It remains Gilliam's most artistically successful film because it juggles the historical and the hallucinatory, the eternally true, the prophetically true, and that which is only ever true in his mind. It's also the definitive film about how people live with excessive rules and regulations—meaning that it speaks equally clearly to Gilliam's curmudgeonly persona, the eighties, the entire modern era, and, in 2017, the early days of the Trump presidency.