Stars: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent, Jim Broadbent, Jim Broadbent, Barbara Hicks

Director: Terry Gilliam

Summary: Amusing tale of a world where bureaucracy has gone mad, and all Ministry lackey Sam Lowry can do is fantasise about his ideal woman. Until, that is, he meets renegade freedom fighter and heating engineer Harry Tuttle...

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.

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Reviewed by: davybozal24-7
Posted on May 10, 2006 7:03 AM

A must for all Pythonesque fans and totally over the top acting from everyone in this wonderfully camp film from director Terry Gilliam .
A huge blockbuster with an array of International Superstars make this futuristic extravaganza a delight to watch . A lot of people thought this film was crap , but what do they know ? It reminds me of today's
government , full of bureaucratic bulls**t and half - ar**d chancers
and lackeys all with their nose in the trough ! Terry Gilliam was away
ahead of his time when he made this . Power to the people ! Better
than a prescription !

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If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director--oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus--Brazilis the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. In fact it was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial(along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek government clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. It's not a software bug but a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosisinsect) that gets squashed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unravelling this bureaucratic tangle, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant. The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself--until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. --Jim Emerson

On the DVD:Brazilcomes to DVD in a welcome anamorphic print of the full director's cut--here running some 136 minutes. Disappointingly the only extra feature is the 30-minute making-of documentary "What Is Brazil?", which consists of on-set and behind-the-scenes interviews. There's nothing about the film's controversial release history (covered so comprehensively on the North American Criterion Collection release), nor is Gilliam's illuminating, irreverent directorial commentary anywhere to be found. The only other extra here is the ubiquitous theatrical trailer. A welcome release of a real classic, then, but something of a missed opportunity. --Mark Walker

Aspect Ratio:	1.85 Wide Screen, 16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Featurette What Is Brazil, Theatrical Trailer, Scene Access
Subtitles:	Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish
Year:	1985
Release Date:	May 19, 2003
Runtime:	137 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	24352 D V D
Keywords:	Comedy, Brazil, General, Wide, Screen
Genre:	Comedy