Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 4

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Gladio: The Motion Picture. Most bummer ending of all time. "Finally, a real revolution! We're going to win the election in a landslide!"
  "POSTSCRIPT: the regime canceled the election and it is now illegal to read books and listen to music."

  Reminded me of how I felt right after the Nevada caucus.

  The best line is when the head general and coup plotter is getting perp walked and the journalist asks him "Are you a victim like Dreyfus?" and he snaps back "DREYFUS WAS GUILTY!"

• 

  Review by DallasFrance ★★★★★ 8

  Z is smarter than me, and it’s smarter than you. It immediately proclaims that “Any resemblance to real events, to persons living or dead, is not accidental. It is DELIBERATE.” Rashomon-ish re-enactments show us the irrelevance of truth and the omnipresence of corruption.

  Brilliant editing sustains suspense for all 127 minutes. Initially, it heightens the tension of protests and violence, but as the film transitions to interrogations and investigations, the pace feels just as relentless.  An attorney catches an official or witness in a lie, and the camera swivels to reveal a tiny twitch, or a hand tensing on the table.

  Nobody survives Costa-Gavras films. The thugs in power are just as bad at lying as the thugs without power, but they get the last lie, and that’s the one that counts.

  
  Favorite Films

  Costa-Gavras Ranked

• 

  Review by Matthew Christman ★★★★

  This film is based on the true story of a 1963 political assassination in Greece that served as sort of a practice run for the right-wing military that eventually overthrew the elected government in 1967. There are a few notable things about this movie, which I dug a great deal. For one, it's a penetrating examination of the psychology and sociology of bureaucracy. Watching the corrupt military officers cover up their involvement in the killing of a pacifist politician with subtle social pressure and straight-forward indoctrination, you get a vivid idea of how these same officers were able to brush aside the civilian government and rule directly. Also, for a film primarily concerned with politics, there is a wounded beating…

• 

  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 11

  Greek expatriate director Costa-Gavras was a political genius. Before the audacity of Bernardo Bertolucci's Il Conformista (1970) and severely influencing the subject matter of Theodoros Angelopoulos' Meres Tou '36 (1972), Z, despite holding the record for the shortest film title ever along with M (1931), is one of the greatest worldwide political dramas ever committed to celluloid. Governmental censorship was considerably heavy during those times, and releasing a brave project of such caliber always shattered the moral of international democracies and conservative parties. Nevertheless, Z screamed like a democratic society could have never done it. Manifestations always lost their impact despite being registered as national history. The director grabbed an astounding novel of political sincerity and subjected it to a…

• 

  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★ 3

  not a great movie to watch stoned btw

• 

  Review by forelavy ★★★★★ 4

  ‘The military regime banned long hair, miniskirts, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Euripides, Russian-style toasts, strikes, Aristophanes, Ionesco, Sartre, Albee, Pinter, freedom of the press, sociology, Beckett, Dostoyevsky, modern music, pop music, new math and the letter Z, which means HE LIVES in ancient greek’

• 

  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★★

  From it's opening moments, it's particularly apparent that this is a film put together by people with a statement to make, and the adequate outrage to forge it forcefully. Approachable as both a commentary on righteous political anger as well as a straight-up thriller, it bestows a remarkable experience where co-writer and director Costa-Gavras carefully ensures that each scene includes various components of interest beyond merely moving forward the chain of events.

  Françoise Bonnot stylishly edits the film, and there's undeniable modernism in its illustration of unjust and immoral governments. It's a well-produced and continually intriguing political thriller which is loaded with conspiracy and nicely underscored with music by Mikis Theodorakis. There's additionally a dominant element of dark comedy trickling through the narrative, and it remains a powerful representation of dishonest authoritarians as well as being a contemporary political masterpiece.

• 

  Review by PopcornIdeology ★★★★½ 1

  I’m a slut for a good political thriller 

  Also “Any resemblance to actual events, to persons living or dead, is not the result of chance. It is deliberate” has got to be one of the hardest openings to a film ever  

  “HE LIVES” 9

• 

  Review by Branson Reese

  It has all of the life and nerve and fury of a two hour ten mile walk around your neighborhood on the balls of your feet after being wronged by a co-worker. Not that I would know!

  It would be so easy for this to succumb to bloat or importance but it's directed with a new wave verve that never dips into seething. You can only seethe when you're wrong. When you're right it get promoted to anger. Occasionally farcical in the way reality gets when things really go wrong, but never a parody. It's a sprint across a tightrope, you always feel the negative space between you and the earth as it cuts back and forth in time. There's…

• 

  Review by Lowe McKee 19

  This film is incredible. Have to say that, right out the gate. Kinetic. Disturbing. Angry. Thrilling. Funny. Its acerbic humor surprised me. Z is a furious and terrifying satire. I need to see more Costa-Gavras. 

  On a purely cinematic level, the movie is just exceptional, man. From the opening moments until the end credits, the film moves at a frenetic pace as we are introduced to both left and right wing politicians, agents of the state, activists, journalists, and civilians, all with different agendas and motivations. Here, the story is the protagonist, jumping from one player to the next until the pieces of the puzzle fall in place to reveal the larger picture. 

  In Z, the camera is constantly moving.…

• 

  Review by Shivam ★★★★★ 2

  "Z" is one the best political thriller film i have ever watched...the film is all about assasination of prominent left-wing politician, known only as "Z" who is murdered in a politically charged climate. "Z" is greek film and it was based true real life assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. The film's core is not only assasination but it is all about the fight for injustice, it shows how powerful peoples manipulate common citizens, it shows values human rights, it shows truth and how corruption could destroy social justice and how hard it would be to survive in that nature for normal citizens, The film is still relevant and so power.

  The "Z" symbol is symbol of life…

• 

  Review by PTAbro ★★★★ 13

  Impossible to pigeonhole within a single genre, Z dips its quill into the wells of ideological soapboxing, conspiratorial thriller, and crime drama, using a nearly inexhaustible supply of actors to weave a complex portrait of a country on the front-lines of the (cold) war and peace movement. So varied are director Costa-Gavras' approaches to his message that it reminds me of City of God in the way that it feels ripe for adaptation into a much longer serialized television drama; say, with each episode focusing on one of the witnesses or suspects of the crime that opens the film and tied together by overarching investigation. The effect is that the film, at a little over 2 hours, feels much longer.…