10 must-watch movies that capture America in times of profound change

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Set us as preferred Can you tell the story of America in 10 movies? Maybe so — at least a version of it — if you stick to moments of serious national friction and those rare instances when a filmmaker meets the mood with a true vision.If you want tearjerkers about red, white and blue triumph, this is not your list (although the Space Race drama “The Right Stuff” always does the trick).

Meanwhile, our current state of disunity and division will find its own expressions in time; start with “Civil War,” though it’s a bit too soon.Instead, we thought about historical pivot points and built a list of classics, along with a few alternatives for each title.America is a broken place in John Ford’s poetically charged adaptation of the Steinbeck novel: a downbeat landscape of Oklahoma dust storms, long shadows and the teetering sight of a car turned into a truck transporting a family westward.

This will always be one of those essential movies about a particular national dream — not just a myth — of emerging from economic catastrophe and being reborn in the promised land of California.Ford, with the instincts of a showman, foregrounded hope on the horizon via inspired performances by Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell’s pragmatic Ma Joad getting the final word (“We keep a’coming…”).

But there is still so much darkness in “The Grapes of Wrath,” especially in its scenes of John Qualen’s Muley Graves, crumpled on the ground, suddenly a squatter on his own piece of land.He’s no match for the bulldozers.

As long as the idea remains that property gets its purpose from those tending it, working it, nourishing it and dying on it, the film will never become a relic.Its binding values of labor and community remain relevant, even if today’s Hollywood rarely speaks to them.

— Joshua RothkopfSee also: “Modern...