#3 on Film Comment's Best Films of 2025:

Leave it to Kleber Mendonça Filho, a filmmaker for whom cinema feels as essential as breathing, to craft a political thriller that is equally steeped in the techniques of its classic-movie inspirations and the everyday atmospheres and textures of 1970s Brazil. Photographed in widescreen Panavision, and featuring De Palma–style split-diopter shots, Altmanesque zooms, and wipe transitions straight out of Star Wars, The Secret Agent is packed with period-perfect details and held together by Wagner Moura’s soulful performance as a scientist and father caught in the murderous headlights of Brazil’s military dictatorship. But this is also a movie that keeps wandering around—“a bit improvised, Brazilian-style,” as one character says. Mendonça is fascinated by how the history and tools of cinema become an archive; the film finds its most arresting images and moral conscience in all the supposedly unnecessary, extra stuff of life that one might imagine any other filmmaker excising from the record.—Michael Blair

Aside from the giallo influences, I also connected with the De Palma references. The film features a high-gloss aesthetic reminiscent of features like Body Double and Femme Fatale. It’s also steeped in shadowy noir camerawork by Ali Asad. The cinematographer creates a seductive look and feel that’s fitting to the steamy narrative it accompanies. I initially lamented that we don’t see any split-screen shots to further amplify the callbacks to De Palma’s heyday, but that might have read as too on the nose, considering that the De Palma homages don’t stop there.

The far-fetched twist is plenty reminiscent of the ultimate reveals in films like Raising Cain, Body Double, and Dressed to Kill. It’s worth mentioning that De Palma was heavily inspired by giallo films, and Marshall takes many of his cues from De Palma, so the inspiration here runs several layers deep.

On the whole, the De Palma references paired with the style-over-substance approach so common to giallo filmmaking make this erotic thriller uniquely appealing to me. With that said, it’s not nearly as good as the films that inspired it. In fact, Compulsion is pretty rough. However, it’s ultimately entertaining, visually striking, and invokes nostalgia for the iconic careers of two of my favorite directors. If that sounds like your cup of tea, you may want to check out Compulsion. The film is now available on demand and in select cinemas.

I did want to run through a couple of other collaborators. One in particular you mentioned during our last conversation. It's Fred [Berger], your producer, who also produced Teen Spirit. I really thought it was important to emphasize his work here, because when you find a producer that's willing to support your vision, especially when it's a big swing vision like this, it is of the utmost importance to have the right person in your corner, or it doesn't happen, or it doesn't happen the way you want. So what is it about him as a producer that not only helps you get your movie off the ground, but also ensures that you see your vision through to fruition?

MINGHELLA: I love that question so much. You do ask the best questions. It’s true. I mean, that's a phenomenal question. Fred is the reason I've gotten to make anything. He's my guardian angel. I asked too much of him making this movie. It really was like a Heart of Darkness situation trying to get this film made, and he did it for nothing, for free. Anybody who's aware of him, he produced La La Land and A Complete Unknown. He doesn't need to be working with me at all, but for some reason has continued to support me, and I plan to continue collaborating with him for as long as I can. But he's the reason I'm able to work with the extraordinary crew who made this film. Drew Daniels, who shot the movie, shot Anora. He's an incredible cinematographer. Throughout the whole crew, there are incredible people who basically want to work with Fred, I think, more than me. So, I'm very grateful to him, and I don't know why he sticks around, but I'm happy he does.

You brought up Drew, so I'll ask a question about him that is inspired by something you were explaining to me last time. Last we spoke, you told me that you're both "mischievous" people, and you wanted your approach to this film to have a sense of mischief and play. What exactly does that look like? How do you spark mischief and play on this set, and where can we see it in the finished film?

MINGHELLA: I'm going to babble a bit, so bear with me. Hopefully the movie felt very unpretentious when you saw it and was very silly, but there was something slightly pretentious, I guess, in our thinking behind the film. When I first read the script, it sort of felt to me like Death Becomes Her by way of Paul Verhoeven, if that makes any sense. So it's like a perverse version, like a Brian De Palma-fied version of Death Becomes Her, and I thought that was a really exciting combination. So I started thinking about those movies and that time period. Paul Verhoeven made movies in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s through the studio system with big movie stars. Death Becomes Her is a movie made in the ‘90s with big movie stars, so I started looking at films in the studio era at that time, and they were lit in a very specific way.

Drew and I started looking at those movies a lot, and there are very specific things that people would do then, which they don’t really do now. Blue nights are banned in the modern era of cinematography, but I've always rather liked blue nights, so we brought some blue nights back. But also, I would just say that we put a lot of lights in camera. We were very inspired by [Jan de Bont], who was a director, but he also was a cinematographer, and we looked at a lot of his work, and used a lot of his lenses, and hopefully it comes through in the movie. Like Fred, Drew is an extraordinary cinematographer and an amazing filmmaker in his own right. We had 25 days to do it; it wasn't enough time to make this film. I would not have been able to do it without a cinematographer that experienced and patient and hard working.

