20 Movies to Remind You the Government Can’t Be Trusted

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Governments lie. They cheat. They steal. Sometimes the blame comes from within: corrupt individuals who’d conned their ways into the halls of power with no moral compass beyond their own self-aggrandizement. Sometimes, the fault lies within ourselves: We’re drawn to populist politicians who tell us what we want to hear even when we ought to know better.

The 1970s, in particular, loom large in movies about government corruption, even in later films. It’s not that no one had ever mistrusted the government before, but it’s the era when anti-government feeling truly entered the zeitgeist. Then, as now, people couldn’t agree on much, but they could agree that political leaders weren’t to be trusted. From there, the ‘80s saw Iran-Contra, the ‘90s saw the Clinton impeachment, the ‘00s the Iraq War—and those are just the marquee scandals.

The less said about the modern era of politics, perhaps, the better. But we may find it helpful to go back a bit in time, and/or overseas, to find movies that hold up a harsh mirror to government corruption.

Seven Days in May (1964)

John Frankenheimer’s follow-up to The Manchurian Candidate sees President Fredric March working on a nuclear disarmament deal with the Soviet Union, a development that doesn’t impress a popular general played by Burt Lancaster. He’s planning a coup, one that's uncovered by Kirk Douglas over the course of the title’s seven days. It’s another trenchant look at the ways in which both personal charisma and military power can have undue sway over American politics. You can rent Seven Days in May from Prime Video.

The Conversation (1974)

The Conversation isn’t about Watergate or Vietnam, but it speaks as well as any movie to the well-earned political paranoia of the era. Gene Hackman (never better than he is here) plays surveillance expert Harry Caul, already desperately paranoid when he overhears a conversation he shouldn’t about a potential murder. Though ostensibly about private peccadillos, the film was released in the same year as Richard Nixon’s resignation (aided by his own White House tapes), and is prescient about the growing surveillance state, but also deeply conflicted. Harry means well, and there are clearly benefits to the work he does, but there are also the very obvious privacy concerns, as well as the potential to misinterpret situations and entire lives based on out-of-context bits of information. There’s nothing broached here that we’re not still grappling with, over 50 years later. You can stream The Conversation on Paramount+ and The Criterion Channel or rent it from Prime Video.

A Face in the Crowd (1957)

If you only know Andy Griffith from Mayberry, prepare yourself for his greatest performance, one that's as chilling as it is prescient. Here, he plays Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, an alcoholic drifter whose folksy good humor and facility for the guitar land him a radio deal with the help of journalist Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), who becomes his promoter and girlfriend. It all ultimately steers him into the world of politics, with Jeffries discovering much too late that she’s created a monster. If you can imagine a politician telling his supporters everything they want to hear while sneering at them behind their backs, you might even say that the rise of populist Larry Rhodes foretells the Donald Trump era. You can stream A Face in the Crowd on The Criterion Channel or rent it from Prime Video.

The Parallax View (1974)

Sitting squarely in the middle of the Vietnam War and sandwiched between the assassinations of the 1960s and Watergate, director Alan J. Pakula created a masterpiece of political paranoia that conveys a sense of mounting dread with each and every noir-inspired frame. Warren Beatty plays Joseph Frady, a journalist who gets caught up in an incredibly complex conspiracy after he witnesses the murder of a sitting senator and presidential candidate. There’s much more than simple assassination going on, but there’s also more to Frady’s quest for truth than simple heroism; unsettlingly, the movie’s thriller plot line conceals a believably complex world in which there are no easy answers. In a broken and corrupt system, even the best of intentions can make things much worse. You can rent The Parallax View from Prime Video.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

What became Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove began life as a drama: Based on the thriller novel Red Alert, Kubrick intended, initially, to play it straight. It wasn’t very far into the screenplay-writing process, however, when the director realized that real-world concepts like the nuclear “balance of terror” and “mutually assured destruction” were better suited to farce than serious drama. The result is one of cinema’s most perfect send-ups of government overreach, personality politics, and the behind-the-scenes dust-ups that have frequently had devastating consequences for humans without the privilege of their own quiet war rooms. You can rent Dr. Strangelove from Prime Video.

