Laserdisc Review: 'Brazil'

No wonder it took three years to complete the five-disc boxed laser set of Terry Gilliam’s landmark retro-future tragicomedy Brazil: Much of the supplementary material recounts the director’s war with Universal over the American edit — and said studio still controls the rights to the film. Given that, there’s considerable candor from both sides in the hour-long docu ”The Battle of Brazil” (put together by film critic Jack Mathews for this collection). But while Hollywood politics make for nearly as absorbing a tale as the movie’s anarchic story of bureaucracy gone mad, the best reason to pick this up is a dazzling new edit of one of the landmark films of the ’80s. A+