Focus Features

This dark comedy is simultaneously hilarious and sad — probably because the over-the-top machinations and tactics parody the tragicomedy that really goes on inside modern campaigns. In a political world where style trumps substance, visuals outweigh policy and soulless campaign consultants are celebrated as intellectual luminaries, writer/director David Mamet gives us characters like the Fad King (Denis Leary) and strategist Conrad Brean (Robert DeNiro); manufactured sob stories created with Hollywood blue screens; and songs like Good Old Shoe. This is political satire at its most vicious — and accurate.

From the moment Florida huckster Thomas Jefferson Johnson (Eddie Murphy) runs for Congress by pretending to be a recently deceased incumbent with the same name, this movie is ridiculing Washington politics. Johnson wins his race solely on name recognition, achieving his dream of going to Congress and putting his skills as a professional con man to work. The casting carries this one. Any flick featuring Joe Don Baker as an energy lobbyist named Olaf Andersen and Lane Smith as a corrupt chairman named Dick Dodge is going to hit that elusive sweet spot: the one that perfectly calibrates caricature and reality.

To inherit $300 million, Montgomery Brewster (Richard Pryor) is charged with the near-impossible task of wasting $30 million in 30 days without accruing a single asset — and without telling anyone about the contest. So how does he do it? He runs for public office. The message that big-time elections have become a huge waste of cash may be a subtext in this slapstick comedy, but Brewster's outraged campaign slogan asking citizens to vote "none of the above" is as relevant in today's money politics as it was when this movie first hit the silver screen.

Twenty-nine year-old neophyte Jeff Smith has a radical idea: he's going to run for Congress against the son of a famous governor who has the backing of Missouri's entire political Establishment. In this documentary of Smith's 2004 primary campaign, we see how despite today's idealistic rhetoric, the forces of corruption and status quo still run the Democratic Party.

It's something of a cliché to say the film, The Candidate, is a great movie about politics — but the last line alone in this story of a California election makes it a classic. After a grueling campaign in which Bill McKay (Robert Redford) goes punchy parroting his meaningless (and eerily Obama-esque) "there's got to be a better way" motto, the candidate for U.S. Senate wins in an upset. Standing amidst his exuberantly cheering supporters, McKay is shown in the last moment of the film helplessly turning to his political consultant asking "What do we do now?"