Film

The Year of Living Dangerously

Peter Weir's humid, unhurried political drama drops a green Australian reporter into Jakarta in 1965 as Sukarno's regime teeters. Mel Gibson's journalist, Sigourney Weaver's British attaché and Linda Hunt's astonishing photographer Billy Kwan circle each other while the city simmers toward violence. It's less thriller than mood piece - tense, morally alert - a romance that keeps asking what merely watching a catastrophe unfold actually costs you.

TMDb rating6.7

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The Killing Fields1984

Same species of story: a foreign reporter and his local guide caught as a regime collapses into horror, told with the same clammy dread and moral weight. Sam Waterston and Haing S. Ngor are devastating.

But Runs longer and hits harder; its final act is genuinely gruelling rather than merely tense.

The Killing Fields poster

Salvador1986

Oliver Stone's jittery, furious take on a burnt-out photojournalist stumbling through El Salvador's civil war shares the reckless-outsider-in-a-collapsing-country energy, but rawer and angrier throughout.

But Stone's style is loud and undisciplined next to Weir's control; James Woods' character is exhausting by design.

Salvador poster

Under Fire1983

A trio of journalists in Sandinista-era Nicaragua wrestle with the exact question this film asks: at what point does covering a story mean shaping it? Nick Nolte at his best.

But Less atmosphere, more plot mechanics; the romance subplot here is thinner than Gibson and Weaver's.

Under Fire poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Act of Killing2012

This is the real history sitting just off-screen in Weir's film - the 1965-66 Indonesian massacres the coup unleashes, told here by the killers themselves.

Nothing prepares you for watching perpetrators cheerfully re-enact their own atrocities for the camera. It's one of the most unsettling documentaries ever made, and it fills in exactly what the fiction can only gesture at.

But There's no romance, no hero, no relief - just an unflinching look at impunity that will sit with you for days.

The Act of Killing poster
More like this (8)

The Quiet American2002

Another love triangle staged against a country about to explode - Saigon instead of Jakarta - with the same slow-burn sense that personal choices are political ones in disguise.

But Quieter and more restrained; if you wanted the coup-plot thriller pulse, this won't supply it.

The Quiet American poster

Witness1985no page yet

Peter Weir again, doing what he does best - an outsider forced into a closed world, a slow-building romance, violence arriving almost gently. Gorgeous, patient filmmaking.

But Amish Pennsylvania is a world away from Jakarta; no political backdrop, no journalism, just Weir's sensibility elsewhere.

Missing1982

Costa-Gavras's true-story political thriller about an American vanished during a Latin American coup runs on that same terrible slowness of finding out the truth. Same year, same nerve.

But Colder and more procedural - a father's search for facts rather than a reporter's search for meaning.

Missing poster

Beyond Rangoon1995no page yet

Boorman drops an American traveller into Burma's 1988 uprising, and the film runs on that same sense of a foreigner morally implicated just by staying to watch.

But More earnest and less controlled than Weir's film; some of it tips toward the didactic.

Casablanca1943

The blueprint: love complicated by war, decency tested by neutrality, a couple deciding what matters more than themselves. Still the gold standard for this kind of romance.

But No journalism, no coup, no politics beyond wartime intrigue - romance and star power over reportage and dread.

Casablanca poster

Good Morning, Vietnam1987

A lighter cousin - an American broadcaster finding his footing, and his conscience, inside a war zone. Robin Williams at his most electric and unpredictable.

But Comedy first, drama second; nowhere near as bleak or politically serious as Weir's film.

Good Morning, Vietnam poster

Foreign Correspondent1940

Hitchcock's prototype for the genre - a green reporter dropped into a crisis abroad, forced from bystander to participant, decades before Weir did it in colour and heat.

Watch the template built forty years earlier: espionage, a naive newsman, and a continent sliding toward catastrophe, staged with Hitchcock's wit, craft, and a romance tangled up in the intrigue.

But Wartime propaganda energy and studio-bound 1940s style; the politics are simpler and the stakes more theatrical.

Foreign Correspondent poster

Three Kings1999

Same engine - outsiders drawn deeper into someone else's war than they intended, forced to choose between detachment and involvement - restaged as a satirical heist film.

A gonzo Gulf War caper that turns queasy and serious right when you least expect it, asking the same question about complicity and conscience, just with vastly more adrenaline.

But Broad humour and stylised violence sit oddly next to Weir's slow-burn seriousness; it's a genuinely different animal in tone.

Three Kings poster

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