O Passageiro: Segredos de Adulto

I recently saw this at the 2007 Palm Springs International Film Festival and it's a good film with an interesting storyline. This is from director Flavior Tambellini who has only made one previous full-length feature film, 2001's Bufo & Spanllanzani which was very popular in Brazil so I don't know why he makes so few films. Veteran cinematographer Pedro Farkas is the director of photography. It's a coming of age story of a teenage student named Antonio (Bernardo Marinho) who comes from an upper class family and has the usual hassles with his father Mauro (Antonio Calloni) who is a wealthy banker being investigated for some kind of presumable white collar crime. One day Mauro is murdered on the side of a road where is body is found quite a distance from where his car which shows evidence of being sideswiped is parked. Antonio through his own investigation finds some evidence in the car that the police missed leading him to believe his father had a passenger with him at the time of his murder. Goulia Gam is Antonio's loving and depressed mother Angela. Carolina Ferraz is Carmen. It's an interesting little film and may be worth checking out as a foreign film but nothing memorable here. I would give it an 6.0 out of 10.

After a tepid beginning in which the film seems to be a characterless high school movie, it has a plot twist and becomes much more interesting, almost a thriller. While its script is perhaps not very focused, story possibilities entertain until its partially open end.