With the Democratic National Convention getting underway Monday, and election season kicking into high gear, what better time to dig into the best Hollywood narrative treatments of American politics, past and present?
Conversations with my enterprising editor encouraged me to think not just in terms of the workings of government, but also of issues that promise to figure significantly as we crawl toward voting day in November and the different ways films can embody a desire to create change.
Some of the choices listed below make no explicit nods toward politics per se, but they grapple with subjects that are inherently political, whether the topic is abortion, race, marriage equality, immigration or surveillance.
Thinking along those lines, I was sad not to find a spot for John Ford’s timeless Steinbeck adaptation The Grapes of Wrath, about a family who lose their Oklahoma farmland and join the Great Depression migration to California, an outstanding screen depiction of poverty, wealth inequality and the labor union movement. My affection for another Ford film starring Henry Fonda, Young Mr. Lincoln, about the formation of a future political leader, made that a regretful omission, too.
Rather than replicate countless other lists of important political films, we decided to skip some of the classics, including A Face in the Crowd, All the King’s Men and The Manchurian Candidate, the latter of which now seems both prescient and dated, standing the test of time largely thanks to Angela Lansbury’s ferocious performance as a diabolical mother/manipulator.
The Candidate was edged out by two other Robert Redford films; Do the Right Thing got bumped by another Spike Lee; and while Sidney Lumet’s gripping Fail Safe, about the alarming threat of an unsanctioned nuclear strike on Russia, didn’t make it, a satirical treatment of that same scenario, also released in 1964, did.
Among more recent films, I was sorry not to find a place for George Clooney’s punchy Good Night, and Good Luck, about journalist Edward R. Murrow’s role in bringing down Joseph McCarthy. Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, a searing depiction of drug addiction in poor rural communities, also narrowly missed being included, as did Oliver Stone’s probing investigative epic JFK, and two by Steven Spielberg, the fine-grained portrait Lincoln and The Post, chronicling the D.C. broadsheet’s push to publish the Pentagon Papers. Likewise Michael Mann’s pulse-pounding corporate thriller The Insider, based on a real-life tobacco-industry whistleblower.
Many political movies considered standouts when first released, including Warren Beatty’s Bulworth, Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog and Hal Ashby’s Being There, remain entertaining even if some of their sting has been diluted by time.
It kills me, however, not to include In the Loop, Armando Iannucci’s scabrous pre-Veep satire of British-American political relations, a hyper-articulate mock doc with some of the most gloriously vivid profanities ever uttered on film. Two powerhouse movies that tackle American interventionism in more serious terms, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, also narrowly missed making the cut.
But hey, 20 films is 20 films, meaning not every deserving entry gets a spot.
'Night Moves' (2013)
The most dialogue- and plot-driven of minimalist poet Kelly Reichardt’s work, this tense thriller about environmental activists executing a plan to blow up a hydroelectric dam in Oregon has its roots in the 1970s political paranoia wave. Unlike most climate-crisis films, it’s a clear-eyed contemplation of the urgency for action weighed against the costs of a radicalized response, its complex ideological dialectic giving it a kinship with last year’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline. The nerve-shredding sequence in which eco-warriors played by Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard carry out the mission at night builds Hitchcockian suspense before pivoting to reflective distance by registering the explosion only as far-off noise. Reichardt’s customary appreciation for the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest gives elegant expression to all that’s at stake.
'City of Hope' (1991)
One of America’s most essential political filmmakers, John Sayles poses the problem of which of two personal favorites to choose. I could happily have gone with his panoramic 1996 neo-Western, Lone Star, about an investigation that unearths a history of racial violence in a Texas border town. But this similarly epic-canvas drama about a fictional New Jersey city where idealism is dead or dying, leaving only corruption, greed, moral decay and despair, is perhaps more in need of rediscovery. With supple rhythms and unerring control and clarity, the director tracks some 36 significant interconnected characters, among them fat cats and disenfranchised minorities, a shady mayor, property developers, a drug dealer, a volatile cop, his abused former wife and a reformist Black councilman whose every effort to help his community hits a wall. Sayles takes on a choice role himself, playing a sleazy auto shop owner with a sideline organizing small-time crimes. It’s a granular portrait of urban America pulsing with anger, where an ethical existence constantly loses out to financial and political power.
