Life of Brian

The Monty Python team's Life of Brian opened in August 1979, financed by George Harrison after EMI's chief executive read the script and pulled funding for being too blasphemous. It was banned in Norway, Ireland, and parts of Britain for varying lengths of time; the BBC declined to broadcast it for decades. Multiple polls — Channel 4, Total Film, Empire — have ranked it the greatest comedy film ever made.

Brian Cohen of Nazareth (Graham Chapman) is born in a stable next door to Jesus on the same night, and spends the rest of his short life being mistaken for the Messiah. Caught between Roman occupation, the People's Front of Judea (not the Judean People's Front, of course), and a rapidly accelerating crowd of disciples who insist on misunderstanding him, Eric Idle's closing song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life — written for the film and recorded in a single afternoon — has since become one of the most-covered British songs of the late twentieth century. John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones (who also directs) play approximately fifteen roles each.

The film's central insight — that the satirical target is not religion itself but the people who attach themselves to it — remains the cleanest defence the Pythons ever offered against the blasphemy charge. The Cleese-Palin debate with Tim Rice's Mary Whitehouse on BBC's Friday Night, Saturday Morning is itself a small classic of the genre.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The funniest film ever made about the politics of belief. Forty-five years on, it still works exactly as designed — and the Idle song is now sung at British funerals more often than any hymn.