„Im Lichte der jüngsten Entwicklungen“ hat der Hollywood Reporter eine Liste der 40 besten antifaschistischen Filme zusammengestellt. Darunter finden sich einige der natürlich zu erwartenden Exponate wie Pasolinis „Salo“ oder Glazers letztjähriger KZ-Film „Zone Of Interest“, aber doch auch etliche Filme, bei denen der Hollywood Reporter einen weiter gefassten Blick auf Faschismus wirft, den man womöglich mehr als „Autoritarismus“ verstehen sollte. Dennoch gilt: „a good time to remember a very simple truth: Nazis are ALWAYS the bad guys“.
Die ganze Liste gibt es mit Kommentaren & Begründungen natürlich beim Hollywood Reporter selbst, im Folgenden habe ich jeweils einen zentralen Satz exzerpiert:
American History X (1998, Tony Kaye)
in scenes showing Derek and his skinheads mates bonding — lonely, insecure losers desperate to belong to something greater than themselves — American History X feels terrifyingly prescient.
Army of Shadows (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville)
perhaps the best film ever made on the feel of life under fascism. Melville depicts the courage and heroism of the French Resistance — many of the characters in the film, adapted from Joseph Kessel’s novel, were based in part on real fighters — but refuses to sanitize their tactics.
Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam)
Authoritarianism isn’t just terrifying. It’s really, really, boring.
Cabaret (1972, Bob Fosse)
The parallels between the rise of fascism in 1930s Berlin and the realities in present-day America can make Cabaret an uncomfortable rewatch.
Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)
Casablanca is a conversion tale, the story of the transformation of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart at his most iconic) from self-professed isolationist to devoted resistance fighter. Bogie is a stand-in for America’s vision of itself as the reluctant savior.
Come and See (1985, Elem Klimov)
It is nearly unbearable. But no other film reveals so completely the moral bankruptcy of fascist expansion.
The Conformist (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci)
As startling and original now as the day it was released — Spielberg, Coppola, and Scorsese all cite it as a major influence — Bernardo Bertolucci’s visually ravishing, psychologically unsettling masterpiece remains the most powerful cinematic indictment of going along with the crowd.
Despair (1978, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
A macabre twist on the film noir, it’s a powerful argument that insanity can be the only healthy response to a world gone mad.
District 9 (2009, Neill Blomkamp)
Neill Blomkamp’s blockbuster cleverly blended the sci-fi creature feature with the mockumentary satire to flip the script on the classic alien invasion movie.
El Conde (2023, Pablo Larrain)
Come for the Dr. Strangelove-level political satire and stay for legendary cinematographer Ed Lachman’s ravishing black-and-white image-making.
The Empire Strikes Back (1980, Irvin Kershner)
Sure, George Lucas’ original Star Wars introduces the rag-tag Rebel Alliance and the individualist heroes who will lead the struggle against intergalactic domination — but The Empire Strikes Back’s dark denouement is far more in tune with the vibe shift of 2025, when the ultra-right-wing is seemingly in ascendance everywhere.
Hitlerjunge Salomon (1990, Agnieszka Holland)
Holland’s film illustrates the absurdity underlying fascist racial ideology.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Wes Anderson)
By shading the story of a once-glorious European hotel and its eccentric denizens with the rise of Nazism, Wes Anderson offered his closest approximation to date of a personal credo.
The Great Dictator (1940, Charlie Chaplin)
Arguably the most influential Hollywood satire ever made, it was also the Tramp’s first talkie and the most commercially successful film of his career. The film’s release galvanized popular American sentiments against the Germans prior to the U.S.’s official entry into World War II, and it later became a surprise rallying cry hit in an already war-torn Western Europe.
The Host (2006, Bong Joon Ho)
If Parasite examined the nature of late-stage capitalism through the prism of a family of grifters, The Host explores how a state apparatus can come to view its own populace as nothing more than a contaminant in need of excision or control.
Ida (2013, Paweł Pawlikowski)
Ida explores how forgetting or misremembering the past can lead to the repetition of cycles of state violence, but it offers no easy answers for how a country, once it goes down the fascist route, can ever make itself whole again.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989, Steven Spielberg)
Remember those days? When it was so taken for granted that the Nazis were deplorable (yes, deplorable) that instead of sweaty oligarchs trolling us with Hitler salutes, we had preternaturally gifted filmmakers like Steven Spielberg playfully reviving cinema history’s stock villains as the foils for pure, swashbuckling family fun
Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)
The ending — a history-righting massacre of Nazi leadership inside a cinema — that delivers Tarantino’s most deliriously transgressive use of movie violence since he first blew our collective minds way back in 1994 with that handgun mishap in the back seat in Pulp Fiction.
