Orwell: 2+2=5 (2025) on Netflix

Plot summary

Archive photographs, newsreels, films, contemporary documentaries and notorious speeches make up this portrait of George Orwell, tracing his career and the lessons of his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the book at the center of the film. His own diary, letters and journals supply much of the material, and a narrator speaks in Orwell's voice. The film sets early twentieth century authoritarianism beside its echoes in the present, in ongoing conflicts that threaten democracy and public liberties: the Myanmar civil war, the war in Ukraine, the Gaza War, the United States' War on terror and the January 6 attack on the Capitol.