In The Secret Agent, the latest film by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, the main character leaves the cinema during a screening and steps almost seamlessly into a street party. Marcelo, who lives under the alias Armando, is a dissident professor in the dictatorially ruled Brazil of the 1970s. Fleeing a planned assassination attempt, he chooses the cinema as a hiding place to hunker down and consider his next moves. Mendonça Filho’s choice of the cinema is more than just a striking detail.

“A good story can be told in a few sentences,” it says in the newspaper. In other words, a good story has a core that’s so clear and distinct that it can be summarized concisely without detracting from it – a few sentences suffice to indicate what it’s really about. The story of Hong Sangsoo’s What Does That Nature Say to You? (2025) can also be summarized simply: In the course of a single day, a young man drives up a mountain, enters a house, goes back outside, and then drives back down the mountain. The question is whether that says it all.