Made at a time when the United States was still at peace with Nazi Germany and the country hadn’t yet woken up to the horrors of fascism, “The Great Dictator” was a bold work from arguably the then-most famous filmmaker in the world, a satire that argued passionately against the antisemitism and totalitarianism on the rise in Europe at the time. Charles Chaplin directed and starred in a dual role, playing obvious Hitler stand-in “Adenoid Hynkel,” the dictator of the European country of Tomainia, as well as a Jewish barber and war veteran who rises up to fight against the poisonous corruption of his country. The film was Chaplin’s first true sound picture, and he put the jump in mediums to good use with a riveting, emotional final speech in which he drops the comedy to deliver a beautiful, impassioned plea for democracy and liberty. Although it was the most successful film he ever made, Chaplin himself came to regret “The Great Dictator” somewhat, writing in his autobiography that he would never have made it had the extent of the brutality Jewish people endured in concentration camps been public knowledge at the time. But if you forgive its lack of foresight, the film remains a funny, smart takedown of fascism to this day.

There’s a moment when you know all-American working mom Joan Bennett is going to have to end things with her husband, who’s become besotted with Nazism, once and for all: When he’s so indoctrinated their young son, the boy replies, “Ja, Vater!” That’s it. Take the child away. Hire the divorce lawyer. It’s over.

“The Man I Married” is an anti-fascist film as a “woman’s picture” domestic drama, and that proves a particularly potent genre to convey its message. Bennett’s character seems to have it all, but her husband (Francis Lederer) goes down the rabbit hole of Nazism and even moves the family to Hitler’s Germany. Which is why this very pro-divorce movie (rare for the studio era!) has a few more twists and turns after that “Ja, Vater!” shocker.

Bennett is basically presented as the average American in 1941: Not especially plugged in about what Nazism really means or the threat that it represents. Her dawning awareness of the danger it poses is that of the entire U.S. waking up and realizing just how dangerous it is. And that it needs to be stood up to, no matter how each freedom-loving person is able to resist in their own way — even if against their spouse. That it has the vibe of a 1940s Lifetime movie, and features one helluva twist ending, makes it all that much sweeter. —CB

Big game hunter Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon) conducts a “sporting stalk.” That’s where a hunter gets their intended prey in their rifle’s sights and doesn’t actually shoot — the fact that you could kill your target is triumph enough. But Thorndike is targeting the most dangerous prey of all: Adolf Hitler. Of course, the Nazis see him and think that this is a real assassination attempt — and maybe at the last moment, for Thorndike, it was. After the Nazis catch and torture him, he escapes Germany via a merchant ship bound for London. But he finds no safety there.

A potent critique of appeasement-era Britain, Fritz Lang’s “Man Hunt” becomes a cat-and-mouse chase. The British government, still at peace with Germany, offers to extradite Thorndike, so he goes on the run — only to have Nazi George Sanders hot on his trail. The Sanders character is named Major Quive-Smith, and he may be a Brit who’s joined the Third Reich as simply a fanatic devoted to their toxic ideology. His pursuit becomes a kind of metaphor for the relentlessness of Fascism, and the people who Thorndike gets help from are the motley assortment of society’s most vulnerable who obviously would be targets of the Nazis as well (a poor ship’s cabin boy played by Roddy McDowall and Joan Bennett as a sex worker).

Joseph Breen of the Hays Office, diligently working to expunge material from Hollywood movies that might offend Germany in the late 1930s, called the script for “Man Hunt” a “hate film.” Lang, who fled the Nazis himself in 1933, gives the movie a particular action-film urgency that makes it eminently watchable more than 80 years on. —CB

Conrad Veidt all but put German cinema on the map with his performance in 1919’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” And yet he too had to flee Germany following the Nazi takeover because his wife was Jewish. When he arrived in Hollywood after several years in Britain, he insisted that it be written in his contract that if he played Nazis they would only be presented as the vilest villains. He had no interest in any idea of “the Good German.”

So you get his performance as Major Strasser in “Casablanca,” and his turn as a Nazi so fanatical he gets himself blown up alongside his dachshund in “All Through the Night.” But his most intriguing anti-Nazi role may be Dassin’s “Nazi Agent,” a kind of riff on “A Tale of Two Cities,” where Veidt plays identical twin brothers: One who’s living in the U.S. as an émigré from the regime and hates fascism, the other as a high-ranking Nazi official in the Reich. When the Nazi brother is in the U.S. on a diplomatic mission, he crosses paths with his sibling, and the anti-fascist kills his twin. He realizes what an opportunity he has: He can assume his brother’s identity and work to subvert the Reich as an official within it. What happens from there is too exciting to spoil. “Nazi Agent” is a prime example of how a pulpy premise could illustrate a deeply felt notion about what it means to stand up to tyranny. —CB

One of the great masterpieces of Spanish cinema, “The Spirit of the Beehive” is a film that couches its criticism of the-then still in power Francisco Franco dictatorship through an enigmatic tale of childhood imagination and tragedy. Set in 1940, in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War that brought Franco to power, Victor Erice’s film follows Ana (Ana Torrent), a six-year-old girl in an isolated Spanish village whose fascination with James Whale’s “Frankenstein” leads her to help a wounded Republican soldier hiding from the Franco regime. Although the political subtext might fly over modern American viewers’ heads on first watch, “The Spirit of the Beehive” is filled with symbolism reflecting the charred state of Spain in the wake of the civil war, as Franco’s grip on the country strengthened and all but the most innocent of children were suffocated by the inhumane reign.

