What about The Contender?
Many of my favorites have already been listed: Network, Citizen Kane, Bob Roberts, Wag the Dog, The Candidate, The Manchurian Candidate, The Parallax View, All the Way, Primary Colors, Nashville.
But there’s a little-remembered gem I figured correctly no one would have mentioned: The Best Man, starring Henry Fonda as a contender jockeying for his party’s presidential nomination at a deadlocked convention. It’s more than a half century old, but it does not come across that way, thanks to the razor-sharp screenplay by the legendary novelist and playwright Gore Vidal, adapting his own play.
Ah, Ides of March. That ending is so interesting (and confounding). I got into some deep discussions about what it portended on the dearly departed IMDb boards.
I did, actually. Mainly because I was laughing about them actually calling Daddy Bush out.