Here's an excerpt:

The specificity of the camera positioning and slow-motion orchestration in the title sequence is stylistically reminiscent of director Brian De Palma. Anderson said he wasn’t consciously thinking of De Palma when designing the title sequence, but he doesn’t deny the influence or direct connection.

“I think when you’re making something, you’re thinking of the things even that you’re not thinking of [them].  It’s in there,” said Anderson of De Palma’s influence on the scene. “You’re using all the paint on the palette, so for me it’s a natural thing. I’ve seen all [De Palma’s] movies, and I’ve seen them again and again, so I think it’s a part of my — it’s gone into my DNA.”

To hear Wes Anderson’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.

It all started with a tweet that caught my eye. It was a shot that featured both the batter and the pitcher, and many people on X likened it to the work of Brian De Palma.

And when you see it, you feel an emotional swell as you witness the inherent beauty of the game.

How did we get here?

Enter Mets Director for SNYtv John DeMarsico, who is a self-described film junkie and who has been putting some of the most insane shots into broadcasts of Mets games. Shots that are so beautiful and cool that they have sort of reignited people's love of the game, and have also encouraged them to explore the movie homages.

DeMarsico tweets with the tag #Baseballiscinema, and he's living up to it. Just cruising through highlights, I was in awe of shots with shallow focus, shots that homage Lord of the Rings, split screens, cross fades, and many more neat ways to edit, cut, and shoot America's pastime.

It really is cinema.

The only downside is that, as a Phillies fan, I hate that the Mets have this guy, and I demand we find our own auteur to step things up.

But that's beside the point.

Honestly, all of Major League Baseball should be lauding these efforts. Sports are often shot in boring and standard ways. But it is a game rife with emotion and tension and stakes, so we should have these edits. We should lean into the story of the game and get different angles.

The touch here is flawless. It doesn't distract, it only enhances. It makes a sport with 162 regular-season games feel important, and it gives gravity to shots that sometimes can bear no weight.

In the following paragraph, Coogler lists many influences on Sinners, including Brian De Palma:

For this script, this crew, and this cast, I dug deep into myself and reached back to my ancestors who breathed so much life and purpose into me. I also unabashedly reached towards my cinematic influences including but not limited to, Spike Lee, John Singleton, Ernie Barnes, Steve McQueen, Ava Duvernay, Euzhan Palcy, Eudora Welty, Oscar Micheaux, Robert Rodriguez, Barry Jenkins, Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Roeg, Andrea Arnold, Jeremy Saulnier, Paul Thomas Anderson, Joel and Ethan Coen, Bill Gunn, Jordan Peele, John Carpenter, Boots Reilly, Shaka King, Nia Dacosta, Terence Nance, Rian Johnson, Bradford Young, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Chris Nolan, Emma Thomas, Theodore Witcher, Francis Coppola, Julie Dash, Steven Spielberg, Kahlil Joseph, Mati Diop, Ben and Josh Safdie, Stephen King, Robert Palmer, Amiri Baraka, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walter Mosley, Stephen Graham Jones, Joel Crawford, Wes Craven, and many others.

And now, this weekend, Drop is opening in theaters. Here's a look at some of the reviews:

Andrew Parker, The Gate

As a director, Landon looks like he’s having a blast getting his De Palma on (with a healthy nod to Wes Craven’s underrated/also implausible thriller Red Eye). As a stylistic exercise, Landon delivers his best outing behind the camera yet, which is fascinating for something that takes place in a single location for ninety percent of the film’s running time. The camera moves swiftly around the tightly packed room, zooming in from above, looking from below (the low angle shots of Violet looking up at her waiter are low key hilarious), and flowing through the space with ease. The little touches (like the bougie washroom and the ribcage mimicking corridor into the dining room that feel like entering the belly of a beast) are what matters here. Landon also does everything in his power to make the usually tedious image of people texting back and forth into a halfway compelling visual. It all comes together nicely, and Landon has put more thought into how the film should look than the sum of the plot’s parts.

And honestly, Drop is a case where that is absolutely the right call. Landon has a flair for allowing the viewer to giggle at dark situations, and he’s not afraid to get theatrical or unsubtle about it, like his use of some dramatic mood lighting swings throughout. He also finds ways to balance the dark humour with deeper character touches, with a heart to heart conversation between the stressed out lovebirds where all of the restaurant’s bustle and background noise pleasingly drifts away and the viewer locks into a tender moment that carries a great degree of poignancy for something that’s otherwise a silly movie.

