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Brazil Details

1985 Certificate 15
  • 70
  • from 16,455 members

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 .. Read more

Starring Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm
Director Terry Gilliam
Genres Comedy

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Brazil

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.

Starring Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent, Barbara Hicks
Director Terry Gilliam
Studio 20TH CENTURY FOX HOME ENTERTAINMENT
Run time DVD: 2 hrs 17 mins
Certificate Certificate 15
Genres Comedy
Language DVD: English
Hearing-impaired English
Subtitles DVD: Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish
Released DVD: 19 May 2003
Production year: 1985
  • Critics' reviews (3) of Brazil

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  • 5 stars out of 5

    In this extraordinary vision of a futuristic bureaucratic hell from director Terry Gilliam, Jonathan Pryce stars as the Orwellian hero, a permanently harassed clerk at the all-seeing Department of Information Retrieval. Pryce is only kept sane by his vivid daydreams, which see him as a heroic flying warrior coming to the aid of a beautiful woman (Kim Greist). As unpredictable as Gilliam's Monty Python animations, this daring and dazzling take on 1984 creates a weird world inhabited by an assortment of crazy characters, including Robert De Niro as an SAS-style repairman. The movie's sledgehammer conclusion gave studio executives sleepless nights. Expect the same.

    • Radio Times
  • 1 stars out of 4

    An expensive, wild, overlong, hit-or-miss Orwellian satire: enough good jabs to please the intelligentsia, but a turnoff for patrons at the local Odeon.

    • Halliwell's Film Guide
  • Most helpful member's review of Brazil

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  • 54 out of 83 people found this review helpful

    Rated - 1.0 star

    Mind Bendingly Long

    There seems to be an element of the "Emporer’s new clothes" about Brazil.

    Certainly there are impressive aspects and as a humorous ... more

      • johnnymac from Wakefield
  • Most recent members' review of Brazil

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  • 1 out of 1 person found this review helpful

    Rated - 3.0 stars

    Worth a look at

    Bizzare but occasionally very funny. If you liked the Monty Python crew then this is worth a look at.

      • A customer from Edinburgh
  • News and features

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    Twilight fans cause a riot at Brazil hotel

    • 11 Nov 2009

    Twilight stars Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart had a recent scare in Brazil when 2,000 fans stormed their hotel and had to be kept away from their suites by riot police. The two teen idols were literally prisoners in their adjoining rooms as police and security tried to keep the fans at bay in the hallways. Lautner recalls, "All of a sudden security comes up to the room and they say, 'Hey, so 2,000 fans just broke into the hotel and the police with riot gear are trying to keep them out of... Read more

Rating breakdown

16,455 Member ratings
  • 100
2,459
  • 90
1,770
  • 80
3,045
  • 70
2,582
  • 60
2,364
  • 50
1,385
  • 40
1,118
  • 30
688
  • 20
690
  • 10
354

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    • 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 (...