A summer guide to 100 politically incorrect movies.

1964 (135 minutes) • Historical Drama Diamond (UK) • Unrated These days one would be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to say a good word about imperialism. In the twentieth century, it was associated with totalitarian maniacs such as Hitler and Stalin. Those countries which colonized “lesser breeds” in the nineteenth century (principally the United States and Great Britain) evolved into societies whose intellectual elite felt it necessary to apologize for their earlier expansionism. (Only among neoconservatives do we find a contemporary thirst for empire.) For that reason, it is hard to imagine a movie such as Zulu being made today... [more]

1982 (115 minutes) • Drama MGM • PG The Year of Living Dangerously was a historic film for the Australian cinema. By the late seventies, such filmmakers as Gillian Armstrong, Bruce Beresford, Philip Noyce, and Fred Schepisi were earning international critical acclaim. Contributing to this talk of a new wave of Australian directors were three pictures by Peter Weir—Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave (1977), and Gallipoli (1981). Then, in 1982, MGM made The Year of Living Dangerously the first Australian film to be fully financed and distributed by a major Hollywood studio. (Weir has worked in the United States ever since.) It w... [more]

1985 (112 minutes) • Drama Paramount • R In this his first American movie, the gifted Australian director Peter Weir chose a most unusual story to tell. On the surface, this is a murder mystery involving corruption in the Philadelphia police department. The tale takes an unexpected turn, however, when the only witness to the murder is an Amish boy. The lad, Samuel, and his mother, Rachel, are delayed in the train station on their way to Baltimore, where she is to help her sister with her new baby. (Rachel’s husband was buried in the opening scene of the film.) After two men kill a third in the restroom of the train station, police detec... [more]

1960 (105 minutes) • Drama Twentieth Century-Fox • Unrated The Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the major reform programs of the New Deal, was widely popular for bringing inexpensive electricity to the rural population of several Southeastern states. Less well known was the fact that families had to be displaced from their ancestral lands to make way for the dams that harnessed the power of the river. In his book on the Tennessee River, the Agrarian poet and essayist Donald Davidson wrote: Heath fires would be extinguished that were as old as the Republic itself. Old landmarks would vanish; old graveyards would be obliterated; the ancie... [more]

2002 (138 minutes) • Action Icon • R As we saw in chapter 10 [of God, Man, and Hollywood] with regard to Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, cinematic depictions of the Vietnam War can be as diverse and conflicted as public attitudes toward the war itself. At least in part because of the left-wing bias of Hollywood, Peter Davis won an Academy Award in 1974 for his technically brilliant but blatantly procommunist documentary Hearts and Minds. At the other end of the spectrum (both aesthetically and ideologically), we have John Wayne’s Green Berets (1968). Between these two extremes, there is considerable room for a balanced and accurate ... [more]