The 40 Best Anti-Fascist Films of All Time 

If Derek Vinyard — the furious, violent neo-Nazi depicted by Edward Norton in Tony Kaye’s examination of white supremacist ideology — were around today, he’d be a Proud Boy recently pardoned by Trump for Jan. 6 offenses. In the film, he gets convicted of murder after brutally executing a Black man who tries to steal his car and undergoes an unlikely conversion thanks to a saintly Black inmate, played by Guy Torry in turns charming, funny and wise. It’s not subtle, and critics have pointed to the film’s obsession with beautifully shot cinematic violence, the same sort of violence the story supposedly repudiates. But in scenes showing Derek and his skinheads mates bonding — lonely, insecure losers desperate to belong to something greater than themselves — American History X feels terrifyingly prescient. 

Jean-Pierre Melville, a former resistance fighter himself, re-stages the German invasion of Paris for the opening shot of his 1969 masterpiece, as jackbooted Nazi soldiers march through the Arc de Triumph. What follows is perhaps the best film ever made on the feel of life under fascism. Melville depicts the courage and heroism of the French Resistance — many of the characters in the film, adapted from Joseph Kessel’s novel, were based in part on real fighters — but refuses to sanitize their tactics, which resemble the gangsters in Melville’s later movies. In an early scene, three members of the Resistance strangle a traitor with a towel — a gunshot would attract too much attention — and Melville draws out the scene, excruciatingly, showing the true costs of heroism and war and how those fighting a monstrous system often become monsters themselves.

Authoritarianism isn’t just terrifying. It’s really, really, boring. Terry Gilliam’s psychedelic fever dream version of 1984 follows Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a mid-level cog in the spirit- (and often bone-) crushing machine of a totalitarian bureaucracy. On the surface, a satire of Soviet-era Stalinism, a modern re-watch reveals a still-scarily relevant world in which tech overreach has deadly consequences — a single typo results in the wrong man being tortured and killed — and an upbeat media dismiss any resistance to the regime. Terrorists, a TV pundit quips, “just can’t stand seeing the other fella win.” In Robert De Niro’s Archibald “Harry” Tuttle — a freelance heating engineer/freedom fighter — Gilliam gave us an anti-fascist hero for the ages.

The parallels between the rise of fascism in 1930s Berlin and the realities in present-day America can make Cabaret an uncomfortable rewatch. Bob Fosse’s eight-fold Oscar-winning musical classic, and its message of how cynicism, irony and complacency are enablers of racism and extremism, is still scarily relevant. “Still think you can control them?” British scholar Brian Roberts (Michael York) asks the haughty aristocrat Baron von Heune (Helmut Griem), who, sounding like a smug House Republican circa 2016, at first dismissed the Nazis as a “gang of stupid hooligans.” As Kit Kat performer Sally Bowles, the never-better Liza Minnelli provides a master class in disassociation and self-deception, fiddling (or singing and dancing) while Rome burns. “The democratic election of an authoritarian figure, the normalization of bigotry, the complicity of the frightened masses. … We have indeed seen this show before,” Joel Grey, who plays the cynical Cabaret Emcee, wrote recently in The New York Times. “History is giving us another chance to confront the forces that Cabaret warned us about. The question is: Will we listen this time, or will we keep laughing until the music stops?”

Michael Curtiz’s romantic classic was explicitly designed as anti-fascist propaganda. Set in 1941, when the United States was still neutral in World War II, but released in November 1942, when U.S. troops joined Allied forces in the liberation of North Africa, Casablanca is a conversion tale, the story of the transformation of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart at his most iconic) from self-professed isolationist to devoted resistance fighter. Bogie is a stand-in for America’s vision of itself as the reluctant savior. Rick would rather stay out of the mess in Europe — “I stick my neck out for nobody” — but his basic decency forces him to make a moral choice. When the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, individual desire, in the form of his love for Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman, luminous), “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

The one film Musk — or anyone who thinks Hitler puns or Nazi salutes are funny — needs to watch. Forget the campy and pop-culture depictions of fascism, forget all the subtle allegories. Soviet-era director Elem Klimov’s depiction of Nazi atrocities in Belarus is direct and uncompromising, offering neither relief nor respite. It follows a young Belarusian teenager who joins the partisans dreaming of heroism and adventure but finds only devastation and horror. Partially based on eye-witness survivor testimonies, Klimov’s film is shown through the young protagonist’s traumatized perspective. It is nearly unbearable. But no other film reveals so completely the moral bankruptcy of fascist expansion.

