Aquarius

The magnetic and sensual Sonia Braga stars as a retired music critic, breast cancer survivor and longtime widow in Aquarius, the latest film from Neighboring Sounds director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Braga’s fiercely independent Clara lives alone in a Brazilian apartment building slated for renovation, the lone tenant stubbornly holding out after her neighbors surrendered to gentrification years ago. There’s very little in the way of traditional narrative beats here, as Filho is more interested in getting lost in the album grooves of Clara’s life than getting tied up in artificial story threads. Filho and Braga create a fully rounded portrait of a strong, proud, complex woman trying to live life on her terms. Braga steals the show, but the filmmaking is quietly brilliant—a sequence where Clara recalls a previous encounter with a male prostitute as something both erotic and potentially dangerous teaches a master class in compact visual storytelling. D.B.