7. Gimme Shelter (1970)
The flip side to Woodstock, 1970's Gimme Shelter revealed the hangover that followed the hippie bacchanalia only four months earlier, and bought a decade to a grim conclusion. In December of 1969, an ill-planned free concert featuring Jefferson Airplane and the Rolling Stones was staged in front of 300,000 people at Altamont Speedway in California. Put in charge of security, the Hell's Angels spent much of their time brutalizing attendees. On top of that, bad acid circulated in the crowd, and the audience-reaction shots could be inserted into a George Romero movie without anyone telling the difference. The event reached its tragic end when a Hell's Angel guard stabbed a spectator, an incident replayed before an ashen Mick Jagger in the final scene.
8. The Parallax View (1974)
The Watergate scandal sparked a series of first-rate '70s thrillers, none better than The Parallax View, which hinted at a powerful new strain of disillusionment and paranoia about government's omnipresent reach and sinister intentions. Director Alan J. Pakula would tackle Watergate directly two years later with All The President's Men, but this fiction film allows for a more free-floating expression of conspiratorial dread. Warren Beatty stars as a journalist who pokes into a senator's assassination and soon gets immersed within the shadowy organization that orchestrated the killing. Beatty's infiltration of the group leads to the signature scene, in which he views a recruitment film filled with disturbing associations about American life. But more importantly, the film suggests that citizens no longer have control over their government and are doomed to suffer injustices under its thumb.
9. Do The Right Thing (1989)
Not long after white locals assaulted three African-American teenagers (and killed one) in the Howard Beach section of Queens, Spike Lee registered his disgust with Do The Right Thing, his landmark statement on race relations. The film itself was an historic event, drawing several short-sighted editorials that criticized Lee for inciting black people to riot, as his Right Thing character does. There were no post-screening riots, of course, but the film served as a litmus test for racial views in America, and based on the contradictory quotes from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X that appear when the screen fades to black, any conclusions Lee has to offer are pretty open-ended.
10. 25th Hour (2002)
Hollywood movies shot in New York around 9/11 went out of their way to avoid talking about the elephant in the room; several even digitally removed any footage of the Twin Towers. It was a missed opportunity to capture a moment in time that needed documentation apart from the nauseating replays on CNN. But New York is Spike Lee's town, and in one of those miracles of timing that can lead to great art, he bravely decided to put his broken city front and center in 25th Hour. The opening-credit sequence alone is as beautiful an elegy for 9/11 as anyone could possibly imagine, with Terence Blanchard's score swelling over a slow reveal of the Tribute In Light. A montage of Ground Zero itself comes in later on, but the film more subtly incorporates the tenor of the times into its story of a convicted drug dealer's last day in the city before he heads off to jail. The feelings evoked by his dilemma—of regret, of reckoning, of loss—are impossible to extract from those that haunt his native city.
11. Elephant (2003)
Gus Van Sant's rapturous, terrifying memorial to Columbine was criticized in some corners for moral vacuity and exploitation, because it really didn't add anything to the discussion on high-school violence. Yet it's valuable for that very reason: Rather than speculating about causes or solutions, or otherwise engaging in the facile politicking that followed in Columbine's wake, Van Sant provides a meditative space for viewers to contemplate this event on their own, just as he did with his previous film, Gerry. Elephant does the important service of wresting Columbine away from the pundits and artfully returning to what evolved into a not-so-ordinary day in high-school life. Van Sant doesn't bother with characterization, but he succeeds in simply acknowledging the existence of victims and perpetrators with dignity and without contrivance.
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