Tribeca Review: “Funk”

Funk (Aly Muritiba, 2026) 3½ out of 5 stars

Brazilian funk music—or, more specifically, “kinky funk”—is filled with bumping, heavy-on-the-bass beats and other electronic sounds, coupled with explicitly sexual lyrics and accompanying salacious gyrations. Called “putaria” in the favelas (the dense, lower-income settlements outside major urban centers such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo), this musical genre features both singing and rap, and is big business at home. As with all popular art forms, the most successful practitioners are those who appear the most authentic.

In Funk, from director Aly Muritiba (Private Desert), we meet a young hopeful, Sabrina (or “MC Sabrina,” as she styles herself), who is convinced she is meant for greatness, despite the odds stacked against her. As played by Duda Santos (TV Globo’s She’s the One series), Sabrina is a force of nature, brash and confident no matter what gets thrown at her. The last thing she wants to become is her mother, Priscila (played by actual putaria star MC Nem), who had her shot, blew it, and now spends her days in sulking resentment of her daughter’s potential celebrity. The fact that the two of them are roommates does not help.

But Sabrina has a strong support network, among them her best friend and manager, Rayssa (singer Lellê); another friend, Michel (Kibba), who doubles as her makeup artist; and her very own DJ, Fabricio (Crazy Jeff, an actual funk DJ). When the film begins, she jumps straight into a set filled with twerking and rhymes about fellatio, cunnilingus, and copulation, followed by a night of drinking and doing everything she rapped about. The next morning, she heads off to her job as a restaurant server. Sabrina works hard and lives hard.

That restaurant gig doesn’t last long, however, thanks to some racist comments made by the white and wealthy clientele. For beyond the narrative about an unknown wannabe who faces difficult questions on the road to stardom, Funk is also a meditation on race and class, contrasting the unapologetic lewdness of the strivers in the favela with the more restrained behavior of those already at the top. The former are almost exclusively people of color while the latter are almost exclusively white. Though the rich folk look down on their poor counterparts, they not-so-secretly desire their sexual liberation.

Eventually, Sabrina attracts the attention of an established talent manager, Alberto (Cláudio Gabriel, Invisible Life), who offers her the big time but at the cost of her one unique commodity: the prized authenticity. In addition, she will have to abandon her friends. It’s a conflict we’ve seen countless times before in similar stories about the elusive search for fame and fortune, and in this regard Funk is not the most original of dramas. But though its structure may be somewhat conventional, its setting is anything but. Bursting with sparkling energy and life (and sex), the movie explores big themes that are universal in scope and specific in detail. Let’s dance.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.