
Adam Curtis
Director · b. 1955 · Dartford, Kent, England, UK
Adam Curtis (born 1955) is an award-winning British documentarian and writer. He has also worked as a television producer, director and narrator. He works for BBC Current Affairs. His programmes express a clear, albeit sometimes controversial, opinion about their subject.
Series8
TV8.5DocumentaryWar & PoliticsThe legacy of famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud informs the lives of people throughout the world even to this day, though it's a phenomenon to which most are unaware. The film is an exhaustive examination of his theories on human desire, and how they're applied to platforms such as advertising, consumerism and politics.
The Century of the Self
2002 · 125 votes
TV8.0DocumentaryIndividual freedom is the dream of our age. It's what our leaders promise to give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at what freedom actually means for us today, it's a strange and limited kind of freedom.
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom
2007 · 38 votes
TV8.1DocumentaryExamines how politicians have used our fears to increase their power and control over society.
The Power of Nightmares
2004 · 81 votes
TV8.3DocumentaryWar & PoliticsWe have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
2011 · 54 votes
TV7.8DocumentaryWar & PoliticsIn six films, Adam Curtis traces the different forces across the world that have led to now. It covers a wide range—including the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opioids, the history of Artificial Intelligence, melancholy over the loss of empire and, love and power. And explores whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new system of power.
Can't Get You Out of My Head
2021 · 28 votes
TV7.4DocumentaryPandora's Box is a six-part 1992 BBC documentary television series which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. The episodes deal, in order, with communism in The Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.
Pandora's Box
1992 · 19 votes
- TV7.0Drama
An anthology series about people who are suddenly confronted with uncertain situations.
The Trap
1950 · 2 votes
TV7.1DocumentaryThis series investigated the way that history and memory have been used by politicians and others.
The Living Dead
1995 · 12 votes
Movies7
Movie7.6DocumentaryAn experimental documentary that explores Saudi Arabia's relationship with the U.S. and the role this has played in the war in Afghanistan.
Bitter Lake
2015 · 98 votes
Movie7.4DocumentaryWe live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They do not care. We say we care, but we do nothing, and nothing ever changes. It is normal. Welcome to the post-truth world. How we got to where we are now…
HyperNormalisation
2016 · 167 votes
Movie6.0DocumentaryIn 1951, a woman died in Baltimore, U.S.A. She was called Henrietta Lacks. These are cells from her body. They were taken from her just before she died. They have been growing and multiplying ever since. There are now billions of these cells in laboratories around the world. If massed together, they would weigh 400 times her original weight. These cells have transformed modern medicine, but they also became caught up in the politics of our age.
Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh
1997 · 5 votes
Movie7.2DocumentaryShort film examining the global events of 2014 to reveal a chaotic morass, the reporting of which is increasingly difficult to comprehend in the context of the 24-hour news cycle and the internet. Screened during Charlie Brooker's 2014 Wipe special.
"Oh Dear"-ism II & Non-Linear War
2014 · 9 votes
Movie6.8DocumentaryAs we wait to see whether Rupert Murdoch will fall from power and lose control of News International, Every Day is Like Sunday tells the forgotten story of the dramatic downfall of Cecil King—the newspaper mogul who used to dominate British media in the 1960s, before Rupert Murdoch arrived.
Every Day Is Like Sunday
2011 · 3 votes
Movie8.0DocumentaryShort film about how mainstream media simplify complex events and present them as "scattered terrible things happening everywhere, Oh Dear", leaving the public feeling powerless to do anything about them. Screened in the third episode of the first series of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe.
The Rise of “Oh Dear”-ism
2009 · 4 votes
Movie6.0DocumentaryShort film using the paranoia of Richard Nixon to explore how a similar outlook on life has been propagated on a larger social scale in the new media age and the resulting moral panics and immobilisation of politics. Screen during the fourth episode of the second series of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe.
Paranoia
2010 · 2 votes