Brazil | 4K UHD+Blu-ray

Tonally, Terry Gilliam seems to have had a lot less to do with Monty Python’s success than much of the rest of the troupe. The TV work that first rocketed them to fame was more built around the clash of staid British stereotypes, devolving into absurdist nonsense. John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Graham Chapman often felt like the dominant voices in their writing room.

When it came to their cinematic presence, however, Terry Gilliam loomed large. Gilliam’s ultra-realist brand of surrealism—busy, overflowing sets and costumes that manage to convey something almost otherworldly while, at the same time being steeped in a sort of earthy normality—gave movies like The Life of Brian and Meaning of Life a signature style to go with Python’s signature laughs. It’s that style that carried over clearer than anything into Terry Gilliam’s solo career, and nowhere stronger than in his sci-fi masterpiece, Brazil.

Set in a futuristic megacity, Brazil tells the tale of a low-level bureaucrat who, through a clerical error, becomes enmeshed in a terrorist plot. That setting makes this one of the first films to present dystopia as a product of corporatization and bureaucracy, rather than pure computing/atomic age advancement. As such, Brazil stands as Gilliam’s most far-reaching and influential work, a cornerstone in our understanding of dystopian science fiction.

Special Features (via criterion.com)

• New 4K digital restoration of Terry Gilliam’s director’s cut, supervised and approved by Gilliam, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
• Audio commentary by Gilliam
• What Is “Brazil”?, Rob Hedden’s on-set documentary
• The Production Notebook, a collection of interviews and video essays, featuring a trove of Brazil-iana from Gilliam’s personal collection
• The Battle of “Brazil,” a documentary about the film’s contentious release, hosted by Jack Mathews and based on his book of the same name
• “Love Conquers All” version, the studio’s ninety-four-minute, happy-ending cut of Brazil, with commentary by Brazil expert David Morgan
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by film critic David Sterritt