Values Resonance / Film

• Much of the anti-war message of All Quiet on the Western Front has lasted well past the 1930s. Not every war film made during that period has aged as well. The book the film was based on is an example as well.
• Amazon Women on the Moon and their "Dial a Date" sketch. Rosanna Arquette's character has a machine in her home that allows her to dial up all kinds of ugly dirt on her prospective date. While the fax-line interface and printouts are very 80s, the idea that your date can and will dig up all kinds of dirt (substantiated or not) via social media and potentially weaponize it is definitely relevant.
• American Beauty: With the COVID-19 pandemic and the following Great Resignation, Lester quitting his unfulfilling job in favor of one that makes him feel more satisfied is seen a lot more favorably than it was back in 1999.
• American Graffiti is relatively progressive on the issue of avoiding Date Rape.
  • When Toad tries to kiss Debbie and she moves away, he doesn't refuse to take no for an answer and draws back, apologizing, before it turns out that Debbie just wanted to take off her jacket before the makeout session.
  • While Steve is unhappy that Laurie changed her mind about having sex at the last minute and argues with her about it, he does immediately sit up and move away rather than insist on taking advantage of her initial consent.
• Back to the Future: Marty telling a teenage Lorraine that she shouldn't drink or smoke. While it came from Marty's first-hand knowledge of how alcohol and nicotine addiction would contribute to his mother's health problems in her later years, it was definitely a forward-thinking lesson to teach. Contrast with many other films from The '80s, which relished teenage characters abusing substances with little regard for the consequences.
• Batman Forever:
  • The Riddler's plan to use an electronic device as a Trojan Horse to steal people's personal information has become a lot more relevant (and plausible) in our current internet-heavy culture.
  • Edward Nygma becoming a rich, famous tech magnate by selling a gadget that entertains the mesmerized masses while secretly stealing their personal info and lurid secrets in the background is eerily prescient to the advent of smartphones and social media and makes the plot more biting in the 2020s than it was in 1995.
• Batman Returns: The enduring popularity of Michelle Pfieffer's Catwoman is likely due in part to evoking this. Unlike some superhero movie love interests, she's not a Satellite Love Interest and is a well-rounded character with her own story arc; some of the subjects explored via her character are also still highly relevant three decades after the film's 1992 release:
  • A woman gets treated horribly by her male boss, who presumes he can get away with it because he's rich and powerful. Substitute attempted murder for sexual harassment, and Selina Kyle's situation with Shreck doesn't sound too dissimilar from many real cases of work-related harassment and abuse towards women. Selina being dismissed as just a secretary whose only value is making coffee is also reminiscent of the struggles of some women trying to get ahead in male-dominated careers, or having their profession and skills dismissed as unimportant. Selina's complaint that people like Shreck tend to get away with their abusive behavior due to their wealth and influence also sounds very familiar (though her plan to murder Schreck isn't an ideal solution).
  • It's been pointed out that Penguin's treatment of Catwoman is highly reminiscent of a so-called 'Nice Guy'; he presumes she would want to be in a relationship with him because they work together and because of her sexualized clothing and behavior even though she never acts flirtatious with him directly and notably rejects or diverts his attempts to 'seduce' her. When she unambiguously rejects him, he resorts to insults and violence, insisting she led him on and seeing no further value in her. It could also be interpreted as a deconstruction of the belief that women who dress or act a certain way are 'asking for it'.
  • Selina and Bruce's romance is actually pretty positive (except for the Dating Catwoman situation and the fact they could both use therapy). Bruce wins Selina's affections by treating her like a human being with no expectation she'll reciprocate his romantic interest in her; unlike some other men in the film, he doesn't objectify or look down on her. During their Wayne Manor date, they both respect their mutual decision to not take things further than they want to, no questions asked, and neither of them takes it personally. Batman also views Catwoman as an equal opponent; he only underestimates her because she's a woman once (and she was intentionally playing up Women Are Delicate) and never makes that mistake again.
• The Best Years of Our Lives deals with soldiers having to return home from World War II and struggling to adjust to normal lives when they can no longer relate to their old friends and family. The message is one that has continued to endure, as films such as Stop-Loss demonstrate.
• Better Than Chocolate: While heavy-handed, the film being firmly in favor of LGBT+ acceptance/rights makes it resonate more than twenty years later when this has been subject to renewed attacks. Of particular note, trans woman Judy is portrayed positively and with cis several lesbian friends who stand by her, something that was rarely shown at the time.
