Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, which opens with a bureaucratic error involving a typewriter typo, depicts the wrongful arrest of an innocent man due to government incompetence. Rewatching it in 2025 shows that the film's inventive and satirical portrayal of a cruel bureaucracy resonates strongly with contemporary political issues. Brazil recently concluded a weeklong showing at New York's Film Forum, supported by a new 4K restoration. The film’s unique visual style and commentary on bureaucratic failures contribute to its enduring impact and relevance in today's society.
Brazil opens with a bureaucratic error. A fly gets stuck in a typewriter, changing the surname of Archibald Tuttle to Archibald Buttle, a misprint on a form that dictates the government forcibly detain a suspected terrorist (Tuttle) but instead leads to the arrest of an entirely innocent man (Buttle). If the inciting events of our great science fiction films have been hostile aliens, seductive robots, and reckless technologies, Terry Gilliam begins his with a humble typo.
Rewatching Brazil in 2025 - nearly four decades after its release - it's hard to understate how well this movie holds up. Wildly inventive at every turn, Gilliam's satirical vision of a cruel and violent bureaucracy rings eerily true of this political moment.
The film finishes a weeklong run at New York's Film Forum with a new 4K restoration, which you can also get on Blu-ray. (And honestly, the non-4K version of Brazil that you can perennially stream on The Criterion Channel still looks great too.)
A lot of that has to do with the film's unique visual style and the depth of its commentary on the implications of bureaucratic and governmental incompetence.
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