Carnaval provides a convenient cover story for nearly 100 deaths and disappearances in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s robust sense-memory immersion into the sights, sounds and suffocating climate the Brazilian director associates with 1977 Recife. It was a period of great “mischief,” although that’s too light a word to describe the everyday corruption that permeates practically every aspect of this meaty 160-minute period piece. Mendonça remembers it well, demonstrating how even the worst of times can inspire a perverse sort of nostalgia. (Read the full review of Peter Debruge.)