• Big Daddy: Sonny's incredibly casual acceptance of two of his longtime (male) friends having fallen in love and the pair being portrayed in a loving, stable relationship throughout the film; though fairly common in 2019, such a thing was both bold and rare for a film released in 1999.^note This was a time when members of the LGBT community, though slowly gaining more social acceptance and civil rights than ever before, were still used by and large as incredibly tone-deaf punchlines in fiction.
  Mike: I am still weirded out seeing them kiss.
  Sonny: Why? They're gay. That's what gay guys do.
  Mike: Yeah, but they were like brothers to us in school.
  Sonny: They're still our brothers. Our very gay brothers.
• Big Trouble in Little China. The film brilliantly satires "White Saviour" tropes and subsequently feels refreshing because even many contemporary movies can't move away from them. Jack Burton acts like a man who thinks he's an All-American Face but is actually a Wrong Genre Savvy Butt-Monkey. He insists on leading the resistance against the Big Bad despite being out of his depth and constantly needing everything explained to him. His Chinese buddy Wang Chi turns out to be his Hypercompetent Sidekick. Despite having an inflated opinion of himself, however, Jack is a hero, so the satire isn't completely critical.
• Billy Madison: For all the film's Black Comedy, bullying is rightfully portrayed as a cruel act that isn't okay.
  • Veronica immediately tells off Billy for making fun of a kid who struggles reading. Billy takes that lesson to heart and saves one of his younger classmates from embarrassment, which is one of the moments where he begins to grow as a person.
  • Billy and his high school friends endure a lot of mistreatment from their peers and this isn't played for laughs either.
  • One of Billy's former classmates held a murderous vendetta against him for years, and Billy apologizing to him and offering to make amends is not just a moment of maturity for Billy, but saves his life when the man shoots Eric to protect him. With bullying gaining greater awareness in recent years, this scene has become a lot more poignant.
• Even though it was based on the (relatively) old French play La Cage aux folles, the 1996 American film The Birdcage did a very good job of updating the material for the '90s, and it still resonates in the 21st century. Of particular note is an outright mention of "same-sex marriage": not only was this a revolutionary concept at the time, but the very terminology was rare compared to the much blunter phrase "gay marriage."
• Black Christmas (1974) is considered to be just as resonant nowadays as it was in the 70s. To wit: the killer, who harasses the girls over the phone before he comes to kill them, is a woman-hating internet Troll before the internet. This harassment isn't taken seriously until it's too late, the film not-so-subtly blaming the community for allowing it to reach that point and fester within their midst (the famous line "the calls are coming from inside the house" can just as easily be seen as metaphorical). Finally, its portrayal of its sorority sister protagonists is quite sex-positive, especially by the standards of the time and the genre, including having the Final Girl not only be sexually active, but planning to get an abortion despite the wishes of her boyfriend.
• Born in East L.A. is a largely forgotten Cheech Marin comedy about an American-born man of Mexican heritage who is mistakenly deported to Mexico, a country he's never known. With immigration becoming a major political football, the themes of race, citizenship, and forced deportation of Mexican-Americans have never been more relevant.
• The Crapsack World of Brazil features a bureaucratic government that responds to terrorist attacks with a cut down on liberties and the detainment and torture of its citizens — meaning that a story made during the background of The Troubles takes on a whole new meaning in The War on Terror. Director Terry Gilliam even joked about wanting to sue George Bush and Dick Cheney for the unauthorized remake of his movie.
• The Caine Mutiny's far more sympathetic portrayal of Captain Queeg compared to the book version and Greenwald's verbal beatdown to the mutineers for continuing to give Queeg nothing but attitude and thinking only of how his paranoia and instability affected them instead of trying to help him when it should have been clear to them he was suffering from mental illness is more poignant than ever due to the greater awareness of the problems of untreated PTSD in the military and the selfish attitudes of people in general toward The Mentally Ill.
• Candyman has the titular slasher villain becoming a ghost after being a victim of a hate crime, and the film is set in a crime-ridden housing district where the residents are poor and ignored by authorities. These themes of racial prejudice, while not without its criticism, has only become more applicable over the years until they became modernized with the release of Candyman (2021).
• Can't Hardly Wait:
  • While there are some homophobic moments in the film, Preston's mellow reaction to being Mistaken for Gay by the stripper has aged decently.
  • In one scene, an Abhorrent Admirer forcefully grabs and kisses Amanda for several seconds without permission as she struggles. When he argues that she was giving him signs that he wanted it, Amanda's reaction makes it clear that what he did was not okay and is deserving of scorn.
  • Kenny's friends get chased out of the house when they try to invoke N-Word Privileges.
• Christmas in Connecticut: This 1940s romantic comedy has a plot that could easily be written today. After it's revealed that a Martha Stewart-type magazine writer is a fraud who can't cook and is terrible at being a typical housewife, she ends up re-hired as a writer at double her original salary and gets engaged to a man who's perfectly happy to be the one more interested in child-rearing and housework.