'The Kids Are All Right' (2010)
Five years before marriage equality was signed into federal law, as debate continued to simmer around the subject and political resistance in many states remained staunch, Lisa Cholodenko did something quietly radical. She normalized same-sex marriage and parenthood by casting Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as lesbian spouses dealing with issues eminently relatable for any heterosexual couple — in their own often tetchy relationship and in their adjustment to the growing independence of their teenage children, played with aching realness by Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson. A funny, horny movie bathed in warm Southern California sunshine, its conflict stems from the siblings’ curiosity to meet their sperm-donor father, portrayed by a hilarious Mark Ruffalo as a farm-to-table neo-bohemian a tad too high on his own considerable charms. Cholodenko makes the politics of representation entirely personal in this gorgeous depiction of familial love and its attendant embarrassments, of parenting and its missteps, of marriage and its challenges. Moore’s Jules trying to explain to her son why his moms watch gay male porn to get turned on is one of many priceless moments.
'Primary Colors' (1998)
Few directors could more reliably get the best out of their actors than Mike Nichols. The flavorful work of a superlative ensemble is among the chief pleasures of this highly entertaining adaptation of the roman à clef about Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. That and a script by Elaine May crammed with acerbic wit and sharp insights. John Travolta nails the folksy sincerity of a candidate both principled and deeply flawed, in whom decency and dishonesty coexist, while Emma Thompson finds compassion for his wife, a ruthless pragmatist whose dignity is battered by the repeated exposure of her husband’s infidelities. The movie is about the incompatibility of politics and idealism, shown through the increasingly disillusioned eyes of Adrian Lester’s Henry, the grandson of a civil rights hero, eager to be part of history in the making. But the more devastating illustration of that point is Libby, an old friend hired by the campaign to block smear tactics. Kathy Bates gives a shattering performance as a tough woman who comes in with guns blazing and exits with a crushing emptiness in her belly where the fire once was.
'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' (1939)
The juiciest political movies are invariably those depicting abuse of power, but every roundup needs at least one entry that predates the age of pervasive cynicism. Not that this Frank Capra comedy is short on dubious morality — D.C. is rife with corruption and graft, freedom of the press is throttled, truth is distorted and a Senate powerbroker revealed to be in the pocket of a wealthy tycoon. (Unsurprisingly, the movie was met with controversy upon its release, denounced in Washington as anti-American.) What lingers most is the idealism of James Stewart’s title character, a rube from an unnamed Western state who lands an unlikely Senate seat. Watching him gaze in awe at the Lincoln Memorial is an indelible image of untarnished patriotism, and even when he’s sucked under by a swamp that drowns whistleblowers, Mr. Smith never gives up the fight.
'Three Days of the Condor' (1975)
It’s probably frivolous in a roundup of great political movies to acknowledge the blinding power of movie-star chemistry, but the pairing of Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in Sydney Pollack’s pacy thriller more than compensates for any plot convolutions. In the canon of “trust no one” films about the dirty tricks of U.S. intelligence agencies, the startling sequence in which a team of hitmen, led with scary detachment by Max von Sydow, enters a clandestine New York CIA office and murders the entire staff is a classic. Redford’s easygoing analyst Joe Turner owes his life to being out picking up lunch at the time. But when he contacts headquarters asking to be brought in safely, he gradually learns that a report he filed put a target on his office and it’s the CIA that wants him dead. Desperate to gain time, Joe kidnaps Dunaway’s random stranger Kathy, holing up in her Brooklyn apartment. Faster than you can say “Stockholm syndrome,” a sexually charged romance develops, which stretches credibility but adds to the undimmed appeal of this relentlessly involving A-grade B movie.
