Critics reviews

A morbidly humourous spin on dystopian tales of misery and decay, Brazil feels like the perfect combination of Gilliam’s unhinged taste for the fantastical and the freakish.

It remains Gilliam's most artistically successful film because it juggles the historical and the hallucinatory, the eternally true, the prophetically true, and that which is only ever true in his mind. It's also the definitive film about how people live with excessive rules and regulations—meaning that it speaks equally clearly to Gilliam's curmudgeonly persona, the eighties, the entire modern era, and, in 2017, the early days of the Trump presidency.

It's a world where instability is constantly threatening to undermine the tightly wound internal logic that governs everything, where loose cogs in the machine like Sam Lowry become threats simply because the system isn't wired to accommodate them... BRAZIL, among the most fantastically dark and detail-rich science fiction flicks ever, was--and remains--a visionary work worth fighting for.

Tar-black in its comic tone, Brazil rouses a wide range of robust emotions through its stunningly coherent, madly inventive narrative. Sam and Jill's romance is hard-won, delicate, and strangely sweet, their culminating roll in the hay radiating pure joy, but the filmmakers also tap potently into the ruthless irresponsibility that a privatized bureaucracy engenders.

Its story glides effortlessly from knockabout comedy and political satire to dreamy romance, rambunctious fantasy, and dystopian science fiction. Its verbal and visual wit remain as incisive as ever, and the themes it explores—social alienation, terrorism, the hazards of high technology, and the bureaucratization of absolutely everything—are more urgent now than when the film premiered in 1985.

It's a splendid example of imagination run riot across the silver screen, and although its story is very, very dark, it's told with such verve and panache that the whole thing feels like an amazing adventure.

Gilliam's finished film is notable for its uniquely claustrophobic atmosphere, like an inescapable fever dream somewhere between Kafka and Monty Python, and set within one of the most brilliantly realised dystopias in sci-fi cinema.

It's as if Gilliam sat down and wrote out all of his fantasies, heedless of production difficulties, and then they were filmed - this time, heedless of sense.

Terry Gilliam's ''Brazil,'' a jaunty, wittily observed vision of an extremely bleak future, is a superb example of the power of comedy to underscore serious ideas, even solemn ones.