Although many cineastes point to Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 or Michael Radford’s faithful adaptation of 1984 as dystopian favorites, there are numerous, criminally overlooked political films and documentaries. Today The Criterion Collection released The Battle of Algiers, a deeply influential film dramatizing the struggle of native Algerians against the French colonial occupation. It was originally released in 1966, and the film made evident to many viewers France’s hypocrisy, embodied in Col. Mathieu, as their government imposed colonial rule abroad after having been liberated from the Nazis less than a quarter century before. In the ensuing years, France underwent substantial internal conflict, more far-reaching than America’s political upheavals, as their global empire collapsed, ultimately calling into question the legitimacy of the State.

Z, directed by Costa-Gavras and released in 1969, depicts French leadership as hopelessly corrupt and murderously autocratic, determined to quash any domestic insurrection through duplicity and state terror. The film pivots on the cover-up of an assassination, and the viewer follows the story through several lenses, ultimately filtered by an independent inquest. The upshot is at once illuminating and by turns, horrifying.

In a season littered with propagandistic documentaries and half-baked political dramas, consider checking out Z as well as such films as Wexler’s Medium Cool, Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, and if you can track it down, Chris Marker’s astounding documentary The Grin Without a Cat.