America, Onscreen

How the world sees America, and how the country sees itself, can be credited, at least in part, to Hollywood. For as long as movies have been around, they have reinforced the stories we tell ourselves about our national character, such as your station in life isn’t dictated by your birth and anything is possible, including justice and untold riches, if you’re determined enough.

Of course, darker versions of this story also unspool in theaters. Is there a definitive movie about our nation? The answer undoubtedly varies by era and respondent. But with the country celebrating its 250th birthday and deeply divided, it’s a good time to look at the question anew.

So I asked 10 writers what films they would pick to define America and why. Their choices ranged from blockbusters to indies, homegrown comedies to enigmatic Italian drama, a recent best-picture Oscar nominee to a little-known debut — in short, movies as varied as the country itself.

— Stephanie Goodman

‘Killer of Sheep’ (1978)

Charles Burnett’s masterpiece takes place in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, in the mid-1970s, a decade after civil unrest there. Shot in black-and-white, the film is at once an expressionistic portrait of a poor Black family and of the country they live in, its idealism and bitter truths. There is soaring beauty as well as rueful comedy in Burnett’s vision, and pain that cuts to the bone. Here, every scarred wall and empty lot speaks to promises broken, as does the hollowed-out face of the father, a slaughterhouse worker (Henry G. Sanders).

Burnett is one of cinema’s greatest poets, but he’s also a cleareyed dialectician, as evident in the scene of children playing in what looks like an abandoned construction site, an interlude set to Paul Robeson’s “The House I Live In.” An ode to American idealism made famous by Frank Sinatra, that song opens with the question “What is America to me?” It registers very differently when sung by Robeson, a civil rights activist whose career was derailed during the Red Scare. With one indelible film, Burnett invokes American history and makes it.

Other great movies about America: Ken Jacobs’s “Star Spangled to Death”; Frederick Wiseman’s “In Jackson Heights”; Ava DuVernay’s “13th.”

— Manohla Dargis

‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)

Stream on Paramount+.

A ruthless, self-made mogul with a string of shady dealings in his past. An opportunistic preacher more interested in power than holiness. A country where fabulous wealth is available, if you’re willing to stomp your boot on your neighbor’s back. Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 epic, “There Will Be Blood,” which gave Daniel Day-Lewis one of his greatest roles, rips into the American dream, borrowing the cinematic language of Hollywood’s great westerns but inverting their themes.

In this vision of the West, the frontier yields oil as black as night and exacts blood in return as the twin forces of American prosperity — unfettered capitalists with no scruples and grifters who steal religion for their own ends — barrel toward an explosive conclusion. In this great land, “There Will Be Blood” suggests, you can gain the whole world as long as you’re prepared to lose your soul, too.

— Alissa Wilkinson

Rent on most major platforms.

Not long into “Dazed and Confused,” as Texas high schoolers pour out of classrooms for summer break in 1976, the cool teacher hollers about the impending Bicentennial: “Don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”

The national milestone lingers in the teenagers’ minds — “This country was founded by people who were into aliens, man,” the head stoner insists — but it’s mostly a backdrop for a rowdy night. As social cliques bleed together, conflicts arise: between old mores and new cultural groundswells, between patriotism and rebellion, between boundless freedom and nowhere to go. It’s in this friction that the Americanness of Richard Linklater’s 1993 dramedy is undeniable.

As a high-school sophomore enamored with this depiction of American teen-hood, I rewatched it on VHS constantly. Choose wisely, it seemed to warn me, a child of immigrants acutely aware that who we are now sets the course for who we can be — and for whether that future self will surrender to groupthink or forever bristle against it.

— Maya Salam

‘Scarface’ (1932)

Rent on most major platforms.

Talk about American types: The epitome of slapstick mayhem and the censor-consternating sensation of 1932, “Scarface” was bankrolled by a legendary Texas-born tycoon (Howard Hughes) and directed by a big-time Hollywood auteur (Howard Hawks) from a script mainly by a celebrated Chicago newshound (Ben Hecht) as a vehicle for a former idol of New York’s Yiddish theater (Paul Muni), who plays a fictionalized portrait of the most notorious man in the country then (Al Capone). “Scarface” wasn’t the studios’ first gangster film, just the most violent and noisiest. Emerging amid a soundscape of screeching tires, clamorous machine guns and slang-slinging repartee, this Kabuki Capone is flanked by two great molls, one hot (Ann Dvorak), the other cool (Karen Morley). Because of rights issues, the godfather of American gangster films was unavailable for 33 years, which only enhanced its cult status. The meme-life of Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake attests to its power.

Other great movies about America: Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch”; Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot”; Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.”

— J. Hoberman

Stream on HBO Max.

Is there a more American city than Orlando, Fla.? Its attractions promise big dreams, big fun, total escape. But it often masks the tremendous working-class struggle required to keep those dreams alive. The director Sean Baker interprets the complications of Orlando, and America itself, in film form with this sun-soaked drama that unspools on the other side of the Disney world. Discount motels with names like Futureland Inn and Magic Castle are the homes and de facto playgrounds of children who spend their days engaging in games and a little mischief, amid these tarnished environs.

