Z

Costa-Gavras's Z (1969) fused the political and the popular as few films had before, winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a rare Best Picture nomination for a subtitled work, along with the Jury Prize and a Best Actor award at Cannes. Based on the real assassination of the Greek democratic politician Grigoris Lambrakis, it barely troubles to disguise its target.

Yves Montand plays the doomed deputy and Jean-Louis Trintignant the examining magistrate who refuses to be steered, in an ensemble that includes Irene Papas and Charles Denner, with Trintignant's flinty, unhurried composure at its centre. Costa-Gavras drives the investigation forward with the momentum of a Hollywood thriller, cutting fast, scoring the action to Mikis Theodorakis's propulsive music, and closing on a mordant catalogue of everything the ensuing regime went on to ban — a litany that turns dry procedural detail into pure political fury.

Released as Greece itself languished under a military junta, the film became an international rallying point and the template for the politically engaged thriller, its influence plain across decades of conspiracy cinema from All the President's Men onward. Gripping as entertainment and uncompromising as protest, Z proved that a film could indict a dictatorship and fill a cinema on the same night — and, more than half a century on, it has lost none of its urgency or its charge.