The 13 Best Movies About Why You Shouldn’t Trust the Government

America continues to battle the coronavirus, demonstrators fill the streets to decry police brutality and racism, and former members of President Donald Trump’s own Cabinet are denouncing his leadership. There’s undeniable surrealism to the moment at hand, with police killings captured on camera running parallel to the bizarre image of the president strolling to a church to hold up a Bible, after the police used violent force to clear his path of peaceful protesters. Polling shows public trust in government has collapsed to historic lows, a decline that began in the 1960s with the agitation around the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War.

That distrust has long been reflected in cinema. Hollywood, especially beginning in the ’60s, has depicted United States leadership and its intelligence apparatus as shadowy and villainous with greater daring over the decades. Some of the best paranoid thrillers and conspiratorial dramas of the past 50 years were initially dismissed as fantastical genre pieces by critics, seen as little more than popcorn entertainment. But even the most outlandish of these works have a grain of truth to them. Their deep suspicion of the apparatus of power stemmed from real scandals engulfing the U.S., or