10 Best Political Movies Of All Time

Election may not be your big aggrandised political behemoth but in sheer entertainment terms, it is up there with the best of them.

Alexander Payne's film about a school council election is perhaps still some of his finest work two-decades later. It revolves around precocious teenager Tracy Flick, played wonderfully by Reece Witherspoon, and Matthew Broderick's high-school civics teacher, Jim McAllister.

When Flick's Mother steps in and gets Jim's best friend fired from the school for having a relationship with Tracy, McAllister becomes bitter toward Flick and determined to give her a dose of reality in any way he can. For her part, Tracy Flick is a passive-aggressive, win-at-all-costs-type that never gets her comeuppance, in spite of the fact that she should.

The film represents a microcosm of what much of politics is underneath the surface. Namely, petty, vicious and vindictive. Through McAllister and Flick, we see the lengths that are gone to ensure victory or defeat depending on which side of the aisle you fall on and the vitriol that can engulf campaigns (not that we've seen that recently...).

Both Broderick and Witherspoon are phenomenal in their roles, with Tracy Flick becoming a pop-culture icon as a prime example of the bad-guy that wins in the end.

As a film, it is firmly Directed by Payne and adapted for the screen perfectly by Payne and Jim Taylor. It has endured in the years since it's release because politics hasn't really changed, if anything it has become more like the film.