Nearly 50 years of franchising and merchandising have made the political subtext (although it’s probably too blatant to qualify as “subtext”) of “Star Wars” feel slightly hollow: You can step out of your home during Halloween and probably see a kid or two dressed up as a Stormtrooper or Darth Vadar. But, go back and watch George Lucas’ original 1977 sci-fi phenomenon and you’ll remember that, oh yeah, these are Space Nazis. The inspiration for the encroaching empire that seeks to rule the galaxy is never particularly hard to spot, from the identical masks that the grunts wear to the “Imperial March” that soundtracks the faceless lead villain. Recent “Star Wars” films have drained the franchise’s anti-fascism of much bite, but the kernel of its politics remains present in most iterations, and has even been explored with genuine depth and relevance quite persuasively in the series “Andor.”

Science fiction has always been a tool to tackle social issues, so it makes sense that there have been plenty of fascist analogues throughout literature and film history. The most famous is obviously George Orwell’s “1984,” but the best film version of that dystopian nightmare isn’t technically an adaptation so much as it is heavily inspired by the novel’s banal bureaucratic hellscape. Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” stars Jonathan Pryce as a low-level bureaucrat living in a surveillance state totalitarian city, one that runs on poorly maintained technology, and resistance is suppressed by intense torture. Although darkly funny in its satire, “Brazil” captures the horror of Orwell’s vision of Oceania, especially in its sobering and hopeless ending, which offers no release from the nightmare.

There are so many films about the brutality and atrocities that the Nazi German government committed — “Schindler’s List,” “Army of Shadows,” “The Pianist” — but if there’s one that’s most effective and upsetting, it’s “Come and See,” Elem Klimov’s 1985 masterpiece about the German occupation of Byelorussia during World War II, that hits the hardest. Based heavily on real first-hand accounts from those who lived in Belarus at the time, the movie shows the occupation from the perspective of a teen boy (Aleksei Kravchenko), who joins the resistance against the occupation to save himself and finds his spirit broken by the cruelty of the invading government. At 2 hours and 20 minutes, “Come and See” can veer on the unwatchable — not because of lack of quality, but because the horror inflicted is so unflichingly depicted that you feel all of the pain onscreen. It’s a masterpiece, pure and simple, even if it’s so difficult you can’t be blamed for just watching it once.

“I’d rather be a pig than a fascist” is the great, screencappable moment in “Porco Rosso,” in which Hayao Miyazaki’s metaphor for the dehumanizing nature of totalitarianism is most obvious. The animated adventure film has politics far more radical and bone-deep than just one memorable line, though. A stirringly fun bit of entertainment that showcases Miyazaki’s well-documented love for aircraft, “Porco Rosso” sets itself in 1930s Italy, where a former World War I flying ace — mysteriously transformed into a pig — has defected from the fascist government and rules the skies fighting sky pirates. The nature behind Porco’s curse isn’t clear, but Miyazaki makes it clear that what the brave pilot needs isn’t to return home and submit to authority but to free himself from his own survivor guilt. In many ways, “Porco Rosso” is a film about freedom, which is the exact opposite of what fascism offers.

One of the most difficult to watch films in recent memory, “The Zone of Interest” can be summed up as a movie about the “banality of evil.” In truth, though, Jonathan Glazer’s arthouse portrait of the serene life of a Nazi war criminal’s family can more accurately be described as a film about the banality, and inhumanity, of fascism, how the ideology numbs those who benefit from it to the oppression and horror it causes. Glazer’s camera, fixed at a remove, surveys Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller as Auschwitz concentration camp officer Rudolf Hoss and his wife Hedwig in their serene household routine. As they tend the garden and fish in the river nearby, screaming and gunshots are always audible, but neither has much interest in acknowledging the bloodshed they’re causing the next door over. The immersive sound design Glazer uses is key, creating a cacophony of noise so at odds with the idyllic manor house that it creates an almost physical sense of repulsion. What really makes “The Zone of Interest” so vital is that the horrors it warns against still exist all over the world in other forms: humanity’s capacity to desensitize itself to suffering, and the dignity of people who are suffering, is boundless.