Commentary: In defense of political cinema

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Set us as preferred VENICE, Italy — As I settled in last week for Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” the opening night selection of the 2026 Venice Film Festival, a full-page pull quote in one of the dailies that circulate on the Lido caught my eye from across the aisle: “Art that feeds on politics will eventually die of malnutrition.” The work of Lamborghini chief executive-turned-contemporary artist Patrick Mimran, whose Billboard Project brought 42 such aphorisms to the city at the start of the Biennale in May, this bumper-sticker provocation registered, 6,000 miles from Hollywood, like a message in a bottle from the American entertainment industry.Especially since the 2024 presidential election, as executives curry favor with statesmen and filmmakers attempt to stay above the fray, contemporary political cinema has come under fire, displaced by the savvier business of “comfort viewing” and dismissed as a pitiable remnant of “Woke 1.0.” Trust me, I get it.

I came of age in the shadow of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an era which produced more than its fair share of wooden misfires (such as “World Trade Center,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Rendition” and “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”) and remarkably few masterpieces (among them “25th Hour” and, yes, “Zero Dark Thirty”).Then the advent of social media, and its evolution from town square to news ticker to outrage mill, created an incentive for obsessive fans and craven commentators to demand more of art than it can bear.

Skepticism of expressly political pop culture, particularly in the U.S.context, hasn’t come out of nowhere.Its fate hitched to the Democratic Party, Hollywood has reinforced the failure of political imagination that gave us Trump 2.0: reflections on a doomed alliance.The problem, as I see it, stems from both the urgenc...