Subject: Government & Politics
The political, religious, and notable personages of a country drive the political machinations that govern the lives of nations and the rise and fall of empires.
1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
- Director: Michael Radford
- Release Date: 1984
- Production Country: United Kingdom
Winston thought he could keep both his illegal personal diary and his affair with the free-thinking Julia secret, but Big Brother was watching; eventually, Winston, a historian who once spent his days writing revisionist history for the State, has his own personal encounter with revisionist history, courtesy of the totalitarian state of Oceania.
Al-massir (Destiny)
- Director: Youssef Chahine
- Release Date: 1997
- Production Country: France, Egypt
Averroes is appointed as grand ulama by the caliph, but is driven out by the caliph's fundamentalist rivals.
All the President's Men
- Director: Alan J. Pakula
- Release Date: 1976
- Production Country: United States
Assigned to cover a minor burglary case in court, cub reporter Bob Woodward quickly realizes that there is more to the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters, but when he and his newly assigned partner, Carl Bernstein, begin to dig deeper, they never expected to find themselves unraveling the story that will define a generation and shape the future of a nation.
Argo
- Director: Ben Affleck
- Release Date: 2012
- Production Country: United States
The CIA and one of its top operatives hatch a desperate scheme to extract six American diplomats who are in hiding at the Canadian Embassy during the Iranian Revolution. Their plan? Pretend to be a Canadian film crew that is filming a science fiction film.
Bei qing cheng shi (A City of Sadness)
- Director: Hsiao-hsien Hou
- Release Date: 1989
- Production Country: Hong Kong, Taiwan
Nationalist Chinese forces set up a government-in-exile on the island of Taiwan but the Taiwanese, including the Lin brothers, do not easily adapt to the Guomingdang's rule after fifty years of Japanese rule. When the people push back against this new totalitarian government, chaos ensues and tragedy follows; in the end, the only Lin family member left to tell the story may be Lin Wen-heung, a deaf-mute photographer.
Blood on the Sun
- Director: Frank Lloyd
- Release Date: 1945
- Production Country: United States
An intrepid American reporter in Japan stumbles across a copy of the Japanese Empire's master plan for world domination. When Japanese officials take exception to his desire to leave the country with a copy of this explosive document, his quest to reveal the truth about Japanese Imperial aggression becomes both difficult and deadly.
Cenneti beklerken (Waiting for Heaven)
- Director: Dervis Zaim
- Release Date: 2006
- Production Country: Hungary, Turkey
A Croatian painter of miniatures is conscripted to paint a portrait of a condemned Ottoman prince in order to help identify the prince.
Charlie Wilson's War
- Director: Mike Nichols
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: United States, Germany
Pushed by a major donor to look into what can be done for the Afghan people suffering under the Soviet invasion, boozing, womanizing Charlie Wilson arranges surreptitious arms deals to supply weapons for the mujahadeen, never realizing that what looks like a simple fix now can have unforeseen consequences years in the future.
Dick
- Director: Andrew Fleming
- Release Date: 1999
- Production Country: France, Canada, United States
After they wander into the Watergate break-in one night and through the White House the next day, Betsy and Arlene are hired to walk the President's dog so that his co-conspirators can evaluate whether these two ditzy teen-aged girls are a threat to their plans or not–a self-fulfilling prophecy, for Betsy and Arlene discover that President Dick not only authorized the Watergate break-in, but also kicked his dog.
En kongelig affære (A Royal Affair)
- Director: Nikolaj Arcel
- Release Date: 2012
- Production Country: Denmark, Sweden, Czech Republic, Germany
Assigned to care for the mentally-ill Danish king, the German physician Johan Struensee finds his friendship with the beleaguered king and his lonely queen to be the perfect platform from which to push an idealistic agenda of social and political reforms. Enraged by the threat to their position and incomes, Danish aristocrats set out to destroy Struensee—and their best weapon could be the man himself.
