Nashville
There's a great editorial in the NYTimes today extolling the virtues of one of Robert Altman's career-defining films, Nashville, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year and has some interesting parallels to issues and themes that we're currently dealing with:

"Nashville" - which was released 30 years ago this month - is also, perhaps most of all, a powerful evocation of the most cynical era in modern American history. In 1975 the nation was still reeling from the Vietnam War, and its faith in institutions had been shattered by Watergate. Watching "Nashville" three decades later, there is an unsettling shock of recognition, because the government's current policies seem to be hurtling us to another time of deep national disillusionment. [....] The year 1975, with the double hits of Watergate and Vietnam, was a unique moment. But we appear to be headed toward a similar national crisis of faith. The Iraq war was started on a false premise, and the deceptions continue to pile up. The Bush administration insists that it is winning, and that it has a strategy for victory, despite all evidence to the contrary. At home, it has turned a budget surplus into a dangerously large deficit, and still wants to make its first-term tax cuts permanent, which could cost $2 trillion. The upside of despair is that it can be a powerful agent for change. The year after "Nashville" came out, Tennessee punished the Republicans - and Gerald Ford, who pardoned Nixon - by helping to elect a Democratic president, and sending a Democrat to the Senate. It was following Hal Philip Walker's angry coda: "If there's any cleaning up done, we're going to have to do it. The Lord is not going to do the replacing, and the powers that be are certainly not going to replace themselves."

While the political subtext running through the film is strong, what makes this film great is the swirling together of a diverse group of characters that truly snaps a Kodak moment of everything that was affecting the culture as a whole--from narcissistic sexuality to the splintering of religious beliefs. And more than M*A*S*H, it cements Altman's style of naturalistic film style of overlapping conversation. If you've never seen it, it's definitely worth your while (I've placed it near the top of our Netflix queue--Mrs. F is now duly warned).