The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto)

 

Writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho

Mendonça at Cannes

Mendonça with Wagner Moura

Mendonça on the set with Eugenia Alexandrova

cinematographer Eugenia Alexandrova

THE SECRET AGENT (O Agente Secreto)             B                                                           Brazil  France  Netherlands  Germany  (161 mi)  2025  ‘Scope  d: Kleber Mendonça Filho

Our story is set in the Brazil of 1977, a period of great mischief.

Winner of Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes, while also awarded the FIPRESCI Prize, listed at #3 from the Film Comment Poll: Best Films of 2025 and #4 from the Cahiers du Cinéma: Top 10 Films of 2025, the film is an elegiac portrait of Brazil in the late 1970’s, set at the tail end of a fascist dictatorship when political violence and corruption were rampant, a time fueled by murder and misinformation, which seems to mirror what’s happening in America at the moment, as we’re seeing this same recipe for authoritarianism being played out on a daily basis, with a President and his Party setting the groundwork for fascism by routinely dismantling the fundamental cornerstones of freedom, like freedom of speech, the press, academia, public education, research and development, and the arts, and then replacing them with a politics of silence, where one shudders to think about what’s happening out of sight behind the scenes.  Thoroughly manipulating the press and social media content, literally reviving a culture of racism, while systematically terrorizing black and brown neighborhoods, the President currently utilizes a para-military ICE goon squad, like something right out of Costa-Gavras Z (1969), as his own private army operating with impunity, answerable to no authority, with no government oversight, claiming they are rounding up immigrants, arresting and removing the worst of the worst when, in reality, 95% have no felony convictions, unlike the President, who is a convicted felon, guilty on 34 counts of fraudulently falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal hush money paid to a porn star to buy her silence on his first run to the Presidency in 2016.  Much like a dictatorship, which is all about dirty secrets and concealment, that pretty much describes this Presidency, as from day one the immediate attempt was to destroy the structure of government and eliminate all watchdog organizations, while at the same time firing all the scientists, doctors, economists, and the PhD’s while replacing them with party hacks and loyalists, people who aren’t remotely qualified to serve in these positions, whose only purpose is to rubber stamp the President’s agenda.  The highly publicized, racially motivated immigration dragnet, largely in cities controlled by the opposition party, demonstrates a blatant disregard of the law both at work and in the courts, having a devastating affect across the country, as nothing stops this administration from continually regurgitating fabricated lies round the clock to the American people about what they’re doing, preaching that they’re making neighborhoods safe while routinely pepper spraying, attacking, and arresting U.S. citizens, journalists, and even Congressional representatives from the opposing party who question their actions and try to expose what they’re actually doing, as they’re continually seen slamming parents to the ground in front of their children, even pregnant mothers, before separating them from those same children, and then allowing them to die in record numbers (even greater than the Covid years) while incarcerated in abysmally overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, intentionally denying access to medical care which could prevent nearly all the fatalities (Trump Administration Deadlier for ICE Detainees Than ...). 