• The Company of Wolves from 1985 is a Feminist Fantasy of Red Riding Hood, subverting the Unfortunate Implications of the original tale by having the heroine learn to be empowered by her sexuality, and become more than capable of standing up to a predator. Its statements about female sexuality have aged very well.
• Part of the reason for The Craft's enduring popularity as a Cult Classic is down to this:
  • Some of the themes explored in the film around slut-shaming, sexual entitlement, bullying, mental illness and suicidal ideation in teens are (sadly) still as relevant in the 21st century as they were in 1996, if not even more so considering the rise of cyberbullying, increasing awareness and understanding of mental illness, and movements such as Me Too and Time's Up to raise awareness about and combat rape and sexual harassment. The Craft also notably averts Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: the scene where Nancy is caught seducing a drunken Chris by glamouring herself to look like Sarah (which could be considered rape by deception, as well as taking advantage of an intoxicated person) is depicted as disturbing and crossing a moral boundary.
  • When it comes to mental illness, Sarah is not demonized for her suicide attempts in the past — nor is she shown as weak or unstable. Her arc is that of a mental health survivor simply trying to live her life and, although she is triggered multiple times by bad influences and has her dark moments, she finds an inner strength and comes out on the other side. And this is well before films such as The Babadook started incorporating legitimate mental health struggles into the horror genre.
• Daughter of Shanghai is a B-movie from the 30s that had Asian leads who averted any stereotyping, were able to be the heroes of the piece and the man and woman were shown to be equally competent. It was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress for this reason — and star Anna May Wong listed it as her favorite role.
• The message of peace and understanding in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) has aged pretty well, even withstanding a remake of questionable quality.
• Dead Poets Society (1989): Though set in 1959, Neil's suicide is all the more topical as awareness of mental health issues, particularly among men, became a major talking point in The New '10s — spurred on, ironically enough, by the suicide of Robin Williams himself in 2014. And the thing that led to Neil's death was that he couldn't deal with the immense pressure from his father to succeed in academics, as nowadays, many students of all ages are also having trouble with that same sort of pressure.
• This happened to Demolition Man. In The New '10s, with Moral Guardians and their polar opposite being louder than ever before, both factions paint a pretty relevant picture. Especially with its surprisingly nuanced ability to portray both the positives and negatives of both sides of the argument, and how people like Raymond Cocteau and Simon Phoenix can and will weaponize things like political correctness and freedom of expression, respectively, for their own selfish ends without caring how it's harming others.
• The Distinguished Gentleman (1992) is a comedy about a conman who gets himself elected to Congress, but is appalled at how much influence wealthy interests have in Washington D.C., a problem that has only become more apparent today than it was at the time.
• Do the Right Thing (1989): The subject matter and overall themes regarding the existence of systemic racism as well as police brutality in a post-Civil Rights world have aged extremely well with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement bringing the aforementioned issues to the forefront.
• Few movies on the subject of the inherent madness of nuclear war have endured the way Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb has.
• Educating Rita subverts the Stay in the Kitchen mentality of Rita's husband and family, who expect her to have a baby by the age of twenty-six. When they disapprove of her desire to improve her life through education, she leaves her husband and starts her life over. Wanting to improve your life despite others around you trying to prevent it is a story that has endured well over time. Julie Walters said that for years other women came up to her and said the film inspired them to change their lives too.
• El Norte is a 1983 film centered around an immigrant couple from Guatemala who flee from a hostile living situation to the United States in hopes of a better life, only to face a variety of challenges, such as tension with other Latinos (the protagonists natively speak Mayan, not Spanish), the culture shock they face when they finally settle in the U.S., to crackdowns on undocumented immigrants like the two protagonists. All of which still affect millions of Latino immigrants today, especially in the 2010s when the U.S. federal government doubled down on enforcing immigration protocols to the letter.
• The Fastest Gun Alive: The downplayed criticisms of toxic masculinity (in the form of George's neighbors subtly deriding his job as soft and the negative effect this has on his psyche leading to the film's conflict) have aged well.
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Since The New '10s, and especially since the coronavirus pandemic, the American education system is increasingly seen as an institution that does not actually engage with students or stoke their interests. Ferris' hooky can be seen as the act of a kid who is exasperated with a school, considering he complains about the curriculum in one of his monologues. When you see Rooney's uncomfortably obsessive behavior and the boring economics teacher, it is much easier to see Ferris' point. It also helps that Ferris shows hints of being Brilliant, but Lazy and is otherwise discouraged from putting in the effort.
