Photos from ‘Orb: On the Motions of the Earth’ and ‘Mussolini: Son of the Century’ | Photo Credit: Netflix/ Mubi
Whether you’re an old hand at arthouse or just dipping a toe into the otaku subculture of burgeoning anime aficionados around the world, this column curates titles that challenge, comfort, and occasionally blow your mind.
This week, two works separated by continents and centuries conspired into something like an accidental trilogy, one that even extends into the corridors of a galaxy far, far away. Orb: On the Movements of the Earth (currently streaming on Netflix) and Mussolini: Son of the Century (playing on Mubi next week) are our chosen titles, but the remaining ruminations of the third member of this constellation,Walk still. Taken together, they all enact the same essential struggles of truth against suppression, dissent against spectacle, and rebellion against the machinery of power.
From the drawing board
Madhouse’s adaptation of Uoto’s manga, Orb: On the Motions of the Earth , unfolds like a centuries-old chain of inheritance. In 15th-century Europe, the forbidden idea that the Earth moves around the sun passes from a child prodigy condemned to the stake, through wandering heretics, duelists, priests, and even a Romani rebel, until the idea survives only as fragments before finally reaching the press. Far from celebrating scientific progress as inevitable, Orb insists that the fragility of knowledge is always a betrayal far from annihilation. Every minute step toward the truth is bought in blood.
A property from ‘Orb: On the Motions of the Earth’ | Photo Credit: Netflix
Yet this anime’s brilliance lies in exploring why institutions fear knowledge and its ability to disrupt control. Inquisitors burn books (and heretics) to protect the Church’s monopoly over the masses, and the anime recasts knowledge itself as an act of sacrificial rebellion, with each generation facing the burden anew, risking fire and rope to pass it on. It’s impossible not to hear echoes of Tony Gilroy Andor, where a spark of defiance spreads like a contagion among the damned. If the dark tenacity of Attack on Titan or the cloistered conspiracies of The Name of the Rose spoke to you, Sphere will feel like its deeper, more philosophical cousin.
Foreign Relations
If Sphere laments the cost of knowledge, Joe Wright’s Italian political drama, Mussolini: Son of the Century, maps the seductions that make people surrender it. Adapted from Antonio Scurati’s novel and led by Luca Marinelli’s grotesquely magnetic duce, Sky Series enchants fascism as performance. Set to a throbbing techno score by the Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands, the rhythms of Wright’s Brechtian ruptures feel disturbingly timeless.
The series chronicles Mussolini’s rise to power and the birth of Italian fascism, as we witness abject terror, a multitude’s desire for order to be armed with obedience and subjugation. It’s impossible not to think of Andor Again here, with the widespread fascist machinery functioning as stages designed to naturalize control.
What distinguishes Mussolini is his refusal to flatter his audience with hindsight. Marinelli’s Mussolini is repellent, but also persuasive in the way populists often are when the ground has softened. He forces us to confront how easily democracy erodes and how fascism relies on unfiltered manipulation repeated until it seems common sense. And if the grotesque charisma of The Great Dictator or the acidic political playfulness of The Death of Stalin caught your attention, Mussolini will strike you like a darker echo.
A Still From ‘Mussolini: Son of the Century’ | Photo credit: Mubi
Together, these works form a continuum. Sphere shows how truth survives persecution, Mussolini warns how oppressive Bluster erodes democracy, and Andor insists that rebellion requires organization and sacrifice. None of them offer easy victories, but all three advocate persistence: whether of ideas, memory, or action.
Call it coincidence or call it the most zeitgeist-demanding accidental trilogy—that these lessons arrive through a medieval anime, a European prestige drama, and a Star Wars spinoff proves just how porous cultural boundaries are when it comes to confronting power.
Ctrl+Alt+Cinema is a biweekly column that brings you hand-picked gems from the limitless offerings of world cinema and anime.
Published – September 5, 2025 3:33 PM IST