Every year films with a popular political slant tend to get overpraised, which is not to say they’re not good films, but it’s questionable whether they rise to the level of greatness.  This year those films tend to be dissident  Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winning It Was Just an Accident (Yek tasadef sadeh) (2025) and Mohammad Rasoulof’s portrait of Iranian political repression in The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Dâne-ye anjîr-e ma'âbed) (2024), as well as Paul Thomas Anderson’s alarmist yet Academy-pleasing One Battle After Another (2025).  To those we can add this film, a classically structured tension film that jumps back and forth in time, concerning the inheritance of fear, the price of resistance, and the need to unlearn the forgetting.  Formerly a journalist and film critic before he began to focus on his career as a filmmaker in the 1990’s, Mendonça is the maker of Aquarius (2016), a film about a woman who refuses to sell her beachfront apartment to a developer, who wants to tear it down and build a skyscraper, so they try to force her out through increasingly abusive and violent means, and BACURAI (2019), a surreal Western about a corrupt and murderous scheme to secure water rights, both featuring the incomparable Brazilian actress Sônia Braga, while the documentary PICTURES OF GHOSTS (2023) analyzes how the city of Recife, the filmmaker’s home town, was once a cinema hub, and how the loss of its movie houses has reflected the city’s broader transformations over time.  This largely subversive work is a more vividly detailed extension of that film, where the filmmaker expresses his belief, “Fiction films are the best documentaries.”  The title is deliberately misleading and ironic, as the film isn’t about a classic John le Carré spy but a political refugee hiding in Brazil's 1977 dictatorship, alluding to his undercover life, the “secret” operations of the regime, and the elusive nature of truth and memory under oppression, with the “agent” representing anyone navigating hidden truths.  Fueled by Brazilian movies from the 70’s, like Bruno Barreto’s Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands (Doña Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) (1976), where a poster can be seen outside the movie theater, also Carlos Diegues’ XICA (1976) and Bye Bye Brazil (Bye Bye Brasil) (1979), they were actually made during the military dictatorship, yet coming at a time when a new political openness began, a certain liberalization of the regime.  Peppered with references to genre films, B-movies, 1970’s hits, and the very environment of movie theaters, the protagonist's father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is a projectionist at Cine São Luiz, the movie house of Recife, evoking a real character from PICTURES OF GHOSTS, though here it functions as a center of resistance.  Shot on vintage camera equipment in Panavision ‘Scope by Russian-born, Paris-based cinematographer Eugenia Alexandrova, this film partially came about by the seven-year research of documents and archives for his film PICTURES OF GHOSTS, using that process to advance the storyline for this film, featuring a man on the run from powerful forces connected to the ruling military dictatorship, seeking refuge and possible safe passage out of the country with a ragtag group of dissidents and political exiles, all living in the shadows, like ghosts of their own existence, as they are targets for elimination, their lives erased by the state, revealing a legacy of chaos, havoc, and the horrible stain political violence leaves in a nation’s memory.  Never really knowing the type of danger he is in, only that he is being chased, what happens to the protagonist is left offscreen, only revealed secondhand near the end through a newspaper clipping.

After the years of the Bolsonaro government, in which authoritarian rhetoric and political repression became acceptable again, it recalls The Captive Mind (1953) by Czesław Miłosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, a blueprint for understanding totalitarianism, as it reveals the psychological toll from living under an authoritarian regime, transforming minds from within, literally losing one’s ability to think freely, making this film read like a silent commentary on the present.  There’s also an indirect message on the decolonization of Angola, the second-largest Portuguese-speaking country after Brazil.  A movie like this makes you appreciate the wonders of a working democracy, with a safeguard of protected freedoms built into the Constitution, allowing dissent as part of any healthy discussion, as democracy works best when diverse interests and multiple points of view are represented.  When those protections are stripped away, the effect is immediate, as there’s a corrupt lawlessness that exists at every level of government bureaucracies, where protecting their own interests is all that matters, irrespective of any harm done to the populace.  This film is like a road map into those troubling times, where the Brazilian military dictatorship lasted from 1964 to 1985 (Military dictatorship in Brazil: a history of violence), marked by state-sanctioned repression, censorship, and an artificial economic transformation, this 21-year authoritarian regime began with a U.S. CIA-backed military coup as a defense against erroneously perceived communist threats.  The regime swiftly granted unchecked power to dissolve political parties, censor the media, and arrest dissenters as they suspended habeas corpus, shut down Congress, and legalized torture.  Following a lead character, Armando (Brazilian actor Wagner Moura in his first Portuguese-language role in years), though most of the film we know him under his alias Marcelo, we watch him as he drifts through various layers of unleashed terror, recalling Kafka’s everyman character of Josef K in The Trial, who is arrested without reason for an unspecified crime, left in a no man’s land of suspicion and distrust, where the prevailing mood of absurdity is everywhere, as no one seems willing to actually identify what crime he may have committed, obscured by a vast, secretive, and inaccessible legal system, but the full weight of the law is thrown at him, suggesting he must be guilty.  At some point in time, plagued by guilt, Josef K begins to believe it himself.  Armando navigates his way through a similar labyrinthian network of bureaucratic traps, returning to his hometown of Recife during the 1977 Brazilian Carnival, described as “a time of mischief,” with nearly 100 deaths reported during the weeklong festivities, as in this chaos he hopes to reconnect with his five-year old son, Fernando, and escape the whirlwind of accusations.  Stephen Spielberg’s JAWS (1975) was in the theaters at the time, where just the poster alone scared the living daylights out of Fernando, nonetheless, he couldn’t wait to see it.  Entrusting his young son with his in-laws, he goes into hiding with a community of dissidents the government would like to make disappear, only to discover Recife is not the safe place he presumed it would be, suddenly finding himself fending for his life, where standouts include Tânia Maria as Dona Sebastiana, the elderly landlady harboring them, and Robério Diógenes as Euclides, a brutal police officer.  The narrative seems meandering and circuitous, with many forks in the road, making it almost impossible to ascertain just what’s relevant and what isn’t, which is like sifting through the strands of history trying to uncover what ultimately matters.  