• Flower Drum Song was notable for having an all-Asian cast of characters who averted most stereotypes and were played by Asian actors. The film toned down the patronizing aspects of the stage show and focused on the Culture Clash in San Francisco between Chinese natives and second-generation young people. The themes of trying to move with the times and still upholding traditions of your culture are very relevant.
• Forrest Gump: While some key aspects of the film haven't aged too well (namely the "white savior" undertones, Jenny's narrative having a slut-shaming subtext, and, to a lesser extent, the fact that the mentally-challenged lead is played by a neurotypical actor), its scathing treatment of the counterculture, which for years was mocked as taking a cue from the Jack Webb playbook, gained relevance during the 2010s, as the counterculture movement became regarded as having done more harm than good in the long run by promoting a hedonistic and reckless lifestyle as well as giving a voice to manipulative, holier-than-thou types that prioritize their personal gain over the common good. The fact Forrest is perfectly able to rely on himself and succeed in life in spite of all has also helped its stature as most films about Inspirationally Disadvantaged characters made in the wake of the movie's success have tended to present them as pitifully incompetent people unable to function in normal society.
• Free Willy: The film's condemning of orca shows has aged extremely well, especially after the release of Blackfish. Especially the scene where Willy's collapsed fin is explained as being a result of captivity, which Sea World continued to deny for over a decade after the film's release.
• Gaslight examines psychological abuse that can happen in marriages and relationships, and Paula comes out the other end able to confront her abuser and not let what he did to her rule her life. There's a reason that one of the forms of psychological abuse that's more recognized nowadays was named after it.
• Heathers:
  • Teen bullying, mass shootings, and suicide have only gained more prominence since the late 1980s. When the film first came out, it crossed the line twice, because the idea of white, middle-class teenagers wanting to slaughter their classmates was viewed as patently absurd. Now, however, it just crosses the line, to the point that a TV show based on the movie was repeatedly delayed and eventually dropped entirely. With two of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history happening within three months of each other in 2018, and these types of tragedies happening practically every week, it's always insensitive.
  • Heathers also brings up rape culture in a way that was very unusual for the 80s, with Kurt and Ram unambiguously being portrayed as assholes for spreading a rumor about Veronica giving them oral sex and sexually assaulting Heather McNamara, and it is not played for a joke. Heather Chandler is also being shown being pressured into giving a college guy oral sex and later is seen washing her mouth out with a traumatized expression on her face, later lashing out at Veronica, who managed to resist the peer pressure to do so, implying that some of her Alpha Bitch tendencies are a cover for all she's sacrificed in the name of appearing popular and cool. J.D also slips a couple of notches down the villain scale when Veronica tries to break up with him and he shoves her back down on the sofa and plants a Forceful Kiss on her, though, fortunately, he doesn't go further once Veronica tells him to get lost.
  • The movie also goes out of its way to show that getting rid of one bad person doesn't solve anything in the long run and that a victim can turn into a bully easily, as when Heather Chandler dies, Heather Duke promptly takes her place and starts bullying Heather McNamara in exactly the same way, much to the frustration of Veronica. When J.D. suggests killing off Heather Duke as well, Veronica points out that killing Chandler just made her into a martyr and they can't go around murdering whoever they feel like, but J.D. doesn't listen to her. This becomes all the more relevant in the New 10s with school bullying coming under much sharper focus.
• Highlander is a prime slice of 1980's British cheese where the hero (an immortal warrior from medieval Scotland) beats up a Dirty Cop who throws around homophobic slurs as his Establishing Character Moment. It's pretty cool to see given the casual homophobia that defined much of the decade.
• Indiana Jones: When the original trilogy came out in The '80s, its pre-World-War-Two setting read largely as a throwback to a simpler time, and its antifascist politics as generically patriotic in a way people of (almost) all viewpoints could embrace. With the rise of the alt-right in The New '10s, it's found a new political resonance, with left-wing groups like Antifa and others embracing Indy as an icon in debates over the appropriateness of violence in confronting neo-Nazis and similar groups.
• It's a Wonderful Life:
  • The film's lambasting of the amoral way Potter runs the town bank, up to and including flat-out robbing his customers, remains ever relevant in light of the Great Recession, as is him getting away with it and being untouchable despite all the stuff he does.
  • The present-day timeline has many references to the war and how it affected daily life. However, the fact that it showed Pottersville as being a seedy and decrepit place compared to the wholesome Bedford Falls actually made it out of place for 1946 and likely led to the film not being a hit at the time. Remember that in addition to having just lived through WWII Americans had spent the previous decade living through the Great Depression as well. As a result, a fun place like Pottersville was much more appealing to the average American than a poor sleepy place like Bedford Falls.