Fahrenheit 9/11
- Director: Michael Moore
- Release Date: 2004
- Production Country: United States
After the attacks on the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush led the United States into two retaliatory wars, wars that Michael Moore, his research, and the people he interviews all maintain were entirely unnecessary and more about fueling the military-industrial complex than truly about avenging the deaths on September 11th.
Fair Game
- Director: Doug Liman
- Release Date: 2010
- Production Country: United States, United Arab Emirates
When Valerie Plame's status as an undercover CIA operative is leaked by White House staff following her husband's publication of a paper critical of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, her life seems to unravel. Fired from her job, separated from her husband, and facing death threats from numerous sources, Valerie must find a way to redeem herself and bring to justice those who defamed her.
Fall of Eagles
- Director: David Cunliffe, Bill Hays, Rudolph Cartier
- Release Date: 1974
- Production Country: United Kingdom
The fates of three of the greatest royal houses in Europe are intertwined in life, death, and their eventual fall from power in the last half of the 19th century, leading to cataclysmic events across the world as the balance of power shifts from monarchies to nationalistic governments.
Fire Over England
- Director: William K. Howard
- Release Date: 1937
- Production Country: United Kingdom
When a Spanish plot to depose the queen is uncovered, the aging Elizabeth turns to Michael Ingolby, a young noble more interested in one of her young attendants than intrigue, and sends him undercover to the Spanish court, where he promptly becomes enamored with another young woman; however, even her beauty cannot blind him entirely to the fact that Spain is assembling a huge armada of ships, all of which will soon be headed towards England.
Harem
- Director: William Hale
- Release Date: 1986
- Production Country: United States
A young Englishwoman is sold into the Sultan's harem and gets caught up in the political intrigue of the late Ottoman Empire.
Hollywood contra Franco
- Director: Oriol Porta
- Release Date: 2008
- Production Country: Spain
The Spanish Civil War was one of the first issues that Hollywood "adopted" as its own, slanting the movie plots and agitating on other fronts in support of the Spanish government against General Franco. One man, Alvah Bessie, left Hollywood to fight with Republican forces in Spain, sacrificing his successful career as a screenwriter and unwittingly setting himself up for future prosecution by the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities during the Cold War.
Inside Job
- Director: Charles Ferguson
- Release Date: 2010
- Production Country: United States
After forty years of tightening regulations in favor of consumers, the gradual deregulation of the banking industry beginning in 1980 ignored those lessons learned in the Great Depression of the 1930s and created a climate of greed and corruption that has very nearly brought the world to financial ruin—a story that has yet to finish playing out on the global stage.
Invictus
- Director: Clint Eastwood
- Release Date: 2009
- Production Country: United States
Faced with a divided and deeply wounded country also wracked by deep economic and social issues, Nelson Mandela needs a symbol around which he can rally all of South Africa into one nation, but can he convince the non-white people who have elected him that an all-white rugby team, which in the past has only represented apartheid and white supremacy, is now the symbol of their nation's future?
Jin yi wei (14 Blades)
- Director: Daniel Lee
- Release Date: 2010
- Production Country: Hong Kong, China, Singapore
In the waning days of the Ming Dynasty, power (including control of the emperor's feared Jinyi Wei, the palace guard) has largely fallen to the Court eunuchs. When the leader of the palace guard is tricked by the head eunuch into stealing the Emperor's Seal to help an upstart prince, the palace guard finds himself framed for treason and on the run, fighting not only for his life, but for the reign of the rightful emperor.
Jing Ke ci Qin Wang (The Emperor and the Assassin or The First Emperor)
- Director: Kaige Chen
- Release Date: 1998
- Production Country: China, Japan, France
A royal concubine, Lady Zhao, is sent into the neighboring kingdom of Yan in order to set up an assassination attempt that will provide the Emperor Qin-Shi-Huang with an excuse to invade Yan; however, Lady Zhao finds her loyalties faltering when she witnesses the growing cruelty of the Emperor, but Jing Ke, the assassin whom she has recruited, believes his mission is legitimate and will stop at nothing to accomplish it.