The uncomfortable dialogue with the past and the present recalls Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) in how it recreates a city at a particular moment in history, where the present remains haunted by memories, as the movie itself represents an act of resistance, accentuating the importance of the role media plays in standing up to authoritarianism, while it’s also notable for being the last appearance of German actor Udo Kier, who died recently just before Thanksgiving, playing a Jewish Holocaust survivor who is ridiculed by Euclides insisting that he must be a Nazi fugitive.  Told in three chapter headings, it has a novelesque sweep about it, meandering through an obstacle course of diverging storylines, occasionally getting sidetracked with what seems like dead ends, much of it feeling uneven, with sequences that go nowhere, yet at heart this is about the banalization of violence.  At more than two and one-half hours, it proceeds at a leisurely pace, slowly introducing a multitude of characters, becoming an ode to the Brazilian cinema of the filmmaker’s youth, never feeling rushed, and never in a hurry to fill in the missing pieces of a backstory, which only fuels the mounting tension, even managing to blend fantasy and black humor into this visually subversive political thriller, where bright, saturated colors act as a counterpoint to the dark, terrifying subject matter.  Several times we see the portrait of dictator General Ernesto Geisel, which hangs in the offices of the official bureaucratic authorities, yet outside of those photos, there is no talk directly of the dictatorship.  Instead there is an atmosphere of tension and authoritarianism that is established in the initial sequence, where a corpse is laying on the ground at a gas station, an apparent homage to Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry (1955), supposedly an anonymous man who tried to rob the establishment days earlier, but no one claims it, while also completely ignored by authorities, indicative of summary executions and the indifference of police power, making it clear that fear contaminates everything, and that this is a regime that weaponizes fear.  By withholding knowledge from the protagonist and the viewer, the filmmaker dangles the promise that all will be revealed in the end, but at best, it remains ambiguous, hidden under a plethora of clues that spill out, making it increasingly clear that Armando is the subject of foul play, as behind-the-scenes fascist interests have targeted him for execution.  Only in a flashback sequence do we understand that Armando was an engineer and college research academic with his wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho), living comfortably in a university setting, when his research is abruptly stolen and the patent rights taken over by the ruthless actions of private industry, which sees dollar signs in profits, making them both expendable, which is made clear in no uncertain terms, eventually targeting his outspoken wife, who dies under mysterious circumstances that may never be known (telling his son she died of pneumonia), making him next.  The entire film plays out on his increasingly paranoid wavelength, acutely aware of his frame of mind, where the beauty of the film is that it deals with surfaces that can be seen, while hiding the real motivations lurking underneath, where corrupt cops, paid informants, and notorious hitmen are on the trail, with what’s seen and unseen on a collision course with destiny, accentuated by newspaper reports that are infuriatingly inaccurate, printing misleading information fed by authorities, anything to take the heat away from the real murderous culprits.