• Jackie Brown features a black, middle-aged air hostess who makes a living smuggling dirty money, drugs, and guns over the Mexican border. Caught between the vicious gun-runner Ordell Robbie and his criminal associates and the ruthless agents of the ATF, Jackie is an unlikely heroine who is nevertheless presented as extremely clever and capable but also deeply relatable and vulnerable. Jackie Brown is widely praised today for its female representation, and some critics hold it up as Tarantino's best film.
• James Bond:
  • The franchise at one time seemed to lose its relevance with the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, but after the trauma of September 11th, which resulted in The War on Terror and international terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, James Bond and his battles against eerily similar villainous groups like SPECTRE suddenly felt brilliantly pertinent again, as acknowledged in Skyfall.
  • Even though it doesn't mention the internet, Tomorrow Never Dies paints a surprisingly accurate picture of mass media scaremongering tactics today. Elliot Carver's line "Words are the new weapons; satellites, the new artillery" seemed plain hammy when first released, but the rise of 24-hour news networks like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, along with TV political pundits, increasingly polarized news judgments (including fake news and misinformation), and electronic warfare make Carver's line hit home harder than ever. In addition to that, the major reason why the villain launches his whole scheme is because China refused to allow him access into their markets, similar to how many Western companies are either banned or must submit to heavy Chinese regulation to be able to operate within China today. That Carver is a satire of media barons like Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, William Randolph Hearst, etc. also makes sense given that the same news networks are owned by large conglomerates.
  • Despite their Cold War setting, the villains in most classic Bond movies weren't communists, but mad capitalists with the resources (including private armies, a presence in every corner of the globe, and cutting-edge technology that sometimes borders on science fiction) to be an N.G.O. Superpower. To put it mildly, this has aged very well into the post-Cold-War era. For most of the twentieth century, between the fortunes lost in The Great Depression and the world wars, the growth of large centralized government bureaucracies, much higher tax rates all over the industrialized world, higher barriers (both legal and practical) to trade between nations, and half the world locked away behind the Iron Curtain, private citizens with the wealth and global reach of James Bond villains were mostly confined to the pages of fiction, where they were used largely for narrative purposes^note as long as the villain was an individual with no national or ideological loyalties, the writers couldn't be accused of demonizing any country and alienating potential audiences rather than as commentaries on the real world. With increasing globalization, privatization, and the skyrocketing fortunes of the rich, these characters are far less fantastical today. The films have acknowledged this: when Tomorrow Never Dies came out, the satire of the Information Age was so obvious that the only question among fans was which real-life billionaire the aforementioned Elliot Carver was based on^note Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates are popular guesses; the writers claim they were actually aiming at Robert Maxwell. Even the more ridiculous villains like Stromberg and Drax, whose plans involve riding out the apocalypse in space stations or underwater cities, have a new resonance in an age when security companies market lavish post-apocalyptic bunkers to nervous billionaires, some of whom in turn are asking whether such cartoonish devices as shock collars or deadman switches should be considered to prevent their guards or employees from rising up against them.
• 'Judgment at Nuremberg: The film emphasizes the largely unpunished complicity of the Nazi civil service in the Holocaust, America's hypocritical background in having racial and eugenics policies that partially inspired certain Nazis, and the U.S. government and public's willingness to let perpetrators of war crimes go not just unpunished, but uncondemned due to a combination of Realpolitik and Bystander Syndrome, all of which are valid points that have often been emphasized less rather than more in popular culture since the film's release.
• The King of Comedy is a surprisingly bleak deconstruction of celebrity culture, fandom culture, and the kind of obsessed person that would seek out their 15 Minutes of Fame with their idolized celebrity. All of this is more relevant with the rise of social media and the internet, where the biggest fans are unironically proud to be called "Stans" for their idols, social media has made it possible for them to keep track of their idols 24/7 and interact with them more easily, and websites like YouTube and Twitter have made it so much easier for the ordinary person to be noticed not just by their idols but by everyone else for a brief moment.
• While Mac and Me is largely known for being a gloriously bad movie, it's also one of the few movies whose primary protagonist — not Token Minority — is in a wheelchair, isn't Inspirationally Disadvantaged, and whose character doesn't revolve around their disability. It was rare when the movie was released in 1988, and it's still fairly unusual... for all the movie's other glaring flaws.
• Mädchen in Uniform was the first movie to have a pro-lesbian storyline (and the two females are explicitly in love). Not only that but neither one dies (one attempts suicide, but is stopped by her classmates) or turns Psycho Lesbian. This movie was made in 1931 and it still has plenty of relevant themes and motifs in terms of feminism and lesbian sexuality, back when neither ideology had much mainstream acceptance.
