Movies about us history movie#

(Never mind that to have omitted such scenes from the story, as The New York Times put it, 'would have been a reprehensible act of moral cowardice').īut such a reading of the film is also to take credit away from Kathryn Bigelow, a shrewder and subtler director than certain audiences immediately took her to be.

Zero Dark Thirty was deemed a ' torture fantasy' and ' Osama bin Laden's last victory over America' when it came out, getting slammed for 'glorifying' the so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' that the characters use in this fictional recounting of the CIA mission to kill the al-Qaeda founder. But really it was an allegory about the overreaching of America and really symbolic for what so many of us went through at different levels.' As Greenberg explained it to the magazine: 'The building of the house was my original premise, but when they had to put that on the market, I realized that this was not a story about one family or even rich people. Oddly, the film also came to define the next decade, too: ' The Social Network was more right than anyone realized,' Wired wrote last year, noting that 'its lessons about privacy and power still ring true nearly 10 years later.'ĭirector Lauren Greenfield has spent decades chronicling the lives of the uber-wealthy, and when she set out to shoot Queen of Versailles in 2007 - about ' Orlando's timeshare king' David Siegel and his wife, Jackie, constructing their 90,000-square foot mansion - it seemed another chance to gawk at some weirdo billionaires.īut then the 2008 financial crisis struck and 'nstead of a glory feature about the realization of the American dream, The Queen of Versailles ended up as a tragic, strangely sympathetic portrait of a financially overextended family trying to rein in its extravagant lifestyle,' Vanity Fair writes.

Movies about us history movie#

By 'lacing their scathing wit with an aching sadness,' director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin 'define the dark irony of the past decade,' Rolling Stone wrote when the movie came out in 2010. The Social Network is one of those rare movies that, upon release, was already understood to be an important document of American life. While there are dozens of other films that could deservedly be argued to be included alongside these, here are 16 movies from the past 10 years worthy of the title of the great modern film about America. Many of the films, also, were misunderstood upon release, and have only come to be definitive of an era with the benefit of hindsight (it is also perhaps telling that the most films on this list are from during or immediately after a presidential election year). They turn over the Bush years, the Great Recession, the Obama era, and describe history with a more discerning, less homogenous eye. They recast the ways we've mythologized ourselves.

They wrestle with the ghosts of our past and dream of a better future. Today, the best movies about America touch on class and race. But in the past decade, filmmakers have increasingly moved away from simple stories depicting idealized American patriotism, and grappled with that idea of complexity - both the good and the bad, the beautiful and the tragic, the laudable and the despicable about this 244-year-old country. There are many terrific, classic examples of this ( here are Linker's choices).