More importantly: Have I made this sound like a bad movie? It’s actually largely a blast, not because Landon is as talented as De Palma, or even Collet-Serra, but because he works real hard to make up the difference. Moreso than the bright, montage-heavy, performance-dependent (and, to be clear, delightful) Happy Death Day pictures, he and cinematographer Marc Spicer go all in on visual tricks, with short but elegant room-surveying tracking shots, canted angles, impressionistic lighting effects to spotlight individual characters, and the occasional flips and spins for extra disorientation. This could have come across as sweaty, but it’s assembled with a glee that can’t be faked; the obvious effort becomes part of the fun.

This puts Drop well in the zone of Collet-Serra’s recent (and structurally similar) Carry-On, no small praise for the neo-Hitchcockian exercise. What keeps the new movie from further ascension to De Palma levels of bliss is its inability to push those attempts at virtuosity into a state of feverish cinematic overdrive, where the show-off fakeness somehow becomes more viscerally real. If this were easy, De Palma might not look like such a genius. As-is, Drop has a few brief moments of near-operatic derangement, a couple of flashbacks that experiment with bad-taste exploitation, and one climactic gag with a semi-twisted kick. Mostly, though, it trades in predictable stuff about Violet overcoming her past traumas as she navigates this brand new one.

Landon can flip this into a strength; just as the Happy Death Day movies are disarmingly sweet amidst jokes about gruesome slapstick demises, this movie obviously feels warmly toward Violet and he treats a few side characters here, like a too-much server (Jeffrey Self) on his first-ever shift, with similar affection. Drop is ultimately a nice movie about an abuse survivor being terrorized by seemingly omniscient forces, loaded with moments that don’t really hold up to scrutiny and well-sold by Fahy’s performance. To work so well in the moment is its own perfectly ephemeral achievement.

#DroptheMovie is a hard driving nail-biter, that keeps you hanging on the edge. Christopher Landon channels his inner De Palma, in a fresh take on the classic whodunnit. While it takes its time getting there, the climax is worth the wait. Thrill seekers will rejoice.

“It definitely began with a conversation about what kind of movie we both wanted to make. Because it’s not just about what I want to do as a director, but also what you want to do as an actor,” Sloan said, gesturing to Mastroianni. “What kind of role are you not gonna get cast in unless we make that movie?”

“It started with Ryan sharing with me all of the films that really excited him, and revisiting those films.” Mastroianni added, explaining that they were primarily inspired by classic thrillers like “Blow-Up,” “Blow-Out,” “The Conversation,” “The Third Man,” “Vertigo,” and “Chinatown.”

“We were like ‘What is the through line here?’” Sloan said. “And we found out there’s a structure that many of these films follow called the Spiral Structure, where there’s a character that’s traveling through but every time they hit this spiral, it’s something from their past that they can’t escape.”

That structure gave them the narrative core of “Gazer,” with Mastroianni’s Frankie constantly running into lapses in memory caused by her dyschronometria that make it harder to solve the larger mystery she has become immersed in. And much like their fictional protagonist, Sloan and Mastroianni found themselves working with incomplete information throughout the production process. The self-financed film was sporadically shot between April 2021 and April 2023, with the duo opting to jump into principal photography before they had an entire script written.

“We started writing basically as soon as the lockdown happened. And that went a full year, and then in November I just said to Ariella ‘We’re gonna get into production in April 2021.’ And she was just like ‘Uhh… okay,’” Sloan said. “We weren’t even done with the script yet. We went in with an unfinished script. We knew we had the beginning and the end, so we said we’ll do two weekends in April and we’ll do the beginning and the end of the movie, because we know what we want.”

See also: Variety - Embracing Pulpy Genre, Germany’s Hnywood Aims for the Stars

Fittingly, as pure cinema, Only The River Flows is a knockout: eerie and dreamlike. An overture of kids at play is a marvel. Another scene is a dead ringer for gaudy maestro Brian De Palma. And, oh: it never stops raining.

But Wei also tethers his film to everyday realities. China’s former one-child policy takes a key supporting role. If the movie is a philosophy lesson in unknowable truth, it also has cynical police chiefs who just want someone locked up fast.

Released in China last year, the film became a domestic box-office smash: no minor feat for an art-house movie shot on 16mm film that opens with a quote from Albert Camus. In the west, it might be tempting to see crowds flocking subversively to a portrait of flawed authority. But those flaws are safely three decades in the past. Anyway, a simpler pleasure may well have been more influential. Having seen the movie, Chinese audiences then thronged social media to debate the plot, a modern forum for an age-old question. No, but seriously, whodunnit?