One of the top ten films of all times.

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It could make my top 100. I don't think it'd crack the top 10, but I could see top 50 or maybe even top 30.

Brazil is an underrated movie, and for some reason I find it weirdly "forgettable". Not that it hasn't stuck with me - it has - but just that when I'm thinking about "great movies" it doesn't always spring to mind. It gets buried under the films that spring more swiftly to thought, like Seven Samurai, Casablanca, Annie Hall, and Lord of the Rings. That's not to say it doesn't belong with those movies as one of the best, just that it doesn't hop into my brain as quickly.

The problem, I think, is in terms of how understated a lot of it is. For all of its zany, madcap characters (Harry Tuttle!) and grotesque satire (Sam's mother's deformation into a plastic surgery nightmare) it is, at its heart, a story about the remarkably ordinary frustrations and struggles of an ordinary man in a strange world. Sam is just trying to get on. He's exasperated by his mother, he's pining for a girl, he's lost in a cubicle maze (with weird, magnifying glass computers, no less!), and his fights with petty bureaucrats and paperwork aren't as mentally-arresting as some other plots. I'm thinking about other "gritty" sci-fi films like Children of Men. "The world has no children!" is a far more graspable plotline than, "A regular guy in a weird dystopia has nightmares and dreams and is trying to track down the catastrophic fallout from a government typo...also, there are rogue duct workers."

For all of that - because of it's weird, understated/overstated complexity - Brazil does achieve a mighty amount of commentary on society and humanity, and it deserves more recognition than it gets. It's truly one of the most underrated films of all-time.