Four Lions(2010)

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.