashley Padilla). She also played a cheating romantic partner in a musical sketch about getting busted, a rideshare passenger whose driver (Andrew Dismukes) discovers he has a talent for Jamaican dancehall rapping, and a TikToker employed by a home security company to take viral videos of burglars.
Rodrigo’s songs were tremendous, especially “begged,” but it was hard for any of the sketches to top Aziz Ansari’s appearance as FBI Director Kash Patel, which drew the biggest non-musical audience reaction of the show when he appeared in the cold open.
As musical guest, Rodrigo performed her latest single “drop dead,” introduced by Debbie Harry, and a new song, “begged,” introduced by recent host and “Heated Rivalry” star Connor Storrie.
It was the rare cold open without a rambling James Austin Johnson performance as President Trump. Instead, after a clever opening title card (“You’re watching A-Span. Of your life disappear. Watching C-SPAN.”), White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt (Padilla) talked about her upcoming maternity leave before introducing “The man, the myth, the liability,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost). Hegseth talked about the war in Iran with its “sick air raids. This war has been a movie … specifically ‘The Neverending Story.’ ” Hegseth fielded a few questions, belittling reporters as he’s done before, answering the question of when the war will end: “That’s like asking when is sex gonna be over,” he replied, “Answer: when the man is done.” Hegseth introduced Patel (Ansari), who fast-talked his way through a defense of his alleged drinking and spending. From low hanging fruit (“We dotted every T and bulged every I”) to a much sharper takedown of Patel (“I’m the first Indian person to suck at their job”), Ansari brought his Tom Haverford from “Parks and Recreation” energy, particularly when describing jumping on the couch at a night club screaming, “Who wants the nuclear codes? J/K, I ain’t got ‘em!”
Rodrigo’s monologue began by acknowledging how young the 23-year-old pop star really is: they say your favorite “SNL” cast is the one you saw when you were a teenager and hers, she said, was the current cast. After teasing her new album out next month, she showed a clip of a commercial she did for Old Navy and mentioned working with Jake Paul on the Disney Channel show “Bizaardvark.” Paul, she said, once told her, “I really want to beat up old guys on Netflix!” and they both achieved their dreams. Rodrigo then played at a piano a take of her first hit single “drivers license,” focused on getting a Real ID at the DMV and all that it requires. “Passport, W2, first-born son / Gas bill, body count, bra size, how long will this be? I’ll just use my old fake ID,” she sang.
Best sketch of the night: They even have Olivia-shaped popsicles!
Unsurprisingly, the best of the night was one of Rodrigo’s musical performances, this time a pre-taped music video about a girl who loves her perfect bedroom. It’s got a purple corded phone, a lava lamp, a beanbag chair … and it happens to be a habitat at a zoo on a planet of bug people. The wistful, lovely song is accompanied by weird visuals of the aliens, who look like praying mantises, admiring the human specimen through the room’s windows, applauding when she goes to the bathroom and taking pictures. There are enough bizarre touches, such as a VHS version of “A League of Their Own” with aliens in human skin suits, a bug protester and an unsuccessful male mate (Johnson), that quite a bit of world building happens in the short span of the very catchy tune. Can we get this song on Apple Music and Spotify, please?
Also good: Cute — cake frosting on the nose. Sexy — mashed potatoes all over the face.
Former “SNL” cast member Kristen Wiig had a talent for introducing characters whose one bizarre trait, expertly performed, could drive a whole sketch. These days, it’s Ashley Padilla (maddeningly, she’s still billed as a “Featured Player”) who is able to elevate a potentially annoying character with a collection of hilarious tics and a lot of boundary overstepping. In a sketch about a broken-up couple (Rodrigo and Marshall) who try to make each other jealous by glomming on to fake new dates, Padilla laughs too loudly, smears mashed potatoes all over Marshall’s face, gives an unhinged speech that includes, “We are to be married at midnight! Now let us pray.” It seems like every episode of late has had one sketch reserved for Padilla to show her way with these types of self-unaware characters, and this was another great showcase for her.
‘Weekend Update’ winner: Podcasters are at war and it’s hard to understand why
If you don’t know why “Call Her Daddy” podcaster Alex Cooper (Chloe Fineman) and TikToker and “Hot Mess” podcaster Alix Earle (Veronika Slowikowska) are feuding, trust us, you are not alone. Their apparent beef, which has been speculated about by very online people and, weirdly, business reporters, is now “Weekend Update” fodder, with the women comparing their fight to a “literal Chernobyl for white women.” Perhaps the best part was Michael Che’s complete bafflement as to who these women are and why they’re mad at each other. Elsewhere, Kam Patterson continued his streak of clunky “Update” segments, this time vying for a date with Megan Thee Stallion after her breakup with NBA player Klay Thompson. In describing himself, Patterson said, “Some say he’s finding his voice more every week.” Unfortunately for Patterson, there’s only two episodes left in the season.
Between 1965 and 1974, Amicus Productions, a famous British competitor to Hammer Films, made seven horror anthology movies. While The House That Dripped Blood and Tales From The Crypt are widely considered the best, there’s another complete gem that often gets forgotten. From Beyond The Grave was the final Amicus anthology, and also perhaps the greatest.
Let’s examine why.
From Beyond The Grave is written by Robin Clarke (in their only writing credit), Raymond Christodoulou (Nutcracker 1982) and R. Chetwynd-Hayes (Night Gallery TV Series 1973), and is directed by Kevin Connor (Motel Hell 1980). It is a 1974 portmanteau story centering around an antique shop named Temptations Limited, run by “The Proprietor” (played by Peter Crushing; The Curse Of Frankenstein 1957). Those that have evil intentions and try to steal from or cheat The Proprietor are met with a grizzly fate, courtesy of the objects that come from his cursed shop.
The third story is titled “The Elemental”. It starts as a standard ghost haunting story, and lays in spoof acting, with effects that are ahead of their time. It’s the silliest of the four, but still effective in its twist. And finally, “The Door” concludes the shorts. It’s about a cursed door that opens a portal to an old world, and it rides a bit too closely to the first story. But what makes it special is that the protagonists survive, because the main character didn’t cheat The Proprietor when he bought the door.
From Beyond The Grave is a fast-moving anthology with pointed endings, timeless cameos, and a powerful wrapper led by genre legend Cushing. As of this writing, it’s available to stream for free on Plex and Hoopla. It comes highly recommended, as do all of the underrated Amicus anthologies.
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