Time Bandits

Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits (1981) was the former Monty Python animator's breakthrough as a director and the first instalment of his loose “Trilogy of Imagination,” followed by Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. A wild, anarchic fantasy aimed at children and adults alike, it became a surprise international hit.

Craig Warnock plays the young Kevin, spirited away by a gang of time-travelling dwarfs through portals in history, in an adventure that mixes slapstick, genuine menace and Gilliam's trademark hand-built spectacle. The cast is studded with stars — Sean Connery as a kindly King Agamemnon, John Cleese as a frightfully polite Robin Hood, David Warner as the gleeful embodiment of Evil, Ralph Richardson as the Supreme Being — and the production design teems with the cluttered, baroque invention that would define Gilliam's work.

Beneath the romp runs a streak of darkness and a satirical edge — about consumerism, parental neglect and the indifference of cosmic powers — unusual for a family film, and its startling ending has been argued over for decades. A formative favourite for a generation raised on it, Time Bandits remains one of the most imaginative fantasy films of the eighties, and the first full flowering of Gilliam's singular vision. A formative favourite for the children who first discovered it, it announced the maximalist, hand-built imagination that would define all of Gilliam's cinema.