Borat

Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev travels to America to make a documentary. As he zigzags across the nation, Borat meets real people in real situations with hysterical consequences. His backwards behavior generates strong reactions around him exposing prejudices and hypocrisies in American culture.

A near-unanimously beloved provocation on release, Borat uses its deadpan mockumentary format to expose American prejudices with a precision critics found as unsettling as it was hilarious. The main point of critical debate wasn't quality but interpretation — Christopher Hitchens famously argued the film actually demonstrated the tolerance of its unwitting subjects rather than indicting them, a reading that cut against the prevailing satirical reading.