Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry escapes the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring daydream of himself as a virtuous hero saving a beautiful damsel. Investigating a case that led to the wrongful arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle, he meets the woman from his daydream, and in trying to help her gets caught in a web of mistaken identities, mindless bureaucracy and lies.
Brazil is a singular dystopian masterpiece from Terry Gilliam, with an extraordinarily inventive plot that skewers bureaucracy and authoritarianism through darkly comic surrealism. The ensemble acting — Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Michael Palin — is uniformly excellent. The retro-futurist production design and cinematography are iconic and wholly original, creating a steampunk aesthetic that remains unmatched. Its novelty is off the charts: no film before or since has quite replicated its tone, look, or satirical vision. The ending is genuinely harrowing and effective, but its ambiguity — while thematically resonant — is slightly less satisfying as pure narrative closure, keeping it from a perfect score in that category.