As startling and original now as the day it was released — Spielberg, Coppola, and Scorsese all cite it as a major influence — Bernardo Bertolucci’s visually ravishing, psychologically unsettling masterpiece remains the most powerful cinematic indictment of going along with the crowd. Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) joins Mussolini’s fascists solely for fear of standing apart. Over the course of a car ride — he is on his way to assassinate his old mentor, an anti-fascist college professor — we jump back in forth in Clerici’s life to this point, Bertolucci’s nonlinear storytelling mirroring Marcello’s fractured psyche, as he grapples with guilt, repression and rage.

The everyday impact of fascism was a theme Rainer Werner Fassbinder returned to again and again in his vast body of work, from the singer in Lili Marleen caught between her Jewish lover and her Nazi-backed career, the criminal in Berlin Alexanderplatz who tries to go straight in the society turning toward evil, or the women in The Marriage of Maria Braun profiting from Germany’s post-war economic miracle but unable to shake the ghosts of the past. Nearly forgotten is Fassbinder’s first big English-language production, an adaptation of a Vladimir Nabokov novel from a script by Tom Stoppard starring Dirk Bogarde as a Jewish Russian émigré in 1930s Germany. The rise of the Nazis triggers a mental breakdown and he comes up with the bizarre plan to collect life insurance by killing a stranger whom he (wrongly) believes to be his exact double. A macabre twist on the film noir, it’s a powerful argument that insanity can be the only healthy response to a world gone mad.

Bursting onto the scene in 2009 with Peter Jackson’s backing, Neill Blomkamp’s blockbuster cleverly blended the sci-fi creature feature with the mockumentary satire to flip the script on the classic alien invasion movie. Using non-humans to highlight the dehumanization that undergirds all forms of apartheid, the South African filmmaker asks not what aliens might do to us, but what horrors we would inflict on them were they to suffer the misfortune of alighting upon our tribalistic, bloodstained planet. The movie turns on a military operation to relocate the aliens’ refugee camp, which the humans view only as a loathsome, non-native drain on resources — a reference to South Africa’s forcible removal of non-white residents from Capetown’s District Six during the apartheid era, but a story arc that’s just as applicable to the plight of immigrants and displaced people in our inhumane present.

Augusto Pinochet, who ruled over Chile with unspeakable human rights violations from 1973 to 1990, was a haunting offscreen presence throughout much of Pablo Larraín’s accomplished early filmography (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No). But with the 2023 feature El Conde, the Chilean auteur finally put the dictator front and center. In what THR’s lead critic described as a “wild leap into irreverent originality,” Larraín reimagined the tyrant as a 250-year-old vampire who faked his own death and continues to stalk humanity and its history. Come for the Dr. Strangelove-level political satire and stay for legendary cinematographer Ed Lachman’s ravishing black-and-white image-making. On the question of cross-border resonance and whether the U.S. might be forging its own orange-hued, undying despot, Larraín previously told THR, with a laugh: “Well, if Trump is a vampire, the good news for me is that he’s your vampire, not mine. We’re already dealing with ours.”  

It’s all there in John Williams’ ingenious theme for Darth Vader, “The Imperial March.” Here strides the quintessential fascist archetype — a masked, mechanized figure of darkness whose very existence symbolizes the dehumanizing nature of authoritarian power; his relationship with his son, Luke, still more metaphorical struggle between systemic control and personal agency. Sure, George Lucas’ original Star Wars introduces the rag-tag Rebel Alliance and the individualist heroes who will lead the struggle against intergalactic domination — but The Empire Strikes Back’s dark denouement is far more in tune with the vibe shift of 2025, when the ultra-right-wing is seemingly in ascendance everywhere. 