Outside of Héctor Babenco’s THE KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (1985), Brazil has been late in dealing with this ugly part of their history.  Apparently part of the population is still unaware of or has fallen under a collective spell of Bolsonaro-induced societal amnesia from this period of Brazilian history, where this film works as an antidotal corrective.  Argentina, on the other hand, became renown for writing intelligent scripts exploring their dark past in the Dirty War (1976-1983), making films like THE OFFICIAL STORY (1985), THE MOTHERS OF PLAZA DE MAYO (1985), NIGHT OF THE PENCILS (1986), and CHRONICLE OF AN ESCAPE (2006), a time when 30,000 leftist sympathizers disappeared, taken to clandestine detention centers where they were tortured and killed before being dumped out of airplanes, dead or alive, over the Atlantic Ocean.  Expressing a fascination with the Brazilian cultural identity, this is a dense and ambitious work, written by Mendonça, which is not so much about the story itself, but creating an atmospheric environment of surveillance and paranoia, addressing the years of the Brazilian dictatorship with a personal, fragmented gaze, populated by a mosaic of interesting secondary figures, including friends, collaborators, former guerrillas, degraded soldiers, and corrupt bureaucrats.  There is no doubt that this is entertaining, filled with an underlying level of tension and suspense that drives the action, coming right after Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles won an Oscar for the Best International Feature with I’M STILL HERE (2024), the highest grossing Brazilian film since the pandemic, which dealt with the arrest and forced disappearance of a woman’s husband during this same military dictatorship, but this film goes off on a bunch of unnecessary tangents that seemingly go nowhere, perhaps adding to the speculation about how difficult it is to read between the lines of history, where much of the planted archival material is misinformation, making it hard to ascertain what really happened.  Imperceptively jumping ahead to the present, there’s a lengthy sequence near the end of modern day university student researchers scouring the secretly recorded material of the times in search of unraveling the truth, including Flávia (Laura Lufési) who fixates on Marcelo’s audio tapes, as the story advances, halts, gets sidetracked, and discovers new revelations much as she unearths these new details, but it’s unclear who they are working for, what their aims may be, and who is funding their research.  There are a lot of assumptions in this film, with nothing ever spelled out, leaving giant gaps in the story, where it’s easy to speculate and come up with our own theories, but the emphasis is not on exactly what happened, rather why it was covered up, and what this means in our current political landscape where authorities are doing exactly the same thing, using the highest echelons of power to obscure the truth, erase history, while feeding incessant lies to the media, making it almost impossible to ever know what is really going on.  This lack of transparency is at the heart of every authoritarian government, using all available technological advantages to obstruct the truth, making a science of cover-ups and obfuscation, continually misleading the public until all that’s left are the layer of lies which are meant to protect the powerful forces behind the scenes, most of whom we will never really know, or just what crimes they got away with.  Never really delving under the surface at the root cause of any of this, Mendonça’s film unearths the blueprint for how it gets done, revealing the extent of the infiltration in every branch of governmental authority, and the murderous lengths they are willing to go to protect the private financial interests of wealthy Brazilian business elites, as they are literally stealing massive funds from an unsuspecting public that hasn’t the means to protect themselves from this kind of insidious criminal operation under the guise of government, leaving behind a legacy of trauma and inequality that persists today.

Note

“I'm calling from the future. Fascism is still around.”  An Internet meme on X by Carlos Aguilar

Honey Don't!

 

Director Ethan Coen

Ethan Coen and spouse Tricia Cooke

HONEY DON’T!                   C                                                                                              USA  Great Britain  (89 mi)  2025  ‘Scope  d: Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke (uncredited)