Joint Security Area (2000, Park Chan-wook)
The movie was South Korea’s biggest box office hit ever at the time of its release, as well as the very first film in the country’s history featuring a North Korean character who was portrayed with human complexity.
Jojo Rabbit (2019, Taika Waititi)
A bit too charming and sweet for a movie about fascism, but, in its cartoonish way, Jojo Rabbit exposes the absurdity at the heart of an evil system.
Leviathan (2014, Andrey Zvyagintsev)
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s visually stunning, masterfully oppressive meditation on the miseries and injustices of Vladamir Putin’s Russia is every bit as monumental as its title suggests.
Das Leben der Anderen (2006, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
A close dissection of how authoritarian systems rely on fear and quiet collaboration to function
Mephisto (1981, István Szabó)
As Szabó shows, fascist systems are superb at seducing and co-opting artists to make them complicit in enabling totalitarian ideologies.
Minority Report (2002, Steven Spielberg)
Minority Report’s warning about techno-authoritarianism that operates beyond the scope of human comprehension has arguably only grown more urgent in our present day of rapidly advancing AI.
Moffie (2019, Oliver Hermanus)
The film shows the links between racial and sexual oppression and systemic brutality that underlines them both.
1900 (1976, Bernardo Bertolucci)
At its core, the film explores the roots of fascism in economic inequality and social tensions while showing the importance of individual choice to resist or to comply.
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, Guillermo Del Toro)
del Toro brilliantly intertwines personal mythology with historical resistance, suggesting — as nearly all of his fantastic films do — that imagination itself is a revolutionary act.
Peppermint Candy (1999, Lee Chang-dong)
This criminally underseen masterpiece from Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong is many things — an uncommonly effective formal experiment, a devastating character study, and a sweeping argument for how fascist periods of the past can haunt and poison a country for decades.
Persepolis (2007, Marjane Satrapi)
Persepolis is a nuanced critique of all forms of fundamentalism, both Islamic and Western.
Porco Rosso (1992, Hayao Miyazaki)
The film is set on the Adriatic Coast of Italy in 1929 — seven years after Mussolini came to power — and it tells the irresistibly whimsical tale of a World War I Italian fighter pilot who has been mysteriously transformed into a pig (but still takes to the sky with swagger and derring-do).
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969, Ronald Neame)
Ronald Neame’s subtle film exposes the thin line between intellectual seduction and moral corruption and the dangerous potential of charismatic indoctrination.
Rome, Open City (1945, Roberto Rossellini)
The film’s raw, documentary-like style — shot on the actual war-devastated streets of the Italian capital — strips away heroic myth-making to show the battle against fascism as a desperate, exhausting struggle marked by constant fear and potential betrayal
Rosenstrasse (2003, Margarethe von Trotta)
Von Trotta indulges in some clunky melodrama, but the film stands as a refute to the standard claim that ordinary citizens can do nothing to resist a fascist regime.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975, Paolo Pasolini)
Pasolini’s final, and most extreme, film, released just weeks after he was murdered under suspicious circumstances (recently uncovered evidence suggests right-wing terrorists may have been involved) shows the inevitable end result of fascist ideology.
Soldier of Orange (1977, Paul Verhoeven)
Arguably the premiere anti-fascist director of our times, Paul Verhoeven in his 1977 breakthrough follows a group of foppish university students who take very different paths after the Nazis occupy the Netherlands.
Starship Troopers (1997, Paul Verhoeven)
Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is such an effective satire of fascist ideology that when it first came out in 1997, many critics misinterpreted the movie as a full-throated endorsement of authoritarianism.
Die Blechtrommel (1979, Volker Schlöndorff)
Oskar Matzerath, the high-pitched percussionist protagonist in Volker Schlöndorff’s Oscar- and Palme d’Or-winning epic, is the Peter Pan of anti-fascism.
To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch)
To Be or Not to Be is wildly intricate and a complex watch, contrasting its humor with frank acknowledgments of the horrors of the moment, essentially arguing that fizzy repartee and sly visual metaphor — the famed “Lubitsch touch” — are nothing less than the champagne of civilization, some of our most sophisticated expressions of joy, which the Nazis only intend to smash into submission.
The Zone of Interest (2023, Jonathan Glazer)
There are plenty of harrowing films about the horrors of the Holocaust, but Jonathan Glazer shifts the focus from the Nazi killings to the banal moral indifference that was their enabler.
The Sound of Music (1965, Robert Wise)
Robert Wise’s multi-Oscar-winning musical classic has little to do with the actual history of fascism. ” You never doubt, though, that the film has its heart is in the right place.
