Brazil

Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) is the great dystopian satire of modern cinema, a film whose troubled release became almost as famous as the work itself: Gilliam fought a long, public battle with his American studio, which wanted a shorter and happier cut, even taking out a trade-paper advertisement demanding the film be released, before his own version finally prevailed. It earned two Academy Award nominations and was named best film of the year by the Los Angeles critics.

Jonathan Pryce plays Sam Lowry, the daydreaming functionary of a totalitarian bureaucracy choked by forms, wiring and ductwork, with Robert De Niro as a renegade freelance heating engineer and Kim Greist as the woman who haunts his dreams. Gilliam, drawing on Orwell, Kafka and his own Monty Python surrealism, builds a retro-futurist world of astonishing production design, in which consumerism, terrorism, cosmetic surgery and red tape all blur into a single nightmarish whole.

Initially divisive — too strange for some, too bleak for others — the film is now widely regarded as a masterpiece and one of the defining science-fiction visions of its era, its imagery and its mordant comedy endlessly quoted and imitated. Furious, funny and visually overwhelming, Brazil turned a bruising fight with the studio system into a permanent monument: a dream of escape staged inside a vast machine that will not, finally, let anyone go.