Items30The creator’s order
  1. 1Duck Soup (1933)Duck Soup (1933) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased 12 Nov 1933Groucho Marx is made leader of bankrupt Freedonia and talks his way into a war with neighboring Sylvania, largely because it would be rude not to. The target is the whole apparatus of nationalism: anthems, ultimatums, ambassadors and the pomp that turns a personal insult into a casus belli. No…0
  2. 2The Great Dictator (1940)The Great Dictator (1940) 8.4/10 on IMDbReleased 15 Oct 1940Charlie Chaplin plays both Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomainia, and the Jewish barber mistaken for him. Released in 1940, while the United States was still neutral, it mocks Hitler to his face: the ranting speeches in mock German, the rivalry with Mussolini's stand-in, and the famous dance with a…0
  3. 3To Be or Not to Be (1942)To Be or Not to Be (1942) 8.1/10 on IMDbReleased 6 Mar 1942Ernst Lubitsch sets a theater-company farce in occupied Warsaw, with Jack Benny as a vain ham actor forced to impersonate Gestapo officers. The joke is that Nazi authority is itself a performance, and a poor one: pompous, insecure and easily flattered. It was released in 1942, weeks after Carole…0
  4. 4A Face in the Crowd (1957)A Face in the Crowd (1957) 8.1/10 on IMDbReleased 29 May 1957Elia Kazan and the writer Budd Schulberg follow Lonesome Rhodes, a drifter with a guitar, from a county jail to a television empire and a seat beside a presidential hopeful. Andy Griffith, years before his cozy sitcom image, plays him as charm curdling into contempt for the audience that adores…0
  5. 5The Mouse That Roared (1959)The Mouse That Roared (1959) 6.9/10 on IMDbReleased 17 Jul 1959The tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick, broke and outcompeted in the wine trade, declares war on the United States in order to lose and collect the aid that follows. Its chain-mailed archers land in New York during an air-raid drill and accidentally capture a doomsday bomb. Peter Sellers plays three…0
  6. 6Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) 8.3/10 on IMDbReleased 29 Jan 1964The benchmark. A deranged general launches a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union and the men in the War Room discover that every safeguard they built works perfectly to stop them undoing it. Stanley Kubrick shot it straight, in stark black and white, which is why the absurdity lands so hard. Peter…0
  7. 7The Firemen's Ball (1967)The Firemen's Ball (1967) 7.4/10 on IMDbReleased 15 Dec 1967A small-town fire brigade's committee tries to run a dance, a raffle and a beauty contest, and every one of them collapses: the prizes are stolen, the contestants refuse and the committee votes on everything except what matters. Miloš Forman never names the Communist Party, and never needs to. It…0
  8. 8Being There (1979)Being There (1979) 7.9/10 on IMDbReleased 19 Dec 1979Chance, a gardener who knows nothing of the world beyond television, is turned out onto the streets of Washington and mistaken for a sage. His remarks about the seasons are heard as economic policy, and within weeks he is advising the president. Peter Sellers plays him with total stillness, the…0
  9. 9Network (1976)Network (1976) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased 27 Nov 1976A news anchor announces on air that he will kill himself, ratings soar, and his network builds a programming schedule around his rage. Paddy Chayefsky's script is aimed at television, but its real subject is power: who owns the airwaves, and what happens to politics when outrage becomes the…0
  10. 10Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983)Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983) 8.3/10 on IMDbReleased 12 Aug 1983Two hapless photographers in Bombay stumble on a murder that links a crooked builder, a crooked municipal commissioner and a crooked newspaper editor, and spend the rest of the film being outmaneuvered by all three. Kundan Shah's 1983 film is India's best-loved satire of graft, and a cult classic…0