'Selma' (2014)
It took Hollywood almost half a century to grapple with Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, making the underrepresentation of Ava DuVernay’s impassioned historical drama at the Oscars even more egregious. In a performance both towering and restrained, David Oyelowo imbues the revered civil rights leader with a stirring sense of purpose but also a humble humanity, continually interrogating himself as to whether his efforts to stop the institutional violence perpetrated against Black Americans are the best way forward. The 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches to demand voting rights are inspiring but equally horrifying as the vicious attacks of Alabama law enforcement and the white citizenry attempt to make a mockery of King and his supporters’ commitment to nonviolence. While the protests ultimately bring victory, prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson (the late great Tom Wilkinson) to push for quick passage of a bill to eliminate voting restrictions, the film suggests how far from true equality the country remains.
'Maria Full of Grace' (2004)
The demonization of undocumented immigration across the southern border has become a dominant GOP narrative in the age of Trump, with rally attendees shrieking for mass deportation, driven by a Norman Rockwell fantasy of white America nonexistent in their lifetime or those of multiple generations before them. I initially planned to include Gregory Nava’s 1983 indie El Norte on this list, but the epic about Guatemalan siblings forced to flee certain death at the hands of a government militia remains a landmark primarily because it was the first major film to make U.S. audiences engage with the Central American immigrant experience. Joshua Marston’s unflinching drama about a 17-year-old woman (Catalina Sandino Moreno) from rural Colombia coaxed into traveling to the U.S. as a drug mule now speaks much more forcefully. It’s a risky move asking us to invest in someone transporting heroin, but the harrowing ordeal that cements the title character’s resolve not to return home humanizes and arguably even purifies her. The film is a haunting reflection on decent people being pulled in to serve a global economy in which the poor are a disposable part of the machinery.
'The Parallax View' (1974)
This Alan J. Pakula classic is another quintessential example of the crackling ’70s paranoia thrillers that tapped into widespread feelings of dread and disillusionment fueled by the Kennedy assassinations and that of Martin Luther King Jr. Warren Beatty is terrific as Joe Frady, a reporter investigating the murder three years earlier at the Seattle Space Needle of a prominent senator and presidential hopeful. Joe’s attention is drawn by the mysterious deaths of every eyewitness, including his fellow-journalist girlfriend, played by Paula Prentiss. His research leads him to the Parallax Corporation, a covert operation recruiting “security” personnel to serve as trained assassins. After infiltrating the organization, Joe finds himself at a rally for another aspiring presidential candidate in a final act that builds to a shockingly bleak outcome, its intricate plotting intensified by the precision-tooled cinematography of Gordon Willis.
'Never Rarely Sometimes Always' (2020)
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, women’s reproductive freedom has become the most contentious battleground in American politics, with voices on the right calling for the criminalization of abortion, the suppression of abortion pills and even a ban on contraception. The beauty of Eliza Hittman’s transfixing drama is that it examines the hot-button issue in purely humanistic terms, as a story of female friendship, solidarity and bravery. The quasi-road movie, in which teenage cousins from rural Pennsylvania travel to New York City to terminate an unplanned pregnancy, is a dreamy, darkly intimate experience, graced by exquisitely unaffected performances from newcomers Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder. The pool of sadness, shame, regret and humiliation in Flanigan’s eyes as her character responds to a medical professional, answering the multiple-choice questionnaire that gives the film its title, in a just world would silence anyone who challenges a woman’s right to choose.
'Get Out' (2017)
Anyone who believes race is no longer a factor in national politics has not been paying attention, particularly since rancor over Barack Obama’s presidency exposed the myth of a post-racial America — not to mention protest movements like Black Lives Matter and the increasing emboldening of the country’s white supremacist strain. Several great movies explore those fissures in provocative ways, but for sheer originality and escalating terror, I can’t go past Jordan Peele’s supremely confident debut. Elevated by fine performances from Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams, with the genius casting of Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener as welcoming neoliberal WASP parents who harbor an evil agenda, this is a trenchant depiction of elite entitlement, with Black bodies being commodified as a remedy for white decrepitude. Peele devilishly balances dark humor with grotesque horror and biting social critique.
