12 of the Best Satirical Movies That Aren't 'Don't Look Up'

The new Netflix movie Don’t Look Up has generated some...strong responses from critics and social media. The quickly moving zeitgeist has shifted from its initial assessment (“It’s bad!”), to more measured takes that praise the film’s unique virtues, to hyperbolic promises that it will serve as a watershed moment in the climate movement (doubtful), and back to the beginning (“No, it’s bad actually”). But even if Don’t Look Up isn’t destined to become a classic, it’s also true that satire doesn’t always immediately land\. Sometimes we’re too close to it to see how effective it is.

Good satire, like film itself, is forever, and it’s rarely a bad idea to revisit some of the classics of the genre. The greatest satires weren’t just speaking to their own times, but had an eye on the future—they were, by design, hoping to warn us off of a dangerous path. Since we rarely, if ever, listen to well-meant warnings, those films have life well beyond their initial releases.

Somewhere in the middle of his journey to master every major film genre, Stanley Kubrick produced one of the most trenchantly funny political satires in American film history. For all of its silly, borderline-slapstick moments, Kubrick began work on the film as a serious exploration of Cold War politics and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction—but, early in the writing process, found it all too ridiculous. Indeed, there’s another film, Fail Safe, that comes from the same source material (more or less)—an excellent thriller, but it doesn’t approach Dr. Strangelove for conveying the terror and utter absurdity of international politics, generally.

Where to stream: HBO Max

There’s an easy, obvious target here: Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, shameless Spokesman For The Academy of Tobacco Studies, the cigarette industry being the kind of thing you could whack with a sledgehammer and probably knock out a solid and satisfying movie. First-time feature director Jason Reitman, instead, brings tremendous style to the film, and Eckhart’s performance makes his Big Tobacco pitchman nearly likable. Based on the novel by Christopher Buckley, the movie is less a play on the politics of smoking than it is a satire of spin, more generally...and of our susceptibility to it. One of the opening scenes finds Naylor explaining how tobacco companies are desperate to keep people alive (to buy more cigarettes), while liberal do-gooders would just as soon see them die—an argument that was played for laughs in 2005, but isn’t any more absurd than the kinds of things we hear on Fox News on the regular.

Where to stream: Prime Video

Only #4 on this list and we’ve already returned to Peter Sellers, and his second Academy Award-nominated role (the first was for his multiple roles in...Dr. Strangelove). On the surface, Hal Ashby’s Being There is a far more gentle satire than Kubrick’s, but it’s no less pointed at the end of the day. Sellers plays simpleminded gardener Chance, whose old-fashioned manners (and the fine clothes given to him by his deceased benefactor) see him, quite by accident, propelled to the highest circles of power in Washington, D.C. His quiet, polite nature and comments about gardening are taken as wise aphorisms, and he becomes something of a political guru by saying nothing much at all. The character is impossible not to like, which makes the essential satire a bit easier to swallow: In our desperation for authenticity, we’ll leap at anything that sounds like wisdom.

Where to stream: Digital rental

There are nods to Mel Brooks’ The Producers in Spike Lee’s underrated Bamboozled, with its story of a Black TV executive (Damon Wayans) who creates a modern minstrel show in order to get himself fired—he’s exhausted from dealing with the racist network heads, and, in particular, a boss who thinks he can use the n-word with impunity by virtue of his marriage to a Black woman. The show uses racist jokes and actors in blackface—and it’s a hit, forcing Wayans’ character to defend the work but, ultimately, sending him into a downward spiral. The film got mixed reviews and lost money in 2000, and I’m not sure that we were ready for the conversation Spike Lee starts here about Black imagery in the media; 20 years later, it feels prescient.

Where to stream: Kanopy

There’s a bit of Being There’s Chance in Warren Beatty’s Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, at least after he decides that he’s got nothing left to live for. Sick to death of a lifetime of spinning bullshit and platitudes, Bulworth hired a hitman to end his life, and plans to go on as normal in the three days he has left to live. It doesn’t quite work out that way—Bulworth finds himself speaking his mind at routine speeches, throwing his aides into a panic. (His comments aren’t generally the kind of off-the-cuff nonsense that has come to pass for authenticity in some political quarters, but instead sincere, if pointed, truth-to-power critiques.) He starts hanging our with Halle Berry’s Black activist Nina, and she introduces him to a world he’d never bothered to experience before. The movie comes very close to fetishizing Black culture, and those elements don’t play terribly well, but there’s a potent rage about the inordinate power of rich and white people in American politics that lends a nobility to Beatty’s intentions, even if all the risks don’t pay off.

