The Walking Dead
The American President is mostly a romantic comedy, but is pretty accurate, from all I’ve read, in showing the day-to-day routine in the White House. It also serves as a movie-length semi-prequel to The West Wing.
In the Line of Fire is mostly a crime thriller about a Secret Service agent squaring off against a would-be presidential assassin, but it also captures the ups and downs of a hotly-contested reelection campaign.
Seven Days in May is a somewhat farfetched but very good thriller about a possible military coup in the U.S.
Great movie. I saw it again recently, and it still holds up very well.
Yes! Love that movie. Langella really should’ve gotten the Oscar for his role as the hardass, tightly-wound White House chief of staff.
Well, in fairness, the elderly Speaker of the House refuses to serve because he’s just too damn old. The book is better, BTW, although very much grounded in the Sixties.
Battle of Algiers
Peterloo
The Young Karl Marx
All the Way (about LBJ; Bryan Cranston is great)
Land and Freedom
Matewan
Bob Roberts also features early appearances of Jack Black and the guy that plays Gus Fring on Breaking Bad.
I’ve been beaten to Dave but how about Charlie Wilson’s War?
On Dropo 's list is Z.
It’s about the a political assassination and its after effects in Greece that later lead to the military taking over. In short: crisis leads to repression leads to loss of democracy.
I think it is fairly apropos still. I’d strongly recommend watching it if you haven’t seen it.
Costa-Gavras’ best film, IMHO. State of Siege is another of his in this general area.
Just finished a Slovak language movie - The Teacher.
An excellent intimate study of power and corruption, as good as anything mentioned above [except Armando Ianucci’s work, which I think is the Shakespeare of the 21st century].
The Death of Stalin was on the mark, I think.
The end of the Bourne Identity where the entire operation is swept away in a mundane budgetary meeting because no one in authority knows or cares sums up our state of affairs.
Damn that movie was creepy. President starts thinking he speaks for God, starts rounding up and summarily executing those people that he considers undesirable, and then convinces the nations of the world to throw away their weapons in one boring ass speech. And then, he ascends to heaven while the angelic choir sings.
The book it’s based on specifically calls the President George H. W. Bush, instead of using a fictional President like the movie does.
Primary Colors (1998) and Ides of March (2011) are two of my favorites, although they’re about political campaigns rather than governing. Nixon (1995) is also a great political drama, although it has Oliver Stone’s usual excesses. I also don’t think Anthony Hopkins was the right choice to play Nixon, although I’d be hard pressed to come up with a better choice.
I would agree that All the President’s Men is the greatest political film ever made. I love how quietly intense it is.
I love that film, and see it as a great candidate for the most accurate film about how politics actually happens. I read the book, and they had to drop things that actually happened because audiences would not believe them. Like an intermediary between Wilson and Joanne Herring who had been a stunt man for Tom Mix.
Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon was amazing in that role, and was frankly cheated out of the Oscar that year. I think Sean Penn has done better performances than Harvey Milk, but it’s not surprising he won an Oscar for that one.
Like gaffa’s comment about Charlie Wilson’s War, you couldn’t include the truth about many of those monsters, for fear you’d be thought of as kidding, or making a propaganda piece. Beria’s habit of raping every woman he felt like, for one.
Hilarious movie though. Next time, I’ll watch with subtitles, really a good idea with any Iannucci work.
I have to mention a Charlie Wilson joke from Adlai Stevenson… Wilson was the Secretary of Defense, and Congress wanted him to sell his shares in General Motors.
Adlai, with his usual quick and economic wit said, “Star defensemen may be penalized for holding”
Being There 
The book was better. (It was also totally bananas, but I do recommend it if you lived through the Bush 41 administration – it’s a roman a clef.)
Ah, I see Rick Kitchen pointed that out already:
Curious, Rick – didja like the book? I loved the faux-scholarly format of the scenes involving historical figures, although the fictional characters (and their plot lines) were a bit meh. Still better than the movie.
Some of the earlier nominees strike me as stretches for the category of “political movie,” but hey, the personal is political and all that*. I’ll add Nashville, a 1975 Altman ensemble piece which features a third-party presidential campaign as a motif and perfectly captures the vapidity – and attractiveness – of a certain kind of common-sense populism (coughPerotcough**).
**vague paraphrase of Jean-Luc Godard, asked during a Q&A whether film was a “revolutionary medium” (as in "politically revolutionary): *“There’s nothing revolutionary about a bullet. But if I take it, and I shoot Nixon with it, it becomes a revolutionary bullet.”
I really liked Deterrence. Sitting president campaigning for re-election gets snowed in by a huge blizzard while stopping at a small diner. Diner patrons and the President’s entourage are trapped together in a claustrophobic setting when a political/military crisis erupts in the outside world.
Two caveats: firstly, it’s more about the interpersonal politics of people trapped together in a crisis than about the functioning of the state. Secondly, it stars now-disgraced Kevin Spacey.
“Nashville” of course… Not only my #3 favorite of all-time, but the first 5 minutes says so much, but overall its a great piece of Americana… Even “The Queen” of Nashville seems to have apathy toward everything… “Except them Kennedy Boys, but they were different.” to her husband (possibly the next governor of TN), “This isn’t Dallas, they can’t do this to us” – of course they can. Even the look on Ms. Can’t-Get-Enough shows the first sign of reality. And who saves the day? The most talented one that everyone shunned, and only received a chance because of a tragedy…
As the saying goes, (paraphrase) “Evil can only be done when good men do nothing”