All the President's Men (1976)

The Nixon administration served as the wellspring of 1970s cinematic paranoia, and it's fortunate that one of the best of the decade's thrillers is based on the true story of everything that went down when a couple of plucky Washington Post reporters (played here by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) started sniffing around a seemingly innocuous burglary in Washington's Watergate complex. The resulting investigation, involving secret recordings, slush funds, and a secret informant known for decades only as "Deep Throat" revealed a criminal cover-up tied to the President himself. A fun throwback to a time when we were bothered by such things. You can rent All the President's Men from Prime Video.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Clearly inspired by the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, the Russo Brothers (and company) crafted a Marvel movie in the same spirit. The Disney-owned heroes typically fight to uphold, rather than upend, the status quo, so Winter Soldier is all the more impressive for seeing Cap as an outlaw. Working as part of espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D., Steve uncovers a massive government conspiracy (Hail Hydra!) tied to Cabinet member Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) that puts him on the wrong side of the law. Before it's over, he's hunted for having learned about a secretive surveillance operation with ties back to Marvel's version of Operation Paperclip, the real-life program that secretly brought German scientists (including Nazis) to the United States. Great Marvel movie or best Marvel movie? You can stream The Winter Soldier on Disney+ or rent it from Prime Video.

Capricorn One (1977)

What sounds like a sci-fi action movie about the first crewed mission to Mars quickly reveals itself to be something else entirely: a conspiracy theory born of Watergate but tying in, however inadvertently, to Moon-landing denial conspiracies. Starring Sam Waterston, James Brolin, Elliott Gould, Brenda Vaccaro, and O.J. Simpson, the movie finds the Mars crew pulled from the mission at the last minute—it seems that the government wants the boost that would be provided by a successful mission, but isn't at all confident that they'd actually make it. The empty craft is launched, the crew are essentially held hostage, and, when the capsule blows up on reentry to Earth, it quickly becomes clear that anyone who knows the truth has to be eliminated. You can stream Capricorn One on Tubi, Prime Video, Peacock, and Freevee.

Wag the Dog (1997)

Just before the Bill Clinton impeachment (and a suspiciously timed bombing in Iraq), and a few years before themes and obfuscations of the Iraq War, Barry Levinson made this all-star, Strangelove-esque satire about a Hollywood producer tasked with creating a fake war with Albania in order to conceal a Presidential sex scandal. Though a dark comedy, the film’s plot wouldn’t be the dumbest reason we’ve gone to war—not by a long shot. You can rent Wag the Dog from Prime Video.

Inside Men (2015)

Korean filmmakers, in film and television, have had no trouble whatsoever with exploring both the excesses of capitalism nor government corruption—perhaps that’s part of the appeal to American audiences saddled with an increasingly status-quo friendly Disney/Marvel hegemony. Here, writer/director Woo Min-ho manages to mine action from the story of a rising Presidential candidate who only gets as far as he does because a conservative newspaper and its biggest sponsor want him in the top job (big media colluding with candidates to swing an election—who'd have thought?). The corrupt connections between corporate media and political candidates are problems that are hardly limited to the Korean peninsula. You can stream Inside Men on Tubi or rent it from Prime Video.

Enemy of the State (1998)

It’s been suggested that Brill Lyle, Gene Hackman’s character in Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State, is so close in temperament to The Conversation’s Harry Caul that they might very well be the same character. Which is interesting, especially given that it caps Hackman’s long run of political thrillers—but they’re also very different movies. This one is everything The Conversation isn’t: big, loud, flashy, and more interested in action set-pieces than in saying anything coherent about surveillance. That doesn’t mean that it’s not a lot of fun, with large helpings of that X-Files-ish style of heightened political paranoia that was soon to give way to actual events. Will Smith plays well-meaning lawyer Robert Clayton Dean, who’s caught up in a wild conspiracy following the government-sponsored assassination of a political candidate. You can rent Enemy of the State from Prime Video.

They Cloned Tyrone (2023)

A stylish and fast-moving genre mashup, They Cloned Tyrone spins plenty of plates—and mostly manages to keep them from crashing down. John Bodega stars as Fontaine, a drug dealer in a world just this side of our own (there’s definitely some Blaxsploitation influence in the dress styles). Following a showdown with one-time Pimp of the Year, Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), Fontaine is shot dead before waking up in his own bed with nothing, seemingly, having changed. Teaming up with Slick Charles and sex worker Yo Yo (Teyonah Parris), he leads the three of them into an unlikely web of a government conspiracy lead by Keifer Sutherland's appropriately named "Nixon," one that involves using poor Black men (think the real-life Tuskegee Experiment) as test subjects. You can stream They Cloned Tyrone on Netflix.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

A relatively early masterpiece from director John Frankenheimer, the film was a victim of its own tragically prescient timing: Released just a year before the assassination of President Kennedy, that real-life event overtook the movie and interest in revisiting it waned until a critical reevaluation decades later. On one level, the movie is a Cold War thriller about a Medal of Honor recipient brainwashed to serve as a communist agent. If that’s all it were, it wouldn’t be much more than a period piece; Frankenheimer and company, instead, take aim at the ways in which Americans are easily manipulated and distracted—Lawrence Harvey’s Raymond Shaw is able to go as far as he does because people are blinded by his military achievements. Meanwhile, Joseph McCarthy-esque demagogues use accusations to deflect from real dangers. It also boasts an absolutely chilling performance from Angela Lansbury as Shaw’s scheming and vaguely incestuous mother. You can rent The Manchurian Candidate from Prime Video.

