The 20 Best Political Movies

When the Secretary of State unexpectedly dies, the president puts forth his political ally Robert Leffingwell as a replacement. Given that no less than Tom Joad himself, a.k.a. Henry Fonda, is portraying this potential new member of the administration, you’d think the job would be his to turn down. Except Leffingwell has made an exceptional number of enemies in Congress over the years and “has never played ball… not even the most ordinary, political-courtesy kind of ball!” Cue various factions of the Senate using their powers — see title — to make sure he never gets past the nomination phase. Most folks remember Otto Preminger’s adaptation of Allen Drury’s bestseller as being one of the first Hollywood movies to show a gay bar onscreen. But the director also managed to shoot sequences inside the actual Capitol, a rarity that added verisimilitude to what’s really an all-star Beltway version of Peyton Place. Even in the early 1960s, the backstabbing and bipartisan brawling was simply viewed as business as usual. —D.F.

A mere 13 years after Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Matthew Broderick returned to the cutthroat world of high school for Alexander Payne’s Election. This time around, he’s Jim McAllister, an emasculated history and civics teacher overseeing a student-government election contest between a dimwitted jock, Paul Metzler (Chris Klein), and an ambitious overachiever in Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon). Near the end, he rigs the election in Metzler’s favor — and destroys his own life in the process. Payne saw the movie as a microcosm of politics in America, but he had no idea it would launch 10,000 opinion pieces comparing Hillary Clinton to Tracy Flick (often unfairly), or that stolen election claims would soon become a standard part of political life in the 21st century. If you haven’t seen the movie recently, watch it again. Flick isn’t the villain that many of us recall; she’s a flawed hero. McAllister, however, is a monster. —Andy Greene

It’d be great if we could cordon off Ellia Kazan’s depiction of homegrown populist demagoguery as a brilliant relic of the McCarthy era, but A Face in the Crowd remains scarily prescient almost seven decades after it came out. Then-newcomer Andy Griffith plays a singing, guitar-slinging, rapaciously charming Arkansas drifter who is discovered by Patricia Neal’s enterprising publicist, dubbed Lonesome Rhodes, and catapulted into national fame — first as a pitchman for a mattress company and a cure-all called Vitajex, then as a hugely popular TV host dispensing folky bromides, and finally as a crypto-fascist political rabble rouser barreling toward his own horrific unmasking. Lonesome’s natural connection with the people is only exceeded by his seething contempt for them: “They think like I do, but they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ‘em,” he proclaims. Griffth’s embodiment of that hypocrisy — in his shifts from the cornpone exuberance of his character’s public persona to the maniacal glee of the increasingly unhinged villain he becomes behind-the-scenes — is as troubling as it is captivating, especially if you grew up watching him as the lovable, reassuring TV sheriff on reruns of The Andy Griffith Show. The result might be the greatest “Could it happen here?” cautionary tale ever put onscreen. Spoiler: In 2016, it did. —J.D.

This satirical mockumentary may well have predicted both the political rise of Donald Trump and the music of Oliver Anthony. Tim Robbins wrote, directed, and stars in Bob Roberts as the title character, a wealthy Pennsylvania Senate candidate who serves up overt right-wing dog whistles as folk songs. Roberts is a master manipulator, willing to do anything to get ahead. Sound familiar? After Trump won in 2016, Robbins acknowledged that “Bob Roberts came true.” He wasn’t comfortable with comparisons between his movie and real life after a gunman shot Trump at a rally, injuring his ear — but when you’ve made a film as scathing and prescient as this one, people remember. —A.P.

Cramming the entire saga of Abraham Lincoln’s life into a single movie isn’t even remotely possible. That’s why Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner wisely zoomed in tightly on January 1865, when Lincoln, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is trying to push the 13th amendment through the House of Representatives. It was a critical moment that would bring about the end of slavery in America, and it required quite a bit of bribing and cajoling from Honest Abe and his associates. The film is a gritty look at how politics is practiced in America, one that rings just as true today as it did 160 years ago. And with apologies to Henry Fonda, Daniel Day-Lewis is the greatest Lincoln in Hollywood history. —A.G.

For the first few years after its release in 2006, it was easy to dismiss this Mike Judge movie as a wild satire — especially the part about former brain-dead professional wrestler Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho becoming the President of the United States. It turned out to be one of the most prophetic movies in Hollywood history when Donald Trump, a proud member of the WWE Hall of Fame, took that same oath of office a little over a decade later. “I know shit’s bad right now,” President Camacho tells Congress midway through the movie, “with all that starving bullshit, and the dust storms, and we are running out of French fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.” We were lucky enough to preserve our French fries and burrito coverings during Trump’s first term. Another time around, we might not be so lucky. —A.G.