What the world needs now is more lesbian-based private eye thrillers, as the opening sequence is right out of the exploitation evil pleasures of Russ Meyer and the lurid Tura Satana in FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (1965), where busty working-class women exact revenge with bats and knives, wreaking havoc with their ability to titillate while also providing loads of subversive fun.  Like that film, this should be so much more of a blast than it is, coming from a filmmaker with such an established reputation, where this is the second installment of Ethan Coen and his openly queer wife Tricia Cooke’s planned lesbian B-movie trilogy, with the conclusive third already entitled GO, BEAVERS!, all written together while she edits the films, following the curious yet less than scintillating Drive-Away Dolls (2024), though not as autobiographical, less personal, and not as much trashy fun.  This feels even more laid back and casual, yet much darker in tone with excessively cruel violence, more of a reimagining of the hardboiled detective genre through a lesbian lens, becoming a deliberately sunny, escapist neo-noir thriller.  If Drive-Away Dolls was the lesbian answer to the road trip, this injects the lesbian subculture to the traditionally male detective genre, skewering the hypocrisy of Christian megachurches and the nefarious activities in small town America, yet it already feels out of time, like we’ve somehow missed out on what drew this couple into making this picture, as the fun is already gone.  It shouldn’t be that contentiously controversial, as after all, the very first cinematic kiss was between two women, 1882 - The Kiss - Eadweard Muybridge YouTube (34 seconds).  In the opening credits, the names are etched into faded signs on dilapidated buildings and commercial establishments, where peeling paint hints at faded dreams, inspired apparently by John Huston’s FAT CITY (1972).  While there’s still some subversive fun to be had, most of it falls flat, leaving very little excitement about the final installment.  Premiering out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in a midnight screening, where it was largely panned, you wonder why a film like this would even get an invite, as there’s little to actually like about this film.  Nonetheless, it has the Coen name, makers of some of the best independent films produced in America since the 1980’s, but the infamous brothers broke up as a collaborating team in 2018 and have been on their own ever since, making their own separate films, though expected to reunite at some point in the future with an anticipated horror film.  It would be hard to imagine one of the Dardennes brothers making a film on their own, as these are two of the best brothers duo in cinema history, hugely influential, even going as far back as the Lumière Brothers.  While actually shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the film is set in the Central Valley of Bakersfield, California, of all places, a farm town with plenty of wide open spaces, not exactly known for their cultural notoriety, but the desert is never far away, and everyone here seems to be living on the edge of oblivion and total obscurity.  The opening says it all, easily the best sequence in the entire film, never living up to what it promises, establishing the tone for a darkly humorous exploitation movie as a badass beautiful woman (Lera Abova) does her best Uma Thurman Pulp Fiction imitation in shades, pulling up to the site of a car crash in her Vespa scooter wearing a leopard-print outfit with an exposed bra, as she walks down a steep slope to an upside down car with a dead woman inside, prying the distinctly recognizable ring off her finger before she wanders off to a nearby stream to bathe naked.  Cut to a distinctive copycat cover version of the hugely popular Eric Burdon and the Animals hit song from 1965, We Gotta Get Out of This Place YouTube (3:15).  Now that’s an opening statement.    

Unfortunately, that mysterious woman who defiantly commands the screen is barely seen again, as it’s not really about her.  It’s about the dead girl lying at the bottom of a gulch.  Arriving on the scene to investigate is the friendly town cop, homicide detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day), who greets the arrival of small-town private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) with a smile, both wondering what the other is doing there, as it’s supposedly an accident, but they’re investigating it as a homicide.  Qualley, who starred in the Claire Denis film Stars at Noon (2022) and the earlier installment of Drive-Away Dolls, may be the recurring figure throughout the trilogy, providing a female version of a detached 1940’s film noir detective like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe updated to the modern day era.  A chic dresser in heels, always making quick witted, wise ass remarks (when asked if she drinks, she replies, “Heavily.  It’s a point of pride.”), she exudes a sexy swagger with what sounds like a Texas accent, a woman you don’t want to mess with, as she can dish it out with the best of them, easily having her way with the bad boys who get a tad aggressive, while picking up loose and available women in bars afterwards.  Driving a vintage turquoise 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle SS 454 Convertible 4-Speed, just like guys in earlier 50’s movies, her car makes a statement, while still using an old-school rolodex for contact information instead of some new-age gadgetry, she remains emotionally guarded, yet possesses a mysterious allure.  Marty has a soft spot for her and attempts a friendly date, but she just laughs off the offer, reminding him “I like women.”  Befuddled by the thought that could even be possible, refusing the accept the obvious, Marty defies the odds and keeps trying, as it is a small town after all, but she keeps telling him the same thing, becoming a running gag throughout the picture.  Without sharing what drew her to the scene of the crime, the dead driver is Mia Novotny, a prospective client who called Honey earlier that same day, but she was killed before they could meet, where the suspicious circumstances surrounding her death expose a wider web of corruption.  Perhaps the unseemliest aspect of the film is its depiction of a corrupt and sleazy church that is basically a front for its behind-the-scenes drug trafficking operations.  Mia was a member of the Four-Way Temple led by the lecherous Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), who is a real sleazeball (Captain America, no less), a despicable but darkly humorous pastor preaching “active submission,” where we see raunchy sex scenes in the Reverend’s private chambers, taking full advantage of young women members of his flock, often with multiple partners, perhaps an ironic reference to the name of the church, which he runs like a cult, where it’s all about the supreme leader in charge.  The nastiness of how they conduct their business appears to be shockingly connected to Mia’s death, as the ring pulled off her finger had the insignia of the church, and we see how easily Devlin is willing to eliminate anyone who might be deemed a threat to his operations.  This is where the film really bogs down in over-predictability, as they are such an easy target, accumulating more and more corpses without a hint of suspense or tension, using dimwitted stereotypes that only drag this film down.  When Honey’s niece Corinne (Talia Ryder from Eliza Hittman’s painfully underseen 2020 Top Ten List #5 Never Rarely Sometimes Always) returns home battered and bruised, she turns to Honey, fearing her overly judgmental mother would only blame her for even going out with such an abusive local redneck, so Honey pays him a call in his trailer, which turns into an ugly and brutally violent affair, as she turns his aggression back on him, having the last word, even planting a rather humorous bumper sticker over his MAGA license plate that reads “I have a vagina and I vote,” one of the few moments that got a few snickers from the audience. 

