Gilliam's masterpiece

The film combines the worst features of 1940s British bureaucracy, 1950s American paranoia, Stalinist totalitarianism, and the ills of the 1980s, all set “somewhere in the 20th century”.

The screenplay is written by director Terry Gilliam with Tom Stoppard, making the film a more dramatically-engaging film than it would have been if Gilliam had written it alone. The black humor and bizarre visuals exist alongside a credible and horribly fact-based depiction of a regime which charges its victims for the electricity and labor that goes into their own torture.

This is truly the most bizarre, yet the most typical film ever directed by Terry Gilliam, who is at his best here; definitely his masterpiece.


8/10