'Election' (1999)
Along with Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon’s signature role remains Tracy Flick, a perky monster bristling with laser-focused ambition as she launches an aggressive campaign for student body president. Matthew Broderick is in fine form as the social studies teacher manipulated by Tracy, whose personal and professional lives unravel as he tries to cut her down to size, while Chris Klein and the sadly departed Jessica Campbell are perfection as chalk-and-cheese siblings Paul and Tammy Metzler. Adapting a then-unpublished novel by Tom Perrotta, director Alexander Payne and screenwriter Jim Taylor deftly mined the satire’s spoiler candidates and underhanded tricks for political parallels on a larger scale.
'Dick' (1999)
Sure, there’s All the President’s Men, Nixon, Frost/Nixon and even Forrest Gump. There’s also Robert Altman’s largely forgotten speculative fiction Secret Honor, a virtuoso monologue with Philip Baker Hall as the soon-to-be-disgraced president. But there’s nothing quite like Andrew Fleming’s giddy satire, which posits that the Watergate scandal was uncovered not by super-sleuth reporters but by two ditzy teenagers bearing hash cookies. One of the jewels of Kirsten Dunst’s transitional period between child and adult roles, and a key stepping stone for Michelle Williams from Dawson’s Creek to big-screen work, the cheekily titled comedy’s deep-bench supporting cast includes Will Ferrell and Kids in the Hall’s Bruce McCulloch as a bumbling Woodward and Bernstein, the latter constantly flicking a hilarious Dustin Hoffman wig; Dan Hedaya as a comically shifty Nixon; and a young Ryan Reynolds as a horny teen who’s no match for the girls.
'Malcolm X' (1992)
Spike Lee is too inventive a director to make a conventional biopic, and this sprawling portrait of the revolutionary Black human rights activist is an operatic epic that burrows into the psychologically complex divide between his public and private lives. In the title role, Denzel Washington brings unquestionable authority to what’s essentially a story of iron-willed self-reinvention, his Malcolm overcoming sorrow, discrimination, crime and imprisonment to become a controversial political leader who angrily questioned the effectiveness of legislation to correct racial inequity. Angela Bassett as Malcolm’s supportive wife, Betty Shabazz, is one of many incisive supporting turns bringing texture to an illuminating drama that lets us walk in the shoes of both the man and the myth.
'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'
“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!” snaps U.S. President Merkin Muffley, one of three roles played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s great Cold War satire, which puts a farcical spin on our fears of the wrong person having access to the nuclear codes. The crisis happens when Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden with a cigar clamped between his teeth, goes rogue, ordering a fleet of B-52s carrying hydrogen bombs to strike Russian targets. (His QAnon-worthy theory is that the commies are responsible for fluoridation of America’s water supply in a plot to pollute “our precious bodily fluids.”) It’s a preposterous parody of dueling superpowers played sufficiently straight to maintain suspense. Sellers also appears as Ripper’s British executive officer, Lionel Mandrake, alarmed to be trapped with a nutjob; and the title character, a German weapons developer whose Nazi past keeps awkwardly resurfacing in the Sieg heil! salute spasms of his paralyzed arm. Meanwhile, Slim Pickens, as Texan Major T.J. “King” Kong, gets the movie’s most iconic moment, riding an airborne H-bomb like a bucking bronco.
