Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Soviet officials scramble for power in the chaotic days after Stalin's death, played as farce that never loses sight of how many people the farce actually killed.

Why it’s here: Turns the actual, undignified scramble after Stalin's death into slapstick without softening what any of it cost — the comedy is the argument that authoritarian succession is always this undignified, not an exception made for laughs.

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.