Brazil (1985)

(Major spoilers ahead, as the ending played a huge part in my response to the movie.)

There's no doubt that Terry Gilliam has quite an array of fantastic images in his head, and as someone who loves imaginative visuals, it was delightful to see that play out on screen. However, especially toward the end, I found that the surreal nature of these images was really getting in the way of the story itself. I'm a firm believer in the idea that if you're going to mix fantasy and reality, it should either 1) be clear that this is really happening in real life, 2) be clear that this is happening in the character's head, 3) be clear that whether it is real or not doesn't actually matter, or 4) be clear that this is making some sort of statement on distinguishing fantasy from reality. Brazil seemed to be doing none of that, and I was getting bored. About half an hour from the end, this seemed to REALLY be happening, and I rolled my eyes and thought, "Really? We're going to have half an hour of complete nonsense for no reason again? Sigh. Okay."

And then the ending happened, where it is suddenly made clear that at the very least, the last half hour has taken place entirely in the main character's head (my favorite fan theory supposes it's been going on even longer, covering all the moments when I was frustrated with the sudden switch). Instead of the movie feeling purposeless, it suddenly had a point, even if it didn't make that point clear until I'd very nearly given up on it. With that in mind, the movie is much more interesting. It takes a lot of the dystopian future tropes and flips them around in a very artistically satisfying way. Until the final 5 minutes of the movie, I was ready to rank it a 2 or so because of how much it had gone downhill, but now I'm perfectly happy giving it a 4.

Best Part: The ending.
Worst Part: Well, it's a good thing I'm determined to finish movies, otherwise I really would have given up about 2/3 of the way through.
Flickchart: #434, below Murder By Death and above Contagion.