• Mandalay (1934): Besides all the feminist takeaways, Tanya is a Sympathetic Murderer who gets away with getting rid of her ex-boyfriend, who sold her into Sex Slavery — and only does so because he wouldn't leave her alone. She then gets an implied Redemption Equals Death when she goes to Black Fever-ridden Mandalay to help treat the plague victims. By today's standards, Tanya needed not any kind of redemption as it's all in self-defense — she's even seen as even more heroic for adopting such a noble if doomed endeavor. By the period's standards, however, women who fight to liberate themselves and are willing to commit morally questionable acts to achieve their goals (regardless of how noble or heinous) are given the villain treatment or suffer severe punishment for their actions. And this is all the more enforced once The Hays Code is passed. Curiously enough, Tanya is never vilified In-Universe, so while, for the film's original audience, Mandalay is a controversial, morally gray work, for today's audience and within the fourth wall, the villains and heroes are clearer cut.
• The Mighty Ducks: In the third movie, Charlie's love interest argues that the Warriors Hockey Team has a racist name and mascot and both should be changed, which does happen at the end of the movie. This argument feels more relevant in the 21st century, in which the Washington Redskins football team experienced increased controversy over its name and was eventually rebranded the Commanders.
• The original Miracle on 34th Street of 1947 feels marvelously ahead of its time with Doris Walker being a senior business executive and a single mother with no one questioning her fitness at either because she is a woman. Its cutting attack on the overly commercialized holiday season seems far more relevant these days. Finally, it presents characters regarding a mentally ill man with delusions of being Santa Claus (maybe...) as nonetheless undeserving of institutionalization because despite his apparent delusion he is not a danger to himself or anyone else and he is still quite capable of taking care of himself on his own, subverting the Insane Equals Violent trope.
• Miss Congeniality:
  • The film combats the Not Like Other Girls trope in a refreshing way. Gracie starts out initially being scornful of the pageant contestants, but as she gets to know them, she becomes good friends with several of them and gains a lot of respect for both the girls and herself in the process, as by the end of the movie, she's still a badass FBI agent and considerably more well-groomed and refined, showing that you can be both and they are not mutually exclusive.
  • The movie also brings up rape culture when a drunk Cheryl rather nonchalantly admits her college professor sexually assaulted her. When a horrified Gracie asks if she reported him, Cheryl says she didn't and then adds, "I know that happens all the time!" Gracie tells Cheryl in no uncertain terms that it does not, that she should always report such things, and then decides to try and teach Cheryl how to defend herself (though Cheryl passes out before she can get far), but Gracie doesn't ever blame Cheryl for the incident or shame her for not telling anyone sooner, and Gracie is inspired to use her training to do some impromptu self-defense lessons during the talent portion of the competition so many young girls watching the show will see it and have something to fall back on.
• The 1936 Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times has been praised for being even more relevant today with its satire of big business, the proliferation of technology, and the plight of the unprivileged in modern society.
• Early in Monty Python's Life of Brian, one of the (anatomically-male) members of the People's Front of Judea keeps insisting on gender-inclusive language; when Reg gets annoyed and demands to know why they're so insistent, they say they want to be a woman and asks everyone to call them Loretta. Reg dismisses this since Loretta doesn't even have a womb... but then at the end of the movie, everybody casually calls her Loretta. This was a funny joke in 1979, but 40 years later, it comes across as a more sympathetic portrayal of a transgender person.
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington portrayed Congress as morally bankrupt; full of bribery, deceit, and other underhanded techniques; absolutely unfriendly to newcomers; the movie being very cynical for the era (and especially for Frank Capra) despite having a happy ending. It seemed oddly pessimistic for its viewers at the time, but as the American government becomes more and more transparent, and more corruption scandals leak out with each passing year since Watergate (which wouldn't happen for another three decades), this film has reflected closer and closer to how Americans largely see Congress. Approval ratings for Congress are lower than ever now, and bipartisan faith in the U.S. president has plunged dramatically in the past two decades.
• Natural Born Killers is a merciless shredding of the 24-hour tabloid news cycle that was just coming into its own in the early '90s, and has only grown since then.
• Network was intended to be an over-the-top satire of the news media when it was produced. Forty years later, the points it makes about corporate-run, sensationalist media and its impact on society are, if anything, even more relevant. Arthur Jensen's speech about corporations being the real nations of the world today seems frighteningly prophetic after decades of increasing globalization and corporate 'synergy'.
• The Night of the Grizzly (1967): Cole expresses disapproval about how Bounty Hunter Cass Dowdy killed fugitives in cold blood even though all but one of them were guilty and sent Cass to prison in the Back Story for one of the murders despite their working relationship. In an era where unjustified police shootings remain a serious problem and often go unpunished, Cole's attitude has aged well.
