Julia Kukiewicz looks at Terry Gilliam’s ten best films.

I’ve heard Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund’s 2004 Oscar-nominated film to be likened to Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”. Yet, I’d hazard a guess this is more a marketing ploy to pigeonhole the film into a more saleable product. It is like saying Antonia Bird’s drama “Priest” is like “The Exorcist”. They both feature members of the church questioning their own faith after all, but the two films couldn’t be more dissimilar. Granted, “ City of God” and “Pulp Fiction” share the depiction of crime and a time-switching, non-linear narrative, but there is little ironic humour to find in Meirelles and Lund’s uncompromising film. “City Of God” isn’t interested in stylised characters that overplay the merits of the metric system or theatrical violence and pop-culture references, it cuts far closer to the bone than that.

Britain has always fared well when pointing its camera lenses towards comedy. Off the back of quality radio (the wit of Spike Milligan and The Goon Show, accompanied ably by the delightful antics of Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe) and television (the Monty Python team constantly obscuring the day-to-day British regime with side-splitting skits) there’s always been plenty of source material for cinema to draw on.
Even thought the Ealing comedies of the 1950s had some success across the pond, it was the appeal of Monty Python and the subsequent …