American Movies Stopped Examining America, Columnist Says
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- The New York Times recently published a listicle titled "What Is the Definitive Movie About America?" featuring picks including "Dazed and Confused," "Disclosure Day," and "The Florida Project," prompting a Variety columnist to offer five alternatives of his own.
- The columnist's five picks are "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939), "The Godfather" (1972), "Nashville" (1975), "Rocky" (1976), and "Dirty Harry" (1971) — films he says dramatize corruption, underworld capitalism, everyday American tumult, underdog mythology, and demagogic vigilantism respectively.
- "Dirty Harry" is described as the "Citizen Kane" of early-'70s revenge thrillers whose political overtones carried over into right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh's worldview, per the columnist.
- Studio-era American cinema projected aspirational values — from the Western's clash between freedom and law to "12 Angry Men" and "In the Heat of the Night" — while New Hollywood films like "Midnight Cowboy," "Chinatown," "Dog Day Afternoon," and "Shampoo" dramatized the disconnect between America's ideals and its reality.
- Today's American movies increasingly take place in "distant galaxies," "horror funhouse" jump-scares, or "candy-colored animated landscapes designed to be friendly to five-year-olds," leaving the country's current upheaval — erosion of the middle class, free speech, and democratic faith — largely unexamined.
- "Oppenheimer" and "One Battle After Another" are named as rare recent exceptions: a 2023 historical drama that "felt like a catharsis" about the nuclear bomb's fallout and a film the columnist says dared "to take a spiritual inventory of what was going on in the country right now."
- The column's timing — July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary — frames the gap between America's political turbulence and cinema's silence about it as a historic disconnect, with the columnist arguing that what the country needs is for movies "to start looking at America again".
Why it matters: The columnist frames the 250th-anniversary moment as proof that American cinema has abandoned a defining civic function it performed for decades — holding up a shared, if contested, mirror to the nation — right when democratic assumptions are being contested. With fantasy now dominating the multiplex and films like "Oppenheimer" standing as exceptions, the gap between the country's upheaval and its screen culture is, by his measure, the widest it has been.