There are plenty of movies, including several on this list, about those who resist authoritarian power. Rarer are stories of those forced to adapt to a totalitarian system in order to survive. In her incredible — and incredibly true — tale, Agnieszka Holland follows Solomon Perel, born the fourth child of a Jewish family in Germany who immigrated to Poland in the 1930s in a failed attempt to escape Nazi persecution. Perel miraculously survived World War II and the Holocaust by passing — first as a Young Pioneer in an orphanage in a Soviet-occupied Grodno, later as a model member of the Hitler Youth. Perel’s life — he survived when his family was almost entirely wiped out — feels like a great cosmic joke, and Holland’s film illustrates the absurdity underlying fascist racial ideology.

By shading the story of a once-glorious European hotel and its eccentric denizens with the rise of Nazism, Wes Anderson offered his closest approximation to date of a personal credo. Here, the signature Anderson preoccupations — that antic spirit of adolescent romance and rebellion; the devotion to exquisite, hand-crafted personal style; irony, ennui and a twist of nostalgia — take on new depth. They are presented, beneath the deadpan, as everything good and worth cherishing in an often ugly and turbulent world — the very values the fascist impulse does its best to erase. As Ralph Fiennes declares as Gustave H., the Grand Budapest’s concierge and aesthete-in-chief: “You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed, that’s what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant … oh, fuck it.”

According to film historians, Charlie Chaplin resolved to make The Great Dictator after catching a screening of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will at the New York Museum of Modern Art sometime in the late 1930s — thereby initiating the greatest cinematic tête-à-tête of the 20th century. Arguably the most influential Hollywood satire ever made, it was also the Tramp’s first talkie and the most commercially successful film of his career. Chaplin famously portrays dual leading roles: a ruthless fascist dictator and the kindly Jewish barber who is mistaken for him. The film’s release galvanized popular American sentiments against the Germans prior to the U.S.’s official entry into World War II, and it later became a surprise rallying cry hit in an already war-torn Western Europe. The Great Dictator has been celebrated across generations for its audacity and slapstick comedy mastery, although late in life Chaplin expressed some reservations in his autobiography, writing that he would not have made light of “the homicidal insanity of the Nazis” if he had known about the true horrors of the concentration camps when he was conceiving the project. 

Blending the grand tradition of Godzilla with black comedy and plucky family melodrama, Bong Joon Ho has never been quite so Spielbergian as he was on The Host, creating a movie monster for the ages but with more than mere cinematic spectacle in mind. After a U.S. military doctor orders gallons of formaldehyde poured down a drain into Seoul’s Han river, an enormous, killer-slug-like creature is spawned. The story’s emotional core pits the hapless lower-class Park family against the beast after it snatches their young daughter and carries her away to its lair. Before long, though, the government’s response to the incident proves just as horrifying as the creature itself. Arbitrary quarantines are instituted, the media is manipulated, individual freedoms are curtailed and paranoid hysteria reigns. If Parasite examined the nature of late-stage capitalism through the prism of a family of grifters, The Host explores how a state apparatus can come to view its own populace as nothing more than a contaminant in need of excision or control. 

One of the many themes reverberating through Pawel Pawlikowski’s quietly devastating Oscar winner is the role of memory — public and private — in perpetuating authoritarian violence. It’s 1960s Poland and Anna, a young novice nun, is on the brink of taking her vows when she is sent to meet her aunt Wanda, her only living relative. A former communist resistance fighter turned state judge, notorious for sending “enemies of the people” to their deaths, Wanda tells Anna she’s Jewish. Her real name is Ida Lebenstein and her parents, first hidden by Christians from the German occupiers, were then betrayed and murdered. The mismatched pair set off on a trip through the Polish countryside to find out what really happened. Shot in stunning black-and-white, using the same boxy Academy format Pawlikowski would use again in Cold War, Ida explores how forgetting or misremembering the past can lead to the repetition of cycles of state violence, but it offers no easy answers for how a country, once it goes down the fascist route, can ever make itself whole again. 

“Nazis. I hate these guys.” Raiders of the Lost Ark set the template, but The Last Crusade cemented the principle with this classic Harrison Ford quip — which delivers a big laugh, reveals a major plot point (it’s the Nazis, again!) and drives home a franchise truism: Indiana Jones is at his best when he’s facing off against humanity’s ultimate evil. Remember those days? When it was so taken for granted that the Nazis were deplorable (yes, deplorable) that instead of sweaty oligarchs trolling us with Hitler salutes, we had preternaturally gifted filmmakers like Steven Spielberg playfully reviving cinema history’s stock villains as the foils for pure, swashbuckling family fun — the kind of fun that by definition isn’t even conceivable under fascism and remains the free world’s most effective sales pitch for choosing otherwise? 

