SET in a bleak and heartless Orwellian future, Brazil constantly sets up situations which don't make sense, then destroys them, only to replace them with something even more terrifyingly surreal. In this no-man's-land of endless dreaming, it is only the hope that it is all a dream that provides respite from the destructive forces of a dystopian society.

This film has the capacity to turn preconceptions around: shocking things are funny and comic things are frightening. Surrounded by the constrictions that bureaucracy, fashion, the quest for youth, and society's need for rigid order create, one civil servant finds that, due to a mistake which the system is incapable of realising or reacting to, he has become scheduled for elimination. His ever more futile battle against the stream becomes symbolic of man's struggle against the forces that contain him. An overwhelmingly powerful film, Brazil shows us in Kafkaesque fashion that true horror is something inflicted by one man on another, inevitably defying reason and logic. This is one of the best films ever made.