Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A prominent politician is murdered during a demonstration. The government and army are trying to suppress the truth, but a tenacious magistrate is determined to not to let them get away with it.
Costa-Gavras's Z is a landmark political thriller — urgent, razor-sharp, and formally inventive. The plot is a masterclass in procedural tension, based on real events surrounding the assassination of Greek leftist Grigoris Lambrakis. The ensemble acting, led by Yves Montand and Jean-Louis Trintignant, is consistently excellent. Raoul Coutard's cinematography is kinetic and documentary-like, lending the film an electric immediacy. Its novelty remains undisputed: Z essentially invented the modern political thriller template, blending docudrama realism with genre propulsion in a way no film had before. The ending — a devastating litany of reprisals and bans — is powerful in its bitter irony, though it functions more as a didactic coda than a purely cinematic resolution, keeping it just below the film's otherwise exceptional level.