Of course, movie geekdom’s greatest savant knows the old Hollywood rule book better than anyone (listen up, again, Elon …): The Nazis are always the bad guys. The first in his trilogy of uproarious alternate histories, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is packed with revisionist howlers: Eli Roth as the Brooklyn-born, baseball bat-wielding Jew Bear, a never-better Christoph Waltz embodying German punctiliousness as evil incarnate, and that unforgettable flash-cut to Joseph Goebels wheezing like a deranged swine in a furious bout of coitus. But it’s the ending — a history-righting massacre of Nazi leadership inside a cinema — that delivers Tarantino’s most deliriously transgressive use of movie violence since he first blew our collective minds way back in 1994 with that handgun mishap in the back seat in Pulp Fiction.

Park Chan-wook’s first major hit, JSA centers on a tragic shooting that occurs along the Korean DMZ amid heightened tensions between North and South. An expertly plotted and crisply filmed mystery thriller, the story’s big reveal isn’t the usual spy scheme but rather that the rival enemy combatants involved in the incident were actually friends, having forged a connection across the DMZ during the long, quiet hours of their mutual night watch. When a superior discovers the enemies hanging out together in a guard tower, it’s the inescapable logic of political conflict that forces a panicked hand, resulting in tragedy. South Korean star Song Kang-ho (Parasite, Memories of Murder) broke barriers by lending his everyman charisma to the part of the North Korean hero, spending months mastering the Northern dialect by meeting with real-life defectors. The movie was South Korea’s biggest box office hit ever at the time of its release, as well as the very first film in the country’s history featuring a North Korean character who was portrayed with human complexity. “North Koreans were always described as demons, monsters or severely malnourished people; the authoritarian anti-communist government of the past imposed it,” Park recalled in an interview with THR. “I felt it was important to describe them as normal people.”

Updating Chaplin’s The Great Dictator concept — frame Nazi ideology from a naive POV to ridicule and deflate it — with his own brand of absurdist comedy, Taika Waititi delivers an “anti-hate satire” about Johannes (Roman Griffin Davis), a young German boy whose imaginary friend is Hitler (Waititi in full goofball mode). It’s an audacious concept that pays off with some scenes — intercutting Triumph of the Will footage with the sounds of The Beatles singing in German, framing Hitler as a pop idol — that are shocking and funny in equal measure. A bit too charming and sweet for a movie about fascism, but, in its cartoonish way, Jojo Rabbit exposes the absurdity at the heart of an evil system. 

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s visually stunning, masterfully oppressive meditation on the miseries and injustices of Vladamir Putin’s Russia is every bit as monumental as its title suggests. The film is also peppered with black comedy, resplendent nature cinematography and some of the most depraved — and seemingly justified — vodka swilling ever committed to camera. Through a sequence of punishing degradations, we follow our stubborn protagonist, Nikolay Sergeyev, as he sets his will against the local mayor’s corrupt land-grab scheme and the kleptocracy proceeds to take everything from him — his home, family, dignity and freedom. Scored with Philip Glass’ Akhnaten, the movie is rich with ironic references to both the Bible and Thomas Hobbes — but its sophistication is only so much cineast ornament atop a relentless, balls-out indictment of the authoritarian corruption that’s corroded every aspect of Russian public life. 

A close dissection of how authoritarian systems rely on fear and quiet collaboration to function, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning debut takes the POV of an East German Stasi agent (Ulrich Mühe, phenomenal) who, in the course of wire-tapping a dissent artist, has a moral awakening and decides to fight the system from within. A plea for how art and empathy can challenge political power.

Klaus Maria Brandauer is electric in this Oscar-winning film as a furiously ambitious German actor who sees opportunity in the rise of the Nazis, ditching his moral compass for a shot at fame and fortune. István Szabó’s take on the Faustian bargain — an adaptation of Klaus Mann’s satirical novel, which was apparently inspired by his brother-in-law Gustaf Gründgens, an actor and Nazi collaborator — will make uncomfortable viewing for any Hollywood types who were proud members of “the resistance” after the 2016 election and have now gone suddenly quiet. As Szabó shows, fascist systems are superb at seducing and co-opting artists to make them complicit in enabling totalitarian ideologies.

