2h 1m / NR / Drama

In 1954, escalating violence in the capital city of French colonial Algeria between the native Algerians seeking independence and the pieds-noirs (ethnic Europeans born in Algeria) led the French to mobilize their army. Their target was the National Liberation Front (FLN), the militarized vanguard of the Algerian independence movement. The Battle of Algiers takes the audience through a horrifying replay of those events, showing the terrifying, cruel brutality both the insurgency and the occupation military wield without a flinch.

It also represents a revolution in filmmaking. By combining historical individuals into composite characters, filming in newsreel style, and using mostly non-professional actors, director Gillo Pontecorvo and cinematographer Marcello Gatti create a hyperreal reconfiguration of actual events, complete with scenes viewed as if through a television at home — because that’s exactly how the viewer is used to seeing scenes of real war.

On release, it was banned in France. Memory of the war was still fresh. In the US, it found a certain amount of immediate acclaim among the anti-war movement. Its influence among filmmakers has only grown through the years, and you can find resonances and references in everything from The Dark Knight Rises to Children of Men. But it also found an audience in actual liberation movements around the world, from the IRA to the Black Panthers. Real rebellions learned tactics by watching fictional depictions, themselves stylized to appear nonfictional, of real events. Never let them tell you art can’t change the world.

2h 5m / G / Comedy, Drama

In 1936, Charlie Chaplin made Modern Times, and boy were those times modern. Inspired by post-Great Depression misery around the country and a conversation he had with Mahatma Gandhi about the soul-deadening nature of technology, his “Little Tramp” character gets picked up in a raid on a Communist protest, accidentally eats cocaine, and fights the cops. It took him four years to make another movie. He found he had something to say, again, and it would take his first film with full sound to say it.

Adolf Hitler had become a sort of obsession for Chaplin. They were born just four days apart, and a screening of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will made him realize that Hitler’s overwhelming persona, pretending to be powerful or dominant, could just as easily be presented as absurd and clownish. Plus: the moustache. So he put away the character of the Tramp and created a slapstick-y, mistaken-identity comedy of ridicule about the most serious imaginable topic: the rise of fascism and Nazism.

In 1940, the world knew darkness had covered Europe, but not how deeply. The war had started, but the United States hadn’t joined it yet. Jewish communities certainly spread word of repression and violence, disappearances in the night, unremitting fear, but too few listened. Before the world knew the Holocaust had happened, the world couldn’t believe the Holocaust was possible. Chaplin later said that if he’d known the true extent of the horror of the concentration camps, he could not have made the film. Then again, if you knew about the Holocaust in 1940, how could you have done anything normal at all?

He sent a copy of the film to Hitler. Inner circle Nazi party member Albert Speer denied he ever saw it. Other accounts say he watched it twice. Chaplin said he would “give anything to know what he thought of it,” though he must’ve had a hunch. Courage expresses itself through whatever means are at hand.

In 1953, blacklisted and harassed by the FBI, Chaplin left the U.S., saying “[s]ince the end of the last world war, I have been the object of lies and propaganda by powerful reactionary groups who, by their influence and by the aid of America’s yellow press, have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal-minded individuals can be singled out and persecuted. Under these conditions I find it virtually impossible to continue my motion-picture work, and I have therefore given up my residence in the United States.”

3h 7m / NR / Action, Adventure, Drama

RRR is a phenomenon. The most successful Indian director of all time, S. S. Rajamouli, having helped usher in a worldwide explosion of popularity for Indian film, decided his next project would be a historical reimagining of Indian history: what would happen if two anti-colonialist revolutionary leaders who were contemporaries had actually met and become friends? RRR presents that idea in the form of an innovative, polished martial arts action movie that’s also a powerful anti-imperialist historical drama, a platonic homosocial love story, and (bonus!) a romantic love story that gives the female lead space to be heroic and courageous herself. With musical numbers. In doing so, it expands a personal narrative into a grand epic rather than shrinking a huge and unwieldy lesson about international politics down to bite size. People yearn to be free, whether that means freedom from an aristocrat halfway around the world, freedom from a terrible boss, or the freedom to be their authentic selves.

In the film, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem have both concealed their true identities when they meet. Bheem has disguised himself as a Muslim in order to infiltrate Dehli and rescue a girl from his tribe that the British governor and his wife have kidnapped. Raju has turned away from his family and upbringing to become a police officer, now tasked with delivering Bheem (who he does not recognize) to justice. A train accident brings them together, and they become fast friends. But truth can’t be hidden forever, and their eventual struggle culminates in a battle that reveals the film’s true self too: it’s a fantasia about how good things might have been, about the losses that could have been victories, about how powerful it feels to fight for the right side, and about the spirit that keeps us all dreaming of a better world.

2h 8m / NC-17 / Drama

Why is evil always surprising? Violence isn’t; when a lion stalks and kills a zebra, it may be shocking but it’s not a surprise. Then again, it’s also necessary. Is that what surprises us about man’s inhumanity to man — its superfluousness? We call it unpredictable; we say that there were no signs. But try as we might to comfort ourselves, evil doesn’t ever really come out of nowhere. Evil iterates.

Director Michael Haneke (Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, Happy End) seems to find human evil an interesting topic to explore. The White Ribbon is set in a little German village a few years before the First World War where some surprising things have begun to happen: the rotten floor of a sawmill collapses, killing a farmer’s wife; a trap fells a horse, which throws its rider; a boy goes missing, to be found the next day bound and beaten. And then the villagers who get curious about these events and attempt to investigate begin to disappear. Cruelty and savagery begin to show up everyone. What’s gotten into them?

As viewers, it’s impossible to forget the future. We know what is coming for these villagers, the children. We know what happens when you live with violence like mold, growing in the quiet darkness and indelible. It’s said that the axe forgets, but the tree remembers. So, what finally happens, somehow, isn’t shocking. And yet it still manages to surprise.