Director: Terry Gilliam
Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Michael Palin
Defining moment: The moment where we realise Michael Palin’s grinning, avuncular Jack is a truly inhuman monster speaks volumes about the banality of evil.
Terry Gilliam’s dark, dystopian sci-fi isn’t, by a
long stretch, a happy-go-lucky film, but its absurd, appalled, incredulous
portrait of a repressive future state is, without doubt, richly comic, its
savage wit owing a debt to diverse sources from Franz Kafka to Monty Python.
The American studio behind ‘Brazil’ didn’t see the joke: they
refused to release the film, and relented only after it won a major US award
that year. Superb performances all round: De Niro plays a revolutionary,
balaclava-clad plumber (naturally) and that nice Michael Palin off the telly is
a government torturer. Edward Lawrenson
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