Brooklynn Prince shines as the 6-year-old Moonee, the movie’s optimistic heart and soul. She creates her own kind of magic while the downtrodden grown-ups around her (including her mother, played by Bria Vinaite) try to make ends meet. Baker is deeply attuned to this dichotomy and guides the film with an epic scope and an intimate focus. The results are both charming and heartbreaking.

Other great movies about America: Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple”; John Sayles’s “Lone Star”; Jordan Peele’s “Us.”

— Mekado Murphy

‘Nashville’ (1975)

Rent on most major platforms.

There are few filmmakers whose work encompasses America, in all its complexities and contradictions, as fully as Robert Altman’s. In his best movies, he took on sacred cows, hidebound institutions, frontier mythology and conventional notions of heroism, and did so with a knowing wink and quiet cackle. There’s something inherently American about his 1975 masterpiece, “Nashville” — how he’s reaching for something big and all-encompassing and audacious in interweaving 24 characters from a variety of backgrounds and social strata over a few days in the capital of country music.

The film’s unruly, unconventional structure became one of Altman’s trademarks, because he adored the messy intersections of real lives, how an eccentric outsider can end up rubbing elbows with a sneering establishment figure, and come out on top. It’s a movie full of music, of heartache, of patriotism and of political violence; it’s the entire American experience in 160 minutes.

Other great movies about America: Altman’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” the story of a land powered by sex and flimflam; Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July,” which grapples with what it really means to love your country (and serve it); Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly,” one of the most sharply cynical films about our country and our time.

— Jason Bailey

Rent on most major platforms.

A study of class divides, labor, identity, women’s rights, health care and more hiding in a frothy coming-of-age romance, “Dirty Dancing” has all the right moves for understanding postwar America — and a killer soundtrack.

Set amid the social upheavals of the ’60s in a Catskills resort, it follows the awakening, sexual and otherwise, of Baby, a sheltered young guest — Jennifer Grey, in a career-defining role — as she meets Johnny, the edgy dance instructor played by a frequently shirtless Patrick Swayze. (Note their characters’ surnames: her Houseman to his Castle; she’s Jewish and well off, and he — despite the aspirational name — is not. Their affair was a taboo-buster in their era.)

A frank plotline about abortion was a cinematic rarity — Eleanor Bergstein, the screenwriter, fought to keep it in. The message is that culture can lead to social and political change — nobody puts Baby in a corner! — especially when it’s shimmied in by dancers and musicians (notably, the movie’s only people of color).

— Melena Ryzik

‘Zabriskie Point’ (1970)

Set in summer 1968 in the Mojave Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” is a hypnotic meditation on American ideals told through strangers turned lovers: a college dropout on the lam and a secretary driving through on a work trip. They spend one fever dream of an afternoon wandering the landscape, discussing societal tensions and stumbling into an extremely dusty orgy. (It’s Antonioni and the ’60s, after all.)

“There’s a thousand sides — not just heroes and villains,” the secretary (Daria Halprin) tells the dropout (Mark Frechette), which seems to have been the Italian director’s view of the United States. Between the mesmerizing scenes of the American West and the pulsing score from Pink Floyd and Jerry Garcia are moments of intense social unrest, crime and corporate greed. The F.B.I. investigated the film for anti-Americanism, but Antonioni crafts an outsider’s love letter to America, its people and everything it can hold, warts and all.

Other great movies about America: Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland”; Sean Price Williams’s “The Sweet East”; Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.”

— Amanda Webster

‘Nothing but a Man’ (1964)

Rent on most major platforms.

The director Michael Roemer was born in Berlin in 1928. He didn’t know what it was like to be young, Black and precariously employed in pre-Civil Rights Act Alabama, like Duff Anderson, the admirable but self-destructive character at the center of his first feature film. What Roemer did know — the feeling of being unwelcome in your own country, the spiritual toll of de facto serfdom — he poured into his miraculous screenplay, which, in the tradition of Tocqueville and Gunnar Myrdal, reflects America back on itself as only an outsider can.

Starring an unforgettable Ivan Dixon (as Duff), with an outstanding supporting cast (Abbey Lincoln, Yaphet Kotto, Gloria Foster), “Nothing but a Man” tells a political story in a personal register. Its characters — informed by research trips that Roemer took across the South with his co-screenwriter, cinematographer and fellow Jew, Robert Young — are never anything other than human, for better and worse.

— Reggie Ugwu

‘Disclosure Day’ (2026)

In theaters.

The world, as a villainous Colin Firth puts it, is on the brink. Quasi-government operatives work in the shadows. Paranoia and distrust, sometimes with good reason, fill the air. The fight to reveal the truth is as furious as the fight to suppress it. Yes, “Disclosure Day” is an aliens-are-here epic, but tonally, when the cardinals, crop circles and car chases give way to regular people struggling through a chaotic nation, it conveys the anxiety and uncertainty suffusing modern-day, non-sci-fi American life.

I saw it in the scene in which Emily Blunt and Wyatt Russell stop at a convenience store: We haven’t gotten to the big action sequences and revelations yet, but they are surrounded by people frantically stocking up, preparing for a war that’s looming in the background. At the end, when our heroes have finally revealed the truth to the public, the vibe shifts to a shaky, tentative optimism, and Blunt has the last word that feels like a call for understanding: “Listen.”

Something about that feels like who we are as a country, too.

Other great movies about America: Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde”; Lee Isaac Chung’s “Minari”; Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales.”

— Andrew LaVallee