In the course of her investigation, Honey runs into MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), a policewoman who works in the evidence room, quickly meeting her at a bar frequented by police afterwards, discovering she’s a like-minded butch queer woman, where their flirtatiousness is one for the ages, with MG brazenly fingering her in public, commenting, “I love first date stuff.”  Taking their business back to Honey’s place, the lesbian sex is relatively tame, where the mildly amusing kicker is the following morning Honey is seen casually washing an array of sex toys in her kitchen sink with the look of a domestic housewife.  That’s something we don’t typically see.  There’s so little sex in movies today, what little we do see is perhaps a reflection of the regressively backwards culture that is becoming more puritanical, so even a glimpse is a throwback to more liberal times when sex was commonplace.  MG is friendly enough, but hides a dark and mysterious side, like many of the characters in this film.  Honey questions Devlin, as murder and criminal activity seems to lead to his door, quickly establishing a clever repartee, as Devlin acknowledges, “You’re fascinating,” with Honey quipping, “And you haven’t even seen the riddle tattooed on my ass.”  He predictably defends using his position to prey on vulnerable young women, suggesting we’re all a little lost in need of some spiritual guidance, and unlike other churches that only deal with saving souls, his guidance encompasses the total package.  When Corrine goes missing, Honey returns to the church, only to find it locked, but she hears a gunshot inside, with a woman on a scooter seen fleeing from the scene.  That’s the last we see of the crooked pastor, who apparently got his comeuppance by being too big for his britches.  Sex and violence are intertwined in this movie, with a series of strange deaths tied to this mysterious church, but the police are completely baffled and fail to make the connection, as Marty remains unconvinced there is a reason to search the Temple.  Audiences have a behind-the-scenes window into their criminal and sexual depravity, but the question is where does it all lead?  The mystery woman appears to have ended any speculation on where this is heading.  Having no other leads, Honey visits MG at her home, and what appears to be innocent banter suddenly turns ugly, with MG growing increasingly paranoid and unstable, turning into a ferocious, knockdown battle between two women, arguably the catfight men seem to fantasize about, as we suddenly learn the grotesque truth behind her repressive family secrets, where MG has no intention of letting Honey just walk out of there.  But Honey is no patsy, capable of getting down and dirty, which she needs to do in order to survive.  In the end, we learn the mystery woman on a scooter is named Chėre, speaks with a French accent, where it might be better to construct an entire film around her character.  Stay tuned.  It’s all a little peculiar, as outside of Honey, who is uniquely compelling, none of the other characters have any depth or are even remotely developed, remaining cardboard caricatures, which makes it difficult to relate with this movie, as it feels so lazily written and realized.  A better version of what this film may have been attempting to accomplish is Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding (2024), which similarly flaunts its comic B-movie neo-noir mentality from a lesbian perspective, and before that was the Wachowski’s Bound (1996).  Perhaps the biggest surprise is the generic female-centric soundtrack, sounding amateurish rather than ironic, including a few songs sung by Qualley, with the titular song, a 1956 Carl Perkins rockabilly classic, which probably should have been the movie theme song, only heard over the end credits, and even then it’s an inept cover version compared to the original.  While they may not have had money for musical rights, these are some really poor choices.  Overall, it’s a lame experience, with no real standout jokes or scenes, except the opening sequence, where the normally reliable Coen humor just falls flat, making this a real slog to sit through.  Films feel more generic nowadays, and this may be a classic example, as a generally reliable creative team seems to have fumbled the ball and simply run out of ideas and inspiration.  There’s a lackadaisical emptiness here that feels like a bad parody gone wrong, making it hard to imagine there will be another.