“Any resemblance to real events and dead or living people is not a coincidence. It is INTENTIONAL.” So reads a title card at the beginning of Costa-Gavras’ Z, set in an unnamed Mediterranean country that could stand in for any number of police states torn between Russian and American influence at the height of the Cold War. The 1969 Franco-Algerian production was fittingly international: While the dialogue (by Spanish writer Jorge Semprún) is in French, the plot itself, based on a book by Greek author Vassilis Vassilikos, adheres to events in Greece following the 1963 assassination of a popular pacifist candidate (whose counterpart is played by Yves Montand) who’d dared to oppose the ruling junta. The titular letter, painted across the street in a climactic scene, was a protest slogan that meant “He lives.” “Here is the new Hitchcock we have been awaiting,” crowed THR about the Greek director. “Whatever the political commitments of its makers, Z is a slick, knockout of a political thriller, the fictional anonymity of its real life setting and characters …