George Orwell got a lot right about the totalitarian future we’d be facing today, but it was Terry Gilliam who predicted just how hopelessly humorous it would all be. Brazil might be his darkest: a zany riff on Orwell’s 1984, it could have stuck to loosely-connected sketches about the pitfalls of a near future. Gilliam’s ambitions might not have made sense to everybody when Brazil was released 40 years ago, but today, its warning couldn’t be clearer. It’s in neither the future nor the past; it could be set in a near-present Chicago or a crumbling European metropolis. Is there still time to reverse course, or will the next 40 years see us pulled even deeper into Brazil’s inescapable orbit?