Focus Features

Tim Robbins gets a bad rap for real-life progressive sanctimony, but he's sharp and funny in this dark satire of right-wing quote-unquote populism. Robbins plays a guitar-strumming millionaire Senate candidate who serves up a message of jingoism and devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism with a smarmy-nasty smile and songs like "The Times They are a Changin' Back." Gore Vidal plays his high-minded opponent, Brickley Paiste — even his old-fashioned patrician name tells you he hasn't got a chance.

Not a great movie, but one of the few election-themed films featuring a woman protagonist. When the vice president dies, president Jeff Bridges chooses Senator Joan Allen to fill out his term. She's perfect — noncontroversial, bipartisan, smart, elegant, hey, it's Joan Allen! But Republicans get hold of rumors that she participated in an orgy in college and all hell breaks loose. Watch the furor and count the ways in which none of it would happen if she was a man. Well, maybe if it was a gay orgy...

Of the many films featuring assassination as an alternate route to the Presidency, this twisty 1962 masterpiece of paranoia is my all-time favorite. If you straighten out the plot, it's straight anti-Communism, with Angela Lansbury as a wily Red out to seize the White House by using her son, who was brainwashing as a captured soldier in North Korea and is now as a sleeper agent programmed to kill on command. What makes the film so provocative is that the Communists are masquerading as pompous McCarthyite rightwingers. Talk about having your Cold War cake and eating it too.

It's only high school... or is it? Reese Witherspoon gives an indelible performance as hyperambitious, devious Tracy Flick, who will stop at nothing (free muffins!) to win the senior class presidency. People who hated Hillary Clinton compared her to Tracy, but that just shows they don't remember the movie very well, because Tracy really was the best candidate.

Talk about ripped from the headlines! When a sex scandal breaks just before election day, the president brings in spin doctor Robert De Niro and Hollywood producer Dustin Hoffman to distract the public by inventing a fictional war in Albania and putting it on television. Vicious, biting, supersmart political satire that will reduce you to mingled laughter and despair.