Highly recommended for those still trying to figure out how Trump could happen, Mosco Levi Boucault’s film is absorbing and unfussy, flashes of wit aside (like the film’s ironic use of Nino Rota’s score from Amarcord).

In the late ’80s, media tycoon Berlusconi used bribes to win the controlling share in Italy’s biggest publishing house, Mondadori. With high-powered accomplice judge Vittorio Metta in the dock for his part in the scheme, Silvio Berlusconi, now prime minister, used his Forza Italia party to brazenly adopt a string of new laws designed to outrun the justice system, some almost comically provocative.

This is all recounted in wry style by the presiding judge at Metta’s trial, who received a seedy, thinly veiled threat from the accused as proceedings wrapped up.

It’s an especially instructive moment for those who think media blackmail at this level exists exclusively in the overheated imaginations of Hollywood screenwriters. Parallels to the here and now should be screamingly obvious, in the form of government capture by corporate capitalism, oligarchs, gangsters, and their buffoonish frontmen.