'Fruitvale Station' (2013)
Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. These are just some of the names of Black Americans killed by police in the years since the fatal shooting of 22-year-old Oscar Grant III on New Year’s Eve 2008 at a Bay Area transit station. As in the Floyd case, cellphone footage shot by onlookers sparked demonstrations, but similar incidents have continued, and police reforms remain slow. This powerful, deeply distressing movie accelerated the careers of director Ryan Coogler and his star, Michael B. Jordan. The empathetic drama doesn’t make Oscar a saint; he’s done prison time, failed to hold down a job and been unfaithful to the mother of his child. But it does what protesters have sought to do for victims of police violence: insist that we see them as people, not statistics. Jordan’s performance — raw, visceral and tender — is among his best, while Octavia Spencer leaves you gutted, embodying the pain of every Black mother who’s feared for her son’s safety whenever he stepped outside. Starting with cell footage of the incident, then rewinding to cover the day leading up to it, the film plants a pit of dread in our stomachs that builds throughout.
'Milk' (2008)
Gus Van Sant blends documentary-style archival elements with delicate moments of poetry in this intensely moving account of the personal evolution and eventual assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay American man elected to public office and a key crusader for LGBTQ rights. Played with as much joy as combative spirit by Sean Penn, Milk emerges as a pragmatic idealist, taking on the kind of bigotry and intolerance — under the self-righteous shield of morality, family and religion — that still galvanize the evangelical far right today. A film of remarkable vitality, compassion and searing anger, it’s also a heartfelt tribute to the power of grassroots activism. Milk helped build a queer community in San Francisco’s Castro District, but he united people beyond that niche, taking the fight to City Hall and in 1978 successfully blocking the proposed ban of gays and lesbians from work in California public schools. Penn is surrounded by a top ensemble, including Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Alison Pill and, as opposites many of us recognize from experience, James Franco and Diego Luna, playing the ideal boyfriend and the neurotic mess.
'Blow Out' (1981)
Argue away over whether this counts as a film about dirty politics. Of course that wasn’t Brian De Palma’s chief intention, but any neo-noir that starts with the assassination of a presidential hopeful, alludes to both the Chappaquiddick incident and the Zapruder film and climaxes with a lethal cover-up as emotionally shattering as it is chilling belongs on this list. Influenced as much by The Conversation as Antonioni’s Blow-Up, it’s a stone-cold masterpiece in which the director’s gifts were at maximum effectiveness, not to mention a visually stylish and darkly humorous salute to filmmaking craft. Performances by John Travolta, Nancy Allen and an icy John Lithgow are first-rate. After four decades and countless viewings, I’m still destroyed watching the “Liberty Day” fireworks scene.
'All the President’s Men' (1976)
Political thrillers of the 1960s and ’70s could easily flesh out this entire roundup, particularly the work of John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet and Alan J. Pakula. The latter’s trilogy of films about paranoia, surveillance and conspiracies that began with Klute and The Parallax View (also included here) culminated in this definitive retelling of how the crimes that eventually forced Nixon out of office were uncovered by a pair of diligent Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, respectively. This one really holds up; it’s taut, propulsive and engrossingly detailed, a study not just in government misdeeds at the highest level but also in the workings of a newsroom back before the agonizing erosion of print media began. The standout of an impeccable supporting cast is Jason Robards, who won an Oscar for his performance as Post managing editor Ben Bradlee.
'The Conversation' (1974)
Francis Ford Coppola owes his legendary status primarily to big-canvas epics like the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now. But this tight, unsettling thriller, which casts a seldom-better Gene Hackman as a reclusive techie who lends his surveillance expertise to both private and government contractors, sits among the director’s canonical works and is unique in his filmography. One of the great films to come out of the rise in establishment mistrust fed by the Vietnam War and Watergate, it steadily dials up knife-edge tension while masterfully charting one man’s crisis of conscience when cracks form in his complacent belief that he merely provides the tapes and what happens afterward is not his business. Rialto Pictures’ pristine new 4K restoration preserves the gritty look and feel of the best ’70s auteur cinema, with crucial attention to Walter Murch’s meticulously layered sound design. The film assembles a tasty supporting cast, many of them relatively early in their careers, including John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, Teri Garr, Robert Duvall and a young, decidedly sinister Harrison Ford. A knockout that hasn’t lost an ounce of its power in 50 years.
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