Politics Bucket List

Experience the dystopian classic by George Orwell

A Russian primary-school teacher films his own classroom as the war turns it into a recruiting office.

The 2008 financial crisis explained by the people who caused it, narrated by Matt Damon.

A Chinese glass company reopens a shut GM plant in Ohio, and neither side understands the other.

A Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist film the demolition of Masafer Yatta over five years.

The San Francisco supervisor, his election, his murder and the candlelight march that followed.

The First Lady and delegate, from Hyde Park to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Barbara Kopple returns to labour: the Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Austin, Minnesota, and the union that split over it.

Peter Davis on Vietnam, cutting between the men who ordered the war and the people it was fought on.

The forced relocation of Navajo families from Big Mountain, narrated by Martin Sheen.

The first of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight films, made to explain to conscripts what they were being sent into.

An Afghan taxi driver dies in American custody at Bagram, and Alex Gibney follows the policy that killed him.

The 1989 American invasion of Panama and the civilian casualties the networks did not show.

Lee Grant on the farms, factories and welfare hotels of the Reagan recession.

Dick Cheney assembles the modern American presidency in the background of every frame.

Margaret Thatcher in old age, remembering the rise; Streep won her third Oscar for it.

Stone's three-hour portrait of a president recording himself into the ground.

A widow, a dead lawyer and martial-law Poland; the first film written with Piesiewicz.

Three lives branch from whether a man catches a train; shelved by the censors for six years.

A Kentucky coal strike in 1973, filmed from the picket line; Barbara Kopple's Oscar.

Thirty days of McDonald's and a liver like pate.

How American food is made, from chicken houses to corn subsidies.

Ava DuVernay on the loophole in the 13th Amendment and mass incarceration.

Al Gore's slideshow on climate change; the cherry picker up the CO2 graph.

Sorkin's Bartlet administration and the walk-and-talk; the fantasy of competent government.

Capra's idealist senator filibusters for 23 hours against a corrupt machine.

An island rises between two nations and both immediately claim it.

A masked anarchist against a fascist Britain of the 1990s; the Guy Fawkes mask comes from here.

Michelle Obama from the South Side of Chicago to the White House.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to his son about being Black in America; a letter in the tradition of Baldwin.