Where to stream: Prime Video

It’s 1989, East Berlin, and loyal communist Christiane (Katrin Sass) has a heart attack and falls into a coma. She wakes up a few months later, after the fall the Berlin Wall, but her children are warned that the slightest shock could be fatal. Their sitcom-ready solution? Pretend that nothing has changed. Confined to her apartment, the kids (including Marvel’s Helmut Zemo, Daniel Brühl) create a world in which communism remains in the ascendant, the ruse, naturally getting harder to maintain as time goes by—though their aided by mom’s firm desire to believe. There’s political satire here, some of which is fairly specific to its time and place, but also broader commentary about our willingness to deceive ourselves (and be deceived) in favor of a world we’d like to see, and also about dealing with parents who would just as soon live in the past.

Where to stream: Digital rental

Armando Iannucci produced this sharp, funny satire of the jockeying for power in Soviet Russia that occurred following the unexpected death of Joseph Stalin—but the similarities with his earlier political comedies (The Thick of It, Veep, In the Loop) make clear that the writer/director isn’t so much interested in exploring the differences between capitalism and communism as he is in looking at the ways in which grasping political elites ply their trades in different contexts. Here, it’s all heightened: the raw terror inspired by Stalin, and the naked cruelty of the Soviet apparatus that he built makes the whole situation, conversely, more absurd; a single word out of place, or a smile at the wrong moment can mean the difference between life and death—a world in which way too much power is concentrated in way too few hands. It’s not all that hard to recognize.

Where to stream: Digital rental

Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog is set firmly in Bill Clinton-era America, but wouldn’t deserve a spot on this list if its concerns didn’t reach beyond. With still shocking prescience, the movie imagines an Oval Office sex scandal that occurs shortly before an election (the movie was in theaters when news of the similar Clinton scandal broke). A spin doctor, played by Robert De Niro, suggests a manufactured war in Albania as the solution: whip up a patriotic fervor to distract the public’s attention—hardly unheard of. The movie itself alludes to the invasion of Grenada in 1983: the Reagan administration, under fire for its response to the bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut decided to land troops on the tiny Caribbean island in response to an election dispute. Count the Spanish-American War and, of course, the invasion of Iraq as other significant examples. Wag the Dog is funny, no question...but all that history, before and since, makes it among the most plausible of satires.

Where to stream: Hoopla

Get Out could be accused of being excessively on-the-nose if it weren’t so pointed, and so exquisitely crafted. There’s something universal at play, conjuring the feeling that everyone has experienced of not belonging, or of being wanted for all the wrong reasons—but Jordan Peele doesn’t leave it there, unwilling for the satire to become so broad as to be meaningless. The movie is explicitly about a Black experience, and, though it might be hard to remember, given its success, that made it extraordinarily risky from a business standpoint in 2017. Before the horror elements well and truly kick in, we’re treated to Bradley Whitford’s cloying: “I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could,” a line that tells us everything we need to know about the white liberals who would rather co-opt and fetishize the experience of Black Americans than consider their own deep-seated racism.

Where to stream: Fubo, FX Now

A world of television news blindly obsessed with ratings, run by giant conglomerates and their stockholders, entirely cut off from journalistic morality and given, largely, to fear-mongering and base rabble-rousing? Good thing those days are behind us! Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayevsky’s film has plenty of targets, but none more prescient than the ones it levels against TV news, and it’s impressively complex in its commentary. Peter Finch’s iconic “mad as hell” moment has been frequently misinterpreted, or at least misappropriated over time, quoted by politicians as the cry of the righteous man—while the movie is less clear, never entirely presenting the character as a hero, just as often suggesting that we’re looking at an attention-seeking demagogue.

Where to stream: Digital rental

Like all of Robert Downey, Sr.’s satires, Putney Swope is broad and cheaply made—two facts which don’t hurt the film, instead giving it a crackling gonzo energy. The title character is a token Black board member in a powerful advertising firm, and is promoted to chairman of the board quite by accident (the other members, unable to vote for themselves, all assume that it’s safe to vote for Swope, who couldn’t possibly win). Renaming the company “Truth and Soul, Inc.,” Swope bans ads for guns and cigarettes while swapping out the all-white office staff for a largely Black one, given a few token white people—his changes wreak such havoc on the national landscape the the US government comes to see the ad agency as a threat to the nation. There’s definitely some low-budget silliness, but Downey smartly makes Swope a complicated figure, as ambitions (maybe even greedy) in his own way as the white characters. Though there’s a white director at the helm, the movie became a fairly essential window into Black power politics of the late ‘60s.

Where to stream: Vudu, The Criterion Channel, Tubi, Kanopy, Pluto TV, Plex

Robert Townsend kicked off his Hollywood career by broadly satirizing the experiences he’d been having all along: finding himself cast in stereotypical roles, with limited (virtually nonexistent) space for for Black leading men. Though that leads, in the last act, to some increasingly silly sketches involving his character’s fantasies, the film is an energetic, and ultimately appropriately dark, take on media representations of Black faces from the point of view of a young actor attempting to navigate that world with any integrity whatsoever. It would be nice to say that the movie is dated 30+ years later, but not by much.

Where to stream: Hoopla, Tubi, Pluto TV