BRAZIL is Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece. The film, cowritten by Gilliam, playwright Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown, is set in a futuristic society laden with red tape and bureaucracy. When a bug (literally) gets in the system, an innocent man is killed, leading mild-mannered Sam Lowry (an excellent Jonathan Pryce) to reexamine what he wants out of life. He decides to fight the totalitarian system in his search for freedom–and the woman he loves. The terrific, offbeat cast features Robert De Niro as a renegade heating engineer; Katherine Helmond as Sam’s ever-younger mother; Michael Palin as a frightened worker bee terrified of upsetting the status quo; Bob Hoskins as a vengeful Central Services employee; Jim Broadbent as a wacko plastic surgeon; the wonderful Ian Holm as Sam’s nerve-ridden, pitiful boss, afraid of his own signature; and Kim Greist as the rebel Sam falls in love with.The look of BRAZIL is relentless, overwhelming, and outrageously spectacular: giant monoliths rise from the street; government offices are a network of computers, pneumatic tubes, and narrow hallways built with Nazi-like precision; apartment complexes are a maze of washed-out grays and numbers, all frighteningly uniform. The terrorist explosions actually bring color into this dull, monochromatic world. BRAZIL is a nightmare vision of the future, yet also hysterically funny and incisive–one of the most inventive, influential, and important films of the 1980s.

Terry Gilliam

Barbara Hicks , Bob Hoskins

Bryan Pringle , Charles McKeown

Ian Holm, Jim Broadbent

Jonathan Pryce, Katherine Helmond

Michael Palin, Peter Vaughan

Robert De Niro