A master of media manipulation (Robert DeNiro) taps a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) to help him manufacture an international crisis with enough juice to distract from news that the President of the United States propositioned a Girl Scout in the Oval Office 11 days out from the election. This plot would have sounded far-fetched when it was released in December 1997 — for about a month, at least, until news broke that Bill Clinton had been conducting an affair with a White House intern. (His administration later went on to bomb a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, drawing criticism that he was trying to pull a “wag the dog.”) Hoffman’s Stanley Motss throws himself into the assignment, hiring a young ingénue (Kirsten Dunst) to play a refugee escaping her burning village, cradling a bag of Tostitos, in front of a green screen (the chips would be subbed out for a kitten in postproduction), among other strokes of brilliance. Motss is ultimately undone, of course, by his burning desire for public recognition of the work he did duping millions of voters into re-electing the guy. (He complains at one point that there is no Academy Award for producing — apparently collecting for Best Picture isn’t credit enough!) Decades later, the cynical send-up of both D.C.’s political operators and the gullible masses they influence not only retains its charm, it feels relevant as ever. —Tessa Stuart

Frank Capra often made movies about idealists: “Most of these heroes have faith… Faith in goodness and in the innate goodness of human beings. They lived that and they believed it.” The Oscar-winning director found the perfect vessel for such optimism in James Stewart, who played Jefferson Smith, the prototypical small-town dreamer who becomes a U.S. senator, discovering to his dismay just how corrupt Washington politicians are. Condemned at the time by some for supposedly being anti-American, this patriotic classic remains prescient about the limitations of idealism when facing a broken system in which business interests and the elite conspire to keep the sort of change Mr. Smith proposes from happening. And for those quick to dismiss Capra’s humanist dramas as corny, look how much Smith’s faith and decency are challenged — such a principled stand is so stirring precisely because it is so staunchly tested. —T.G.

Can politics destroy a person’s soul? We know the answer to that now, of course, but when director Michael Richie’s satire came out in 1972, the idea was revelatory. Robert Redford, looking as gorgeously camera-ready as ever, plays Bill McKay, a lawyer who happens to be the son of a former governor. The wily campaign strategist Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle) sees Bill as a perfect candidate to run against an incumbent Republican Senator. He’s handsome and genuine — just the kind of person who can unseat the tired, fusty opponent. As the campaign drags on, you can see the life seeping out of him, and though McKay still acts the part well, it turns out to be just that: acting. The prescience of this clear-eyed look at where politics was headed can’t be overstated. Back when people assumed we could trust the people in office, The Candidate proved it’s all a machine. —E.Z.

Stanley Kubrick had originally planned on doing a dead-serious take on the threat of nuclear annihilation (and should you crave that, we highly recommend Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, an equally great political movie released later that same year). Instead, he and screenwriter Terry Southern pivoted to the absurdity of a U.S.-USSR endgame of mutually assured destruction, and produced what may the ultimate black comedy. How else to describe a film that soundtracks our species’ self-destructive demise with the ironically cheery “We’ll Meet Again”? Everyone remembers Peter Sellers’ bizarro take on the title character, a former Nazi scientist spitting out mass death stats when he’s not fighting with his own mechanical hand. What sticks out now is the second of his three performances here, in which he plays President Merkin Muffley, a liberal-leaning commander-in-chief (based loosely on Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson). His one-sided conversation with the Russian premier only enhances the idea that even the most powerful leaders are powerless when the clock strikes Armageddon time. And he comes off better than his fellow politicians, foreign bureaucrats, and military wackadoos, all of whom are either complete boobs or the sort of petty, combative cretins that inspire what remains a pitch-perfect punchline: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here — this is a War Room!” —D.F.

When the first line of a movie is, “Morning, my little chicks and cocks,” don’t say you weren’t warned. Armando Iannucci’s profane political satire is far more than a dress rehearsal for his later project Veep — though the two share faux-vérité cinematography and biting insults. (A highly incomplete sampling of nicknames from this film: “Young Lankenstein,” “Abattoir of room meat,” “Leaky Mingebox,” and “Scary little poodle-fucker.”) Set amid the run-up to a possible war pitting the U.S. and England against an unnamed enemy, “there are very few redeeming characters in it,” Iannucci said upon its release. Even that’s an understatement. A State department higher-up doctors an official government transcript, visiting British politicians discuss being too afraid to masturbate in the nation’s capital, and “ram it up the shitter with a lubricated horse cock” is an acceptable, if not encouraged, way to talk to your co-workers. Even if political humor isn’t your bag, hearing a Scottish press officer call opera “Subsidized! Foreign! Fucking! Vowels!” — one of many insults hurled with the speed of a fastball and the twist of a screwball — is worth it alone. Fuckity-bye! —Jason Newman

A great newspaper drama and an even better political thriller, this Oscar winner turned recent history into an electrifying and reassuring motion picture about the durability of America’s foundational institutions. No one who saw this adaptation of journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s book had any doubt about the ending — we already knew those dogged Washington Post reporters were going to connect the Watergate break-in to Richard Nixon, who would resign the presidency — and yet the movie couldn’t be more gripping. Perhaps it was because director Alan J. Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman imagined the film as a taut procedural, in which Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford are the grouchy, unconventional buddy-cop duo who’ll pound the pavement trying to find sources willing to go on the record. Maybe it was because the cast was filled with a murderers’ row of incredible character actors, including Jason Robards, who took home a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as eternally stern Post editor Ben Bradlee. Or maybe it was because everyone involved managed to perfectly balance the story’s mixture of patriotic fervor and stripped-down professionalism, viewing the Watergate cover-up as an urgent crisis that challenged the very principles of our democracy. Those alarm bells have not diminished in the nearly 50 years since the film’s release — if anything, the crisis feels even more present and harrowing now than it did then. Perhaps that’s why so many of us return to All the President’s Men: We want to be reminded that, eventually, justice will prevail and the bad guys will be taken down. Sometimes, that hope is all we have. —T.G.