Top 10 Most Controversial Film Censorship

Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's animated adaptation of Satrapi's graphic memoir follows a girl growing up through the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Iran's government objected to its selection at Cannes in 2007, and the film was pulled from the Bangkok International Film Festival that year after Iranian diplomatic pressure; a 2011 broadcast on Tunisia's Nessma TV drew attacks on the station over a scene depicting God.

Gillo Pontecorvo's reconstruction of the 1954-57 Algiers insurgency was shot in a newsreel style so convincing that the film opens with a card confirming not one frame of documentary footage was used. It won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1966 and did not reach French cinemas until 1971. The Pentagon screened it in 2003 for officers heading to Iraq.

Life of Brian was banned outright in Ireland and Norway on release in 1979 and refused a certificate by a number of British local councils, several of which had no cinema to show it in. The Pythons' televised defence on the BBC's Friday Night, Saturday Morning — John Cleese and Michael Palin against Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark, who had arrived after the screening began — is now remembered as clearly as the ban itself.

Oliver Stone's 1994 satire was refused a certificate in Ireland and kept off UK video shelves for years, and became the centre of a legal argument about whether a film can be held liable for crimes committed by people who watched it. John Grisham pressed that argument publicly after a friend was killed by one of a pair who had watched the film repeatedly; the resulting suit against Stone and Warner Bros. was ultimately dismissed.

Ang Lee's film never received a mainland Chinese release and was barred outright in several Middle Eastern countries. In the United States it played widely but not universally - a Utah multiplex owned by Larry H. Miller pulled it hours before its first scheduled screening. It went on to win three Academy Awards, including Best Director for Lee.

Chaplin's first true talking picture, released in October 1940 while the United States was still neutral, has him playing both a Jewish barber and the dictator Adenoid Hynkel. It was banned across Germany, Italy, Spain and occupied Europe. Chaplin later wrote that had he known the actual horrors of the concentration camps, he could not have made it.

Alison Klayman's 2012 documentary follows the artist Ai Weiwei through his citizen investigation into the Sichuan earthquake school collapses, the demolition of his Shanghai studio, and his 81-day detention in 2011. It won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and was never released in mainland China, where references to Ai were routinely scrubbed from social platforms.