If you thought V for Vendetta was an apt allegory for the state of the world today, go back and revisit this gem. Twenty-two years before playing V’s fascist chancellor, John Hurt embodied George Orwell’s future everyman, Winston Smith. He slowly wakes up to the totalitarianistic fraud that the government has enslaved him and his fellow citizens with. The media rewrites history to favor the changing political climate. Wars are fabricated to keep the populace disoriented and focused on an outside enemy rather than the one within. Sound familiar? Almost everyone knows the story, but it’s frightening how much more realistic it seems over time. This filmed version is an epic undertaking, a mix of German Expressionism and bleak industrial trappings. The moments where Smith envisions a lush landscape just out of reach are like an oasis to a man dying of thirst. (Brazil copped the image a year later, but not nearly as effectively.) It remains a chilling film, and afterwards I wait for Fox News to tell me we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

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