Brazil

Brazil (1985) is Terry Gilliam's bleak dystopian satire, and you can watch online on iFILM. Jonathan Pryce and Robert De Niro head the cast.

Sam Lowry is a low-ranking clerk in a vast ministry where a person's fate hangs on the right form, and a typo in a surname can get the wrong man killed. Sam has no taste for promotion; he drifts through dull paperwork and escapes into dreams where he's a winged knight rescuing a beautiful stranger. Then he meets her for real, a truck driver named Jill, and chasing her drags him deep into the machine until the system tags him as the enemy. The corridors are full of sharp faces: Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin. De Niro turns up as a renegade repairman branded a terrorist for fixing ducts without a permit.

Gilliam built his nightmare out of paperwork, monstrous heating ducts and ads for cosmetic surgery. The studio demanded a happy ending and quietly recut the film; Gilliam won his cut back through secret critics' screenings, a fight that film history remembers as the Battle of Brazil. It now sits beside 1984 among cinema's defining dystopias. Stream Brazil (1985) online on iFILM.