This Italian film from 2009 shows us the fiery, passionate fascist dictator Benito Mussolini played by Filipo Timi, but the story centers on the obsession his mistress Ida Dalser (the incredible Giovanna Mezzogiorno) had with him that drove her to madness.
A high school teacher in Germany wishes to teach his students about the atrocities of living under a dictatorship, so he designs a interactive classroom program to show them how easily people can fall under the spell of a convincing autocrat. This story is based upon a real-life experiment done in 1967 by Ron Jones, a high school teacher in Palo Alto, California.
This sensational, Oscar-winning crowd pleaser from Quentin Tarantino verges on what one might describe as revenge porn. Any Nazi who stands in the way of Lt. Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) and his band of Jewish-American outlaws roving World War II Europe gets his scalp removed. This is one of the most creative re-workings of history ever put on film.
This little-seen Australian film from 1996 features Judy Davis as a young Communist who travels to the Soviet Union and has an affair with Joseph Stalin (played by F. Murray Abraham of “Amadeus” fame). When she travels back to Australia, she discovers she is pregnant. Her Stalin love child is forced to deal with the crimes of a father he never met.
South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker made a blockbuster which lampooned half of Hollywood in this satirically cutting film depicting Kim Jong-Il. The late North Korean dictator is depicted, unsurprisingly, as a maniacal dictator with an over-amped grasp on the English language who is unfurling a terrorist plot that police aim to foil.
During the Iraq-Iran War in the late 1980s, Latif Yahia is recruited to become the body double for the son of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He is thrown deep into the sadistic, excessive, hedonistic lifestyle of Uday Hussein and his father’s brutal dictatorship. Many said the film was historically inaccurate for the sake of Hollywoodization, but it’s worth seeing for Dominic Cooper’s portrayal of both Latif and Uday.
In 1973 Chile, democratically-elected President Salvador Allende was overthrown during an American-backed coup by the commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army, Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet’s ensuing dictatorship lasted 17 years. This fictional story follows Jack Lemmon as he searches the chaotic landscape of the embattled country for his missing journalist son, along with his daughter-in-law played by Sissy Spacek.
Way back when, the Marx Brothers and their zany appeal ruled the world of comedy. Their 1933 masterpiece, “Duck Soup,” examined emerging European nationalism, focusing on the autocratic new leader of a fictional bankrupt country, Freedonia. The film was released just as Hitler was rising to power.
This film swept the top 10 lists of critics worldwide in 2007 and nabbed the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film festival. It’s set in communist Romania, where Nicolae Ceausescu’s heinous police-state is in full swing. Otilia and Gabriela are best friends with a huge predicament. Gabriela needs an abortion in a country where such action is severely punished. Incredibly intense and moving, it’s an accurate look at the bleakest era of communism which stifled the lives of Eastern Europeans.
Forest Whitaker won an Oscar for nailing with frightening ardor the megalomaniac spirit of the murderous Idi Amin of Uganda. Amin was responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of his country’s citizens. Scottish James MacAvoy was Amin’s personal doctor, and witnessed the most scary private moments of the brutal dictator’s ravings and delusions.
As a companion piece to “The Last King of Scotland,” this earlier, masterfully edited 1974 documentary by Barbet Schroeder delves into the everyday life of Idi Amin. This film came out before the full scope of Amin’s horrors were revealed to the world. Even so, corruption, madness, and murder (the foreign minister’s body washed up in the Nile during the shoot) pervade every scene.
Nominated for a 2013 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, this Cambodian film from Rithy Panh is about life under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Half of it was filmed with newsreel and documentary footage. The other half used carved clay figurines as character. It conveys uniquely the atrocities Pol Pot committed in the name of communism. More than 2 million people died in Cambodia’s killing fields from 1975 to 1979.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s third major feature film after “Borat” and “Bruno” wasn’t as well received, although his cult following certainly gorged on this mockumentary which introduces us to Admiral Gen. Aladeen, the bearded, immature, maniacal, racist, murderous lunatic who runs the made-up Republic of Wadiya. Cohen blended together the unpleasant spirits of Kim Jong-Il, Idi Amin, and Muammar Gaddafi to create the indelible Aladeen.
The last days, and then the last moments of Adolf Hitler are explored in this 2004 German film. It takes place in Hitler’s bunker before he realizes his dream of the Third Reich has been quashed. In the Hitler role, Bruno Ganz spits, screams, and then finally pleads for the duration of the film, and his performance is stunning. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.
There’s no comedy as solid or as timeless as Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 classic, his first “talkie” and his biggest crowd-pleaser, “The Great Dictator.” Slamming the antics of Adolf Hitler, Chaplin dons a black mustache for the role of a weaselish lunatic, Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of “Tomania.” Released smack in the middle of rampant anti-Semitism in Europe, it’s today a chillingly accurate portrayal of a man, a regime, and a world gone mad…and somehow still hilarious.