• Not Without My Daughter (1991):
  • Betty resisting the patriarchal theocracy of Iran and fighting for her freedom. Her abusive husband wanted her to gave in to the repressive system, she didn't and broke free.
  • After the killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022, the film's message about the plight of Iranian women is more relevant than ever.
• Now, Voyager is very ahead of its time in its treatment of mental illness. Charlotte's mother believes her nervous breakdown is "all nonsense" that she needs to snap out of. Even after Charlotte has gone through counseling and therapy (and given herself a glamorous makeover) her life problems are not automatically solved — and she needs to work hard to properly take control of her life. The film is also very feminist, as Charlotte chooses not to get married because she doesn't love her fiancee — even if they would be a smart match — and she instead devotes her time to taking care of a young girl who's similarly dysfunctional, using her own experiences to help. The film ends with the implication that she'll use her family's wealth to help more people struggling with mental illness.
• Office Space: The satirization of the elements associated with poor white-collar work environments, such as micromanagement from supervisors, defective technology hindering productivity, and poor work-life balance for the employees, rings just as true in The New '20s as it did in The '90s. The long-term psychological effects of working these sorts of jobs for too long, such as depression, are also taken a lot more seriously in the modern day.
  • The fact that white-collar tech jobs are no longer the guaranteed ticket to a middle-class lifestyle they were during the economic booms of the 90s and 00s also helps offset some of the Great Recession era complaints that stable, comparatively well-paying jobs being portrayed as such hell-holes made the main cast come off as Ungrateful Bastards.
• While The Opposite of Sex isn't fully enlightened with homosexuality during its time, it did a pretty good job with the portrayal of Matt's sexuality. He's bisexual who is in a relationship with Jason throughout the movie while showing his attraction to women is just as valid, with Lucia being the person in the wrong by claiming that bisexuality doesn't exist. It is also an example of a man who happens to be bisexual in the 90s which is impressive even to this day as one of the issues bisexual men still face right now is the issue of bisexual erasure, including the under representation in media, even the LGBT+ ones.
• In the horror film The Rage: Carrie 2, a bunch of Jerk Jocks at a high school are targeted for death by a teenage girl whose best friend was Driven to Suicide due to a toxic combination of rape culture, machismo, and a Madonna-Whore Complex. This film was directed by a woman, and the aforementioned characters were loosely based on a real-life scandal from a few years prior involving high school athletes from the Spur Posse group treating their female classmates like sex objects. No, this film did not come out in 2016, and therefore was not inspired by the Steubenville rape case, the Rolling Stone/UVA controversy, the Brock Turner scandal, or anything of that kind. It was released in 1998, long before the current debate on campus rape, toxic masculinity, and athlete entitlement, or support for fourth-wave feminism that addressed it, was anywhere close to the mainstream.
• Scary Movie: recurring gag throughout each movie is that while the wholesome white girl is guaranteed to live ( though she does get hit by a car in the first film's conclusion), all the black characters are fully aware that they only exist to be killed off. With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, audiences are now more likely to sympathize with the black characters.
  Brenda: Another little white girl done fell down a well. Fifty black people got their ass beat by police today, but the whole world gotta stop for one little whitey down the hole.
• Shanghai Express from 1932 as shown here drops the anvil hard on Slut-Shaming by showing two female characters being empowered by their sexuality and depicting the characters who look down on them for it as pompous or in need of learning a lesson. A religious man learns that prostitutes can have souls too. The women also save the day — Shanghai Lily by offering herself to Chang in exchange for Donald not being blinded (she turned down his previous offer, making it clear she has the power here) and Hui Fei by stabbing Chang as revenge for raping her. Hui Fei is a prominent Asian lead, shown as intelligent and resourceful and played by an actual Asian actor.
• Starship Troopers: At first glance a typical Hollywood soap action movie, but actually a deeply scathing critique of the book it was based on and militarism in general. Yet it later became popularized as a critique of The War on Terror, due to the many parallels between several parts of the movie — governments using acts of terror to justify war, sending countless people to their deaths, employing torture, etc. People who watch it today are even surprised that this film was actually produced half a decade before the Iraq war.
• One reason the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy films, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith were Vindicated by History during The New '10s was that by that time, the trilogy's themes of the decline of democracy and the toxic influence of wealth in politics had become more relevant than before. When The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, people thought a trade war started by a Trade Federation was preposterous, but with subsequent events like the "Citizens United" Supreme Court case, which ruled that "corporations are people" and equated money with free speech, and the War in Iraq suspected of being driven by the desires of obtaining Iraq's oil supply, it didn't seem so outrageous anymore.