The year is 2054. Steven Spielberg is behind the camera and Tom Cruise is on the run — briskly, as ever — through a byzantine Philip K. Dick conspiracy. The police state presides over a system that is said to detect “pre-crime” flawlessly. Three uniquely gifted precognitive humans float in a suspension tank, their brain waves monitored by super-computers that sift their thoughts for glimmers of premeditated murders. When the intention of a crime is detected, the cops swoop in to nab the would-be perpetrators before the killing can even take place. Cruise’s hologram-swiping gloves — so memorable, so mind blowing in 2002 — are already looking a little quaint in 2025. But Minority Report’s warning about techno-authoritarianism that operates beyond the scope of human comprehension has arguably only grown more urgent in our present day of rapidly advancing AI. 

Film fans interested in the kind of society that can produce an Elon Musk should check out this hidden gem from South African director Oliver Hermanus. In 1981, at a time when homosexuality was still a crime in the country, a closeted gay man is called up for mandatory military service and undergoes shame, humiliation and extreme psychological violence. The title comes from a common Afrikaans anti-gay slur. Based on an autobiographical novel by André Carl van der Merwe, the film shows the links between racial and sexual oppression and systemic brutality that underlines them both. 

There are many great Italian films about life under fascism — Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and Ettore Scola’s A Special Day, the Taviani brothers’ Night of the Shooting Stars — but for sheer oomph, few can match Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic. Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu play men born on the opposite ends of the social spectrum — De Niro’s Alfredo is a wealthy landowner, Depardieu’s Olmo an illegitimate peasant — bound together by friendship and torn apart by the class struggle that will give rise to Mussolini. Indulgently long (depending on which version you can find, 1900 clocks in at four-plus or five-plus hours) Bertolucci’s film is wildly operatic and deeply sensual, and its clear Marxist sympathies rarely sink to the level of dogma. At its core, the film explores the roots of fascism in economic inequality and social tensions while showing the importance of individual choice to resist or to comply.

Deep in a dark Spanish forest, during the darkest days of the country’s fascist nightmare, Mexican cinematic magician Guillermo del Toro transforms an innocent young girl’s inner fantasy world into a potent fable about power, corruption and resistance. With Ofelia’s magical quests paralleling the Spanish Republicans’ underground struggle, del Toro brilliantly intertwines personal mythology with historical resistance, suggesting — as nearly all of his fantastic films do — that imagination itself is a revolutionary act.

This criminally underseen masterpiece from Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong is many things — an uncommonly effective formal experiment, a devastating character study, and a sweeping argument for how fascist periods of the past can haunt and poison a country for decades. The film begins with an unhinged middle-aged man (played by Sul Kyung-gu) throwing himself in front of a train while his former classmates, holding a 20-year reunion in a public park nearby, watch on in horror. A mystery melodrama, the film then proceeds down the train tracks in reverse, revealing six key episodes that led the man to this deranged endpoint. These intricately interlaced vignettes, which become increasingly heartbreaking as his story coheres, follow the man through East Asia’s spiritually vacuous 1990s economic boom times into several shattering experiences during the darkest days of Korea’s 1980s military dictatorship. By the time the audience re-meets the protagonist in the film’s final episode as a sweetly innocent student on the verge of adulthood, the foreknowledge of how Korean history will twist his life into crushing tragedy is almost too much to bear. 

Marjane Satrapi’s animated autobiographical film, the adaptation of her graphic novel about growing up in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, is a deeply personal, frequently hilarious critique of totalitarianism. Before the Islamic revolution, little Marjane was a fan of punk music and Bruce Lee, the daughter of well-off, strictly secular leftists who opposed the dictatorship of Shah and held their nose when the Islamics seize power, only to see one authoritarian regime replaced by another. Too subtle and balanced to be dismissed as simple anti-Iran propaganda — when Marjane goes abroad to school, Satrapi shows how condescending and misogynist the “free world” can be — Persepolis is a nuanced critique of all forms of fundamentalism, both Islamic and Western.

