Brain Droppings

Four British Muslim men in Sheffield decide to become suicide bombers. Omar is sincere and sharp, Waj is a follower, Barry is a loudmouth convert, and Faisal is trying to train crows to carry explosives. A training trip to Pakistan goes badly wrong, the plan changes shape again and again, and the target ends up being the London Marathon.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the target: Morris takes the most feared subject of the decade and finds the comedy in it, aiming the joke at the ideology and the men chasing it, not at Muslims as a group. After about three years of research with police, terrorism experts and imams, and with British Muslim writers and actors shaping the script, the film sees would-be bombers as sad, bickering, self-important and heartbreakingly human. The pedagogy is in that last part. It shows how a movement offers a lost young man a place and a purpose, how group pressure and ego drive the plan more than belief does, and how the authorities' own blunders belong to the same farce. It treats a suicide bombing as the end of the joke, which is why the ending is hard to watch. Critics split, and some found it a miss, but it makes a useful companion to any serious reading on radicalization.

Two Victorian bachelors each invent a fictional alter ego named "Ernest" to escape their obligations, until both fictions collide with the women they're courting — who each insist on marrying a man named Ernest. Adapted from Oscar Wilde's play.

Why it’s here: Punk in weaponizing wit against Victorian propriety — every double life and invented relative is Wilde mocking a society obsessed with appearing respectable rather than being honest. Pedagogical in showing how absurd social rules reveal themselves once you refuse to take them seriously.