NIGHTLY FLIX — If you’ve been a regular reader of POLITICO Nightly this year, you’d know that there’s been more than enough to keep politics junkies entertained: from a consequential speakership fight to fights over the soul of the Democratic party to criminal indictments of former President Donald Trump to TikTok’s Ron DeSantis obsession . But beyond all of the headlines out of D.C. or Iowa that have kept us all voraciously reading and watching and discussing, sometimes the best way to excavate political truth is through fiction: art that makes us think a little more deeply or that gives us a new perspective on politics. This year, the movie industry has (often, certainly not all the time) provided us with just that — a solid slate of films that have been the highlights of the best movie year in a long time, many of which have had a lot to say about modern politics. Here is Nightly’s list of movies that said something interesting about our politics and values — and, of course, kept us entertained. Anatomy of a Fall: A French courtroom drama directed by Justine Triet that might have the most beautiful setting captured on film this year — a cabin in the French Alps — descends quickly into darkness after Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), a young boy who’s visually impaired, finds his dad dead. Daniel’s mother Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is immediately suspected and finds herself in the midst of a very public trial in France. The film, which is in almost equal parts English, French and German, is concerned with themes of family, justice, memory and the blending of fact and fiction. It’s also a fascinating look into how the French legal system works, and how different it is from its American counterpart. Oppenheimer: Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) might reach emotional heights during the Trinity test, but it is directly concerned with questions of politics throughout. Oppenheimer, suspected of being a communist, finds himself at first jettisoned from the nuclear project — and then decades later, from American political life. As Nolan trains the camera on Oppenheimer’s face in essential moments in the film, we see him reckoning with questions of his own responsibility for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and setting off a world in which we’re always trying to build a bigger bomb. Barbie: The other (and much more profitable) half of the biggest movie weekend in years, Barbie might be based on a doll introduced in the late 1950s, but the political questions it considers are all of the moment. When Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) leave a world in which women are in control and find themselves in modern-day Los Angeles, they’re each confronted with existential questions about what it means to be a man or a woman outside the artificial world of a Barbie dream house. Brought to life by Greta Gerwig, the film has launched all kinds of opinions and disagreements about its politics and message — its cultural impact is impossible to ignore. Poor Things: Propped up by a virtuosic performance from Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a woman reanimated and set out into the world by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), Poor Things is a journey into the strange, steampunk-filled mind of director Yorgos Lanthimos. We watch as Bella discovers the world beyond a laboratory and transforms, along the way participating in a beautifully choreographed number with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, in a hilarious turn). Lanthimos has a predilection for the bizarre that makes the film aesthetically fascinating, but the heart of his movie is about questions of our responsibility to others. If someone without any context were dropped into the world, how would they learn about it and understand it for themselves? The Sweet East: Still in very limited release, The Sweet East is the debut feature from Sean Price Williams. It follows Lillian (Talia Ryder), a high school senior on a school trip to Washington D.C. who’s separated from her classmates during a bungled arcade shooting. The film becomes a journey into the nooks and crannies of America, as Ryder confronts a white supremacist rally and meets disgruntled professor Lawrence (Simon Rex), travels to New York and finds a director and producer (Ayo Edibiri and Jeremy O. Harris) casting a film on colonial America and a host of other strange characters who all project some of their own fantasies onto Lillian. The story, which resists having a pat political message, instead confronts more complex and difficult questions about modern day America, and in particular the East Coast. It also looks beautiful — Williams’ background as a cinematographer who shot features like Good Time comes through here in his portrayal of cityscapes and the country alike. The Killer: What looks at first like a classic assassin film in a stark setting from David Fincher quickly transforms into much more than that. We’re treated to an ongoing monologue from the titular killer (Michael Fassbender), who insists on repeating phrases like “forbid empathy” and loves The Smiths (the soundtrack to the whole film). The thing is, despite his many skills, he’s not as perfect at his job as one might originally believe from his own monologuing. As he sets off on a revenge journey, we’re taken around the world and watch as elements of our political and economic system are subtly parodied by Fincher — and help to prop up Fassbender’s amorality. BS High: The only documentary on the list, BS High is a sports movie about a school that barely played sports and wasn’t really a school at all. You may remember an August 2021 incident in which a “high school” called Bishop Sycamore — advertised as an athletic training academy — was destroyed in a nationally televised football game by IMG Academy. As it turned out, the high school didn’t exist. The documentary goes beyond the incident and gets plenty of access to Roy Johnson, the coach who created the scam. The end result is a product that’s at home in a now long line of scammer and grifter movies and TV shows. Johnson is, by all accounts, proud to talk openly about his own grift and how he pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes. He’s the sort of character that’s existed around the world for centuries, but is increasingly common in America today: he’s a leading member of the age of the scammer. May December: Loosely based on American teacher Mary Kay Letourneau and her relationship with one of her students that lasted into adulthood, May December follows actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) as she drops into the lives of Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) as she does research for a role in a biopic. As Berry and Atherton, Portman and Moore play off of each other well, both constantly sizing the other one up. Melton also gives a true breakout performance that’s the heart of the film, as he plays a character that seems 13 and in his 30s all at once. The politics here exist within the deeply screwed up family dynamic, but just because they exist within the home doesn’t mean they’re any less potent. Killers of the Flower Moon: For decades, Martin Scorsese has made movies about American greed and excess; he’s one of the most nakedly political filmmakers of the century. But for a long time, a segment of the moviegoing public has attached to many of these epics — Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street — by training in on the excess and the rise rather than the fall. In some ways, it’s hard to totally blame them: he makes greed look really good, to paraphrase one of his contemporaries. But in his later period, he’s been much more direct about peeling back that facade to reveal the rot underneath. That’s true in Killers of the Flower Moon more than any of his other works. The film continues to look beautiful, but it’s three and a half hours of the brutality of Americans, with white men plundering the land and fortune and lives of our native population. If it wasn’t clear before, Scorsese seems to be saying, this is what it’s been about all along. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh . PROGRAMMING NOTE: We’ll be off next week for the holidays but back to our normal schedule on Tuesday, Jan. 2.