Anime legend Hayao Miyazaki’s most recurring visual metaphor for freedom and creative transcendence is aviation (his famed studio, after all, is named after a 1930s Italian reconnaissance aircraft nicknamed the “Ghibli”). In Porco Rosso, the maestro places this career-long fixation front and center. The film is set on the Adriatic Coast of Italy in 1929 — seven years after Mussolini came to power — and it tells the irresistibly whimsical tale of a World War I Italian fighter pilot who has been mysteriously transformed into a pig (but still takes to the sky with swagger and derring-do). Was Porco Rosso cursed to become a pig due to the survivor’s guilt he feels from the horrors he witnessed in the First Great War? Or has he become a swine because he dropped out of Italy’s dehumanizing nationalist movement to live by his own curmudgeonly code of honor as a freelance bounty hunter — one who abhors the Italian secret police as much as the profiteering air pirates he tracks down in the skies? Miyazaki doesn’t exactly say, but the freewheeling version of heroism that Porco represents is unmistakable. When an Italian officer invites him back into the Italian air force with a cush position, Porco scoffs, “Thanks for the offer, but I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.”

Decades before Professor McGonagall’s withering gaze made Harry Potter tremble, Maggie Smith was magnetic, terrifying (and Oscar-winning) as the titular teacher in this adaptation of Muriel Spark’s cautionary classic. Miss Brodie’s charisma, and her romantic pronouncement that her pupils need to learn about “beauty, honor and courage,” appear to put her in the Robin Williams/Dead Poets Society school of carpe diem education. But there’s something darker beneath. This is the 1930s and Brodie is a vocal admirer of fascist leaders Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco. Her sway over her favored students — the “Brodie Set” — will prove disastrous. Ronald Neame’s subtle film exposes the thin line between intellectual seduction and moral corruption and the dangerous potential of charismatic indoctrination. 

Rossellini’s Rome, Open City is a searing neorealist testament to Italian resistance to totalitarianism. The film’s raw, documentary-like style — shot on the actual war-devastated streets of the Italian capital — strips away heroic myth-making to show the battle against fascism as a desperate, exhausting struggle marked by constant fear and potential betrayal. After Italy belatedly turned against Mussolini’s fascists, two leftist activists and a Catholic priest — each embodying a different form of collective defiance — find their city humiliatingly occupied by Nazi Germany, which has reinstalled the Italian dictator in a puppet state in northern Salò. Rossellini doesn’t flinch from the nasty reality — the movie is a ground-level deconstruction of how fascist power relies on systemic violence, terror and dehumanization to function — but his film is also infused with passion, and the determination, however bad things get, for humans to survive.

Stories of strong women confronting toxic masculinity is a sort-of-speciality of German director Margarethe von Trotta (Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxembourg, Marianne & Juliane) and this feature illuminates another, lesser-known tale of female resistance. In 1943, Hitler’s thugs rounded up Berlin’s remaining Jews for deportation to the camps. A small group of Jewish men — those married to non-Jewish Germans — had a brief stay of execution, and were diverted to a Jewish community center in Rosenstrasse while the Nazis decided their fate. Their wives protested outside, forcing — incredibly — the Nazis to back down and release their men, most of whom survived. Von Trotta indulges in some clunky melodrama, but the film stands as a refute to the standard claim that ordinary citizens can do nothing to resist a fascist regime.

Fascism is a snuff movie. Loosely adapted from Marquis de Sade’s S&M treatise, Italian avant-garde artist and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini transfers the depravity to Salò in northern Italy, circa 1944, in the fascist republic set up by Mussolini after he was freed by the Nazis from Italian partisans. Four power-mad, sexual sadistic members of the ruling elite kidnap 18 teenagers and subject them to months of physical and psychological torture. The story is divided into four segments, inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, and there is some high-minded discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust, but any intellectualism is eviscerated by Pasolini’s gruesome depiction of the violence — rape, hanging, scalping, nipples burned off, eyes gouged out — that lies beneath. Pasolini’s final, and most extreme, film, released just weeks after he was murdered under suspicious circumstances (recently uncovered evidence suggests right-wing terrorists may have been involved) shows the inevitable end result of fascist ideology. 

