Four Lions

Chris Morris's Four Lions opened in 2010 (Morris's first feature after a long career in British satirical television (The Day Today, Brass Eye, Jam)) and was nominated for the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film and Best Original Screenplay. The film consolidated Morris as the most uncompromising British satirist of his generation; the comparison most-frequently invoked at the time was Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, with which the film shares its particular brand of structural confidence in handling the most morally difficult contemporary subjects through comedy.

Four British Muslim men from Sheffield (Riz Ahmed, Kayvan Novak, Nigel Lindsay, Adeel Akhtar) plan a jihadist suicide attack on a London marathon. The plot's primary source of comedy is their absolute incompetence, petty arguments, catastrophic operational errors, the imported jihadist-training-camp footage that produces the film's most-cited running joke. Morris and his co-writers (Sam Bain, Jesse Armstrong, who would later create Succession) had researched the screenplay through extensive interviews with British counter-terrorism officers and one former jihadist.

The film's central thesis (that domestic-radicalisation operations are typically conducted by ordinary people whose petty vanity and incompetence the British political class refused to acknowledge) produced one of the most-cited British political comedies of its decade. The film's reception in the broader British discourse was remarkably forgiving; the few public-policy figures who objected were largely overshadowed by the support the film received from Muslim community organisations and counter-terrorism researchers.