Z bristles with nervous energy, and no wonder: made just a handful of years after the assassination of a Greek politician who opposed the country’s military regime, it presents a fictionalized version of those events, set in an unnamed Mediterranean country. With an agitated camera that’s always on the move, often employing paranoid zooms, director Costa-Gavras jostles the audience in the manner of a docudrama, as The Battle of Algiers did a few years earlier. Together, they define 1960s revolutionary cinema. If the occasional flashbacks to the personal lives of those involved (Yves Montand plays the politician, while Irene Papas is his wife) are not quite as effective because they break the docudrama immediacy, the film’s meta-textual ending is a stroke of genius. At first, Costa-Gavras offers a fantasy finale of accountability, with the state perpetrators indicted for the political violence they incited, only to pull the rug out from under us and reveal what happened in real life: that they were exonerated and allowed back in power, where they clamped down on basic democratic rights even harder than before. Z is a bitter, brilliant pill to swallow.
(6/17/2026)