Arguably the premiere anti-fascist director of our times, Paul Verhoeven in his 1977 breakthrough follows a group of foppish university students who take very different paths after the Nazis occupy the Netherlands. One is martyred, one turns traitor and one becomes a war hero. Directed with the style and dash familiar from his later Hollywood productions, Solider of Orange never lets its message — that ordinary people can actively oppose totalitarian systems — get in the way of a cracking tale. And Rutger Hauer has never looked sexier.

Robert Wise’s multi-Oscar-winning musical classic has little to do with the actual history of fascism. Yes, there was a Von Trapp family of singers, and yes, they did escape the Nazis for America ahead of WWII, but the film’s portrayal of ordinary Austrians (strict Catholic nuns among them) as vanguards against Hitler strains credulity from the nation that welcomed the “Anschluss.” You never doubt, though, that the film has its heart is in the right place. “I have no political convictions. Can I help it if other people do?” says Max Detweiler (Richard Haydn) to Baron Von Trapp (Christopher Plummer), arguing for political indifference in the face of authoritarian terror. Answers Herr Von Trapp: “Oh yes, you can help it. You must help it.” It’s enough to make you break out in song.

Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is such an effective satire of fascist ideology that when it first came out in 1997, many critics misinterpreted the movie as a full-throated endorsement of authoritarianism. They must have missed the bulk of the Dutch director’s prior filmography (not to mention his bio — he witnessed the devastating Nazi bombing of The Hague firsthand as a boy), which is littered with vividly realized skewerings of fascism’s various forms (Soldier of Orange, RoboCop, Total Recall). In hindsight, the misreads only highlight Verhoeven’s intended point about the instinctual appeal of fascistic impulses, no matter how cartoonishly expressed. Everything those early critics slammed is precisely what’s hilarious and ingenious about the film — from the deliberate casting of exceedingly hot, exceedingly dumb-seeming lead actors, to the gleeful displays of orgiastic military violence, to costumes, sets and snippets of dialogic directly lifted from Nazi iconography and propaganda. 

Oskar Matzerath, the high-pitched percussionist protagonist in Volker Schlöndorff’s Oscar- and Palme d’Or-winning epic, is the Peter Pan of anti-fascism. He refuses to grow up because growing up means becoming a Nazi. Adapted from Günter Grass’ magic realist novel about a boy who stops growing at 3 and has a voice that can smash glass, The Tin Drum uses the childlike POV to mock the pomp and pomposity of Nazism. In one scene, his drumming confuses a military march at a party rally, transforming it into a mass waltz. (Would that Oskar could have been on the bill for the Trump inauguration.) There’s nothing sweet and innocent about wee Oskar — the late critic Roger Ebert called him “an unsavory brat” — but sometimes the best way to confront fascist hypocrisy is to scream in contempt.

When is it too soon to respond to atrocity with sparkly comedic levity? With this peerlessly nervy exercise in artistic commitment, screwball maestro Ernst Lubitsch essentially says: never. To Be or Not to Be stars Jack Benny and Carole Lombard as husband-and-wife stage actors in Nazi-occupied Warsaw who get caught up in a spy plot just as Hitler’s SS is hauling off Jewish residents to the camps. The film went into production shortly before the U.S. entered World War II and sharply divided viewers upon its release in 1942, with many critics blasting it as appallingly tasteless. But To Be or Not to Be is wildly intricate and a complex watch, contrasting its humor with frank acknowledgments of the horrors of the moment, essentially arguing that fizzy repartee and sly visual metaphor — the famed “Lubitsch touch” — are nothing less than the champagne of civilization, some of our most sophisticated expressions of joy, which the Nazis only intend to smash into submission.   

There are plenty of harrowing films about the horrors of the Holocaust, but Jonathan Glazer shifts the focus from the Nazi killings to the banal moral indifference that was their enabler. The humdrum lives of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss — the commander of Auschwitz and his dutiful wife — are portrayed flatly, as domestic normality plays out directly adjacent to industrial murder. We never see the ovens, but we can hear them, just over the wall. “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what they did then’; rather, ‘Look what we do now,’” said Glazer in his Oscar acceptance speech for Zone. “Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present.”