When British director Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave was released in 2013, it was praised as marking "a turning point in the viewing public's acceptance of more realistic interpretations of the harsh, violent, exploitative nature of black chattel slavery." The film follows the story of the free-born Black man Solomon Northup, who was kidnaped in 1841 and forced to work a Louisiana plantation until his release 12 years later in 1853, and does not hold back on depicting the cruelty and violence of the antebellum South.īut as Variety hyperbolically noted in its review at the time, "It's a shame that such injustice was allowed to exist for so long. As The New Yorker explained it, "how a viewer reacts to the mission itself will likely be determined by how the viewer feels about bin Laden, the American military, and the so-called war on terror," with the movie's events provoking "a moral questioning of the viewer of the viewers' judgment of the past decade of American politics in the wake of the September 11th attacks." (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. ![]() 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.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. 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).
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