Miss Evers' Boys (1997)

The conspiracy surrounding the real-life Tuskegee Experiment continues to this day, inasmuch as discussions of the 40-year government medical study that used poor Black men as unwitting test subjects remain minimal. By the end, hundreds had been deceived about their medical treatments and conditions, and over 100 had died as a result of deliberately ineffective medical treatment, all in the name of medical research on syphilis. The film tells the story from the perspective of Nurse Eunice Evers (Alfre Woodard), based on the real-life nurse who became a trailblazer as one of the very first African-Americans to be employed by the U.S. Public Health Service, only to find herself in the role of collaborator. You can stream Miss Evers' Boys on Max.

They Live (1988)

John Carpenter's gloriously unsubtle satire of commercialism capitalism, American-style, finds a drifter (Roddy Piper) discovering, via a pair of sunglasses, that the world as we know it is a facade run by a ruling class that's concealed subliminal messages everywhere: messages like consume, breed, conform. You know, the stuff that we're really good at. Knowing the truth about the ultimate conspiracy, our musclebound protagonist isn't going to give in without a fight. You can rent They Live from Prime Video.

Z (1969)

It’s the ending here that makes Z so darkly memorable—which is not to say that the movie isn’t a classic through and through. Costa-Gavras’ satire of government corruption was released smack in the middle of a period of military junta control in Greece, but also in a global period of political assassinations and wars of false pretenses. A magistrate investigates the political murder of a left-wing politician, only to come up against an increasingly absurd, but nevertheless believable, series of walls and obfuscations. You can stream Z on Max and The Criterion Channel or rent it from Prime Video.

The X-Files (1998)

The X-Files’ overarching mythology was always far too broad to ever really amount to anything coherent; it’s also hard to get too worked up over secret alien colonists (or something) when the real world poses so many more immediate threats. Still, there’s no question that the show and its spin-offs exemplify a ‘90s style of anti-government paranoia—one that imagines political officials as being competent, focused, and forward-thinking enough to manage any number of conspiracies over the course of decades. Where X-Files, and this movie in particular, was surprisingly prescient was in its imagined world of conspiracies, one in which everyone wants to believe everything all the time. As a standalone, the first movie summarizes the X-Files experience fairly adeptly, with government agents concealing the existence of an ancient alien virus with the help of some nasty bees. Its most memorably goofy moment, in which Martin Landau reveals the truth about "FEMA—the secret government!" has evolved into an actual conspiracy theory over the decades because of course it has. You can rent The X-Files movie (sometimes subtitled Fight the Future) from Prime Video.

Cabin in the Woods (2011)

We know “cabin in the wood”-style horror movies, and we know how they're meant to work. So, while Cabin in the Woods initially looks like a Scream-style deconstruction of the genre, it quickly reveals itself to be something far more ambitious, veering from near-parody to apocalyptic stakes. A couple of slightly goofy government agents are watching everything that goes on with our horny and hunted campers, all of whom find themselves part of a bloody global conspiracy—at least the ones who survive. You can stream Cabin in the Woods on Tubi or rent it from Prime Video.

Dick (1999)

A very silly but nonetheless surprisingly smart comedy about two big-hearted teen friends who are, perhaps, not the brightest (think a ‘70s-era Romy & Michele), Dick stars Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams as deeply naive D.C. residents who become entangled in the events surrounding the Watergate break-in. At first enamored with President Nixon (a perfectly cast Dan Hedaya), the two gradually come to realize that he’s not the well-meaning charmer that they’ve taken him for; their resulting revenge is deeply satisfying. It’s often hilarious, but also serves as a pretty solid metaphor for the comedown that we face as a nation, and as individuals, when our political hopes are dashed. It's a reminder to not get too attached and, for my money, as good a movie about Watergate as you're likely to find. You can rent Dick from Prime Video.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

A superior paranoid thriller, as long as you're willing to buy Robert Redford as a nerd. Here he plays a bookish CIA analyst codenamed Condor who shows up to work one day to find that everyone in his office has been murdered. It seems their analysis of a thriller novel with real-world implications was getting a little to close to something. The ensuing cat-and-mouse game leads Condor into the heart of a government plot involving global oil supplies—the assumption being that Americans would tolerate literally anything in the name of cheap gas. And where's the lie? You can stream Three Days of the Condor on Paramount+ or rent it from Prime Video.