• Strange Days: The 1995 film presents a dystopian Los Angeles of 1999 in which the police are growing increasingly militarized, violent and racist. The murder of a black man during a traffic stop drives the plot. In modern times, issues with police militarization, violence, and racism have all become even greater causes for concern, with fatal encounters between black men and police receiving significant coverage and controversy.
• They Live!: The satirical sci-fi action flick was conceived as a scathing critique of the rampant consumerism/greed and shallow conformity of the late 1980s. Over 30 years later, those themes show no signs of being dated anytime soon.
• The Three Stooges Meet Hercules has an opening narration about the heroes of the past. One of these is Leif Erikson, who "discovered the New World centuries before Columbus". This was in 1962, a time when general consensus was that Columbus discovered the New World, which today is all but discredited in favor of Leif.
• Tommy Boy:
  • The overarching plot of the film is Tommy's Ohio hometown seeing its industry being shut down and outsourced, and him trying to stop a tycoon from downsizing his own company's factory. With America's deindustrialization getting worse with each passing year, many people in the Rust Belt can relate to this film.
  • The film's semi-antagonist, Ray Zalinsky, is a corporate magnate who uses a PR campaign to present himself as a friend of the working man while selfishly downsizing people for his own gain, something he admits to Tommy. Nowadays, with numerous incidents of corporate abuse, such PR campaigns have come under greater scrutiny.
• Tromeo and Juliet: Juliet's bisexuality is portrayed as a matter-of-fact and the sole lesbian character, Ness, is portrayed very positively instead of making her a Psycho Lesbian or a jealous stalker. Given this was in 1996, that was still rather progressive at the time.
• Videodrome: Although the movie takes it to acid-trip and Body Horror levels and applied to television, the medium du jour, its prediction that people would primarily contact each other through video screen machines, adopt "strange new names" (i.e. online avatars), and become increasingly intertwined with a virtual world has become more relevant with the prevalent role of the internet in everyday life. Even the satirical element of having unscrupulous Moral Guardians trying to control it to advance their own ideology has become strangely prophetic in light of the attacks on Internet Free Speech and FCC's repeal of net neutrality.
• The Violent Years may have its main message poorly executed and difficult to take seriously, but what stands out about the film is that it's still one of the very few films that averts Double Standard Rape: Female on Male, despite it being released in 1956. It treats what happened as what it is: a gang rape under the threat of murder and the Moral Event Horizon in-universe. This was one of the things the film was mocked for at the time even as recently as the 90s because the prevailing mindset was still that All Men Are Perverts and that the scenario would be more of a wet dream than a nightmare. However, in The New '10s, awareness of the fact that sexual assault is inexcusable no matter who it happens to has become much more widespread, and as a result, the horror of the scene lands much more as intended now.
• WarGames was released in 1983, when personal computers were still new, and networking them was a decade away. Even though the subject of nuclear war isn't as relevant as it was during the Cold War (and the dangers of all-out nuclear war are so well-worn the relevant lesson enters Captain Obvious Aesop territory), the dangers presented by computer security threats are even more pertinent to the present than they were in The '80s now that Everything Is Online and talk of cyber-warfare abounds, and many of the basic security mistakes featured (such as putting a list of passwords on a sheet of paper right next to the computer) are sadly still with us today, too.
• A Wedding (1978): Gay groomsman Reedley is devoid of any stereotypical traits, his sexuality is an Open Secret at the Military School, and no one displays any obvious homophobia toward him.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Jessica Rabbit is introduced seemingly as a Femme Fatale Ms. Fanservice, but is soon revealed to be a layered and proactive character. She plays Ms. Fanservice as part of her job but draws clear boundaries and refutes claims that she's a Gold Digger or Really Gets Around - even pointing out that she's often stereotyped entirely because of how she looks. She proves to be a heroic character who does whatever she can to rescue her husband, whom she clearly loves.
• The World of Suzie Wong pulls no punches in challenging the racism of rich white expats in Hong Kong towards the Chinese locals, features the titular Suzie supporting Robert financially for a time, and depicts an interracial relationship where the race is almost incidental. Suzie is an Asian female lead with depth and an arc and subverts a lot of offensive Asian tropes of the day. She's also able to be funny without being a punch line or a Flawless Token.
• X-Men: For a film released in 2000, it became relevant among autism and LGBT rights advocates for treating equality among the many queer and autism-coded X-Men.
• THX 1138 (1971): The themes about consumerism being so widespread that people are only valued as workers and police brutality also being prevalent don't feel out of place 50 years later.

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