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HOW BAD IS THE MICHIGAN TAPE? — A newly unearthed recording of Donald Trump and Ronna McDaniel pressuring two county officials in Michigan not to certify the 2020 election could be the very definition of shocking but not surprising news, writes POLITICO. On one hand, the fact that Trump and McDaniel called Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, the two GOP canvassers in Wayne County, has been known for some time and is included in the House Jan. 6 committee’s report. Furthermore, Americans have already heard audio of Trump pressuring elections officials in another jurisdiction, and those efforts are already a core part of Jack Smith’s election subversion case in Washington. But several prominent lawyers say the Nov. 17, 2020, phone call — revealed in detail Thursday by the Detroit News — presents new and significant legal peril to the former president and current GOP frontrunner, even if the political ramifications are already baked into the 2024 presidential race. Andrew Weissmann, a former DOJ prosecutor, suggested on X last night that the recording could open the door to a federal bribery charge: “Trump and Ronna McDaniel — Offering a thing of value to a public official to violate oath of office = a crime.” Others see new fuel to power Smith’s election subversion case as well as something that Georgia prosecutors might use to bolster their own case against Trump. RUNNING UP THE SCORE — President Biden’s campaign and affiliated groups are amping up their efforts in South Carolina, pouring in money and staff ahead of the first Democratic primary in February in an effort to generate excitement for his campaign in the state, writes the New York Times. It seems, at first glance, to be a curious political strategy. Few incumbent presidents have invested so much in an early primary state — particularly one like South Carolina, where Mr. Biden faces no serious primary challenger, and where no Democratic presidential candidate has won in a general election since Jimmy Carter in 1976. But the Biden campaign sees the effort as more than just notching a big win in the state that helped revive his struggling campaign in 2020, putting him on the path to winning the nomination. It hopes to energize Black voters, who are crucial to Mr. Biden’s re-election bid nationally, at a moment when his standing with Black Americans is particularly fraught. SABOTAGING NIKKI — Donald Trump’s allies, MAGA media influencers and even his son are sending the Republican frontrunner a message as he begins to ponder potential vice president picks: Don’t even think about choosing Nikki Haley , writes POLITICO. The effort to kill off Haley’s veep buzz before it truly takes off has come as the former U.N. ambassador and ex-South Carolina governor is gaining momentum in the Republican primary. It has prompted speculation she’d be a logical choice as a running mate for Trump, who has maintained a wide polling lead and remains the strong favorite for the Republican nomination. Her rise has caught the attention of the former president, who has recently quizzed people outside his campaign for their impressions of Haley, according to three people familiar with the conversations.
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RESOLVED — The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution today to ramp up international humanitarian aid to Gaza, after days of negotiations amid a push from the U.S. to tone down the language, POLITICO reports. Both the U.S. and Russia ultimately abstained from the vote, allowing the resolution to pass with unanimous support from the rest of the Security Council, which includes the United Kingdom, China and France as permanent members. The vote on the resolution, penned by the United Arab Emirates, was delayed for four days in hopes of avoiding a U.S. veto. In the end, a week of tense negotiations yielded text that the U.S. had said Thursday night it would not vote down. Language that originally called for a cease-fire was changed instead to call for “urgent steps” to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza and “create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities.” The resolution urges all parties in the conflict to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza through all border crossings. It also requests that the U.N. secretary-general appoint a coordinator to facilitate the delivery of aid. PLANTING A FLAG — The United Kingdom has more than doubled the number of diplomats posted in San Francisco since 2018 and now has 40 in its Northern California consulate — including policy and trade specialists who offer expertise to lawmakers and agency employees writing state policies, reports POLITICO. It’s comparable to the footprint of an embassy in a medium-sized country. California and the U.K. have always had a close relationship; the country is one of the state’s largest sources of foreign direct investment, rivaled only by Japan. Britain’s attention to California reflects the state’s growing influence in the global economy and partisan gridlock in Washington that has made the Golden State a de facto regulator for major industries. “If you influence the state of California, that has significant heft at the federal level, too,” British Consul General Tammy Sandhu said during an interview on a fall evening at her office in a high rise off San Francisco’s Market Street. “What we recognize is that you can actually achieve a lot — sometimes more — at the state level.” Moments later, Sandhu walked briskly down the hall to host a reception for Matt Clifford , a top artificial intelligence adviser to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The event drew local tech executives and elected officials, including San Francisco Supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Ahsha Safaí and advisers to state Sen. Scott Wiener. Clifford, who was in town to tour Artificial Intelligence labs, mingled with the group as they sipped California wines and snacked on appetizers in a conference room decorated with British flags.
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