Brazil

Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) is the great dystopian satire of modern cinema, and its troubled release became almost as famous as the film. Gilliam fought a long, public battle with his American studio, which wanted a shorter and happier cut; he even took 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.

It divided audiences at first, too strange for some and too bleak for others. It is now counted among the defining science-fiction visions of its era, and its imagery and its mordant comedy have been quoted and imitated ever since. Furious, funny and visually overwhelming, Brazil is that rare thing, a film that survived a bruising fight with the studio system in the form its director wanted: a dream of escape staged inside a vast, indifferent machine.