John Powers

Yet what makes Islands good is that it's not just another reheated noir.

As our anxiety mounts, a feeling accentuated by the musical score, we begin to pick through the story's sly hints and possible clues.

Have Tom and Anne actually met before?

Why exactly is Tom drawn to Anton?

Why is he bending over backwards for people he barely knows?

Is he hoping to escape his spiritual solitude by throwing himself into the search for the missing Dave?

The movie makes us feel Tom's, indeed everyone's, isolation.

It's not for nothing the film is called Islands.

Gersta's carefully calibrated images show how the characters are defined by the meaningless beauty of the island, where even the sunset can feel a bit cold, and the meaningless pleasures of holiday reveling, swatting tennis balls back and forth, guzzling drink after drink, throwing one's music-fueled arms toward the sky in the disco, over and over and over again.

In its blend of high art style and pulp crime story, Islands is a nifty piece of what we might call existential pop.

While both its style and story clearly suggest a male riff on Michelangelo Antonio's great film La Ventura, whose heroine goes looking for a mysteriously vanished woman, Islands also made me think of Michel Welbeck's nifty novella Lanzarote, about an alienated hedonist's search for meaning on another of the Canary Islands.

And even the White Lotus TV series, where both tourists and hotel employees face crises that call their lives into question.

Now, I'm happy to say that, for all its metaphysical overtones, Islands doesn't end on one of those unresolved enigmas that leaves you shrieking at the screen.

We learn everything we need to know.

And so does our hero.

Realizing he's confused inertia for contentment, Tom finally grasps that the only way to stop his life from being empty is to do something meaningful to fill it up.

If you've spent any time in a dictatorship, I've had that happy experience.

You understand why your high school teachers were always praising democracy.

You quickly learn that authoritarian states are all about violence, inescapable corruption, and a sense of free-floating anxiety.

you get a masterful portrait of what that's like in The Secret Agent, an unsettling yet very enjoyable new movie by Brazil's leading filmmaker, Kleber Mendonça Filho.