Culture | Film American politics is often stranger than fiction. And following Thursday’s terrifying presidential debate, yesterday’s controversial supreme court ruling, Trump ’s imminent sentencing and with the United States presidential election just four months away, the eyes of the world, as always, are on the US’s extraordinary political machine. Hollywood has often brilliantly captured the country’s government , its many checks and balances, and America’s political scandals.
Whether depicting Watergate, the abolition of slavery, or the road to war, these films have been in turn insightful, inspiring and of course, entertaining. From satires to hard-hitting dramas and escapist fantasies, these are the best films about American politics and its impact on the world, listed in no particular order. The Watergate Scandal has been tackled directly or indirectly many times on film, from the excellent The Post (1971) and Frost/Nixon (2008), to Anthony Hopkins’ 1995 biopic Nixon and 2018 documentary Watergate.
But few films capture the resounding impact of the Watergate quite like All The President’s Men, Alan J. Pakula’s award-winning political thriller. Telling the true story of the political scandal which led to the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon, the film follows Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward – the investigative journalists who first uncovered the story for the Washington Post in the early Seventies.
The two young reporters, played by Dustin.