In the wake of the 2024 election, THR’s arts and culture critic reflects on the minor key narratives and international offerings that illustrate how we got here — and where to go now.

Halfway through Alex Garland’s Civil War, a troupe of war correspondents come across a grisly scene. Three of their colleagues kneel before a mass grave, guarded by a band of insurgents somewhere in the American South. As the journalists approach, the rebel group leader (a chilling Jesse Plemons), submits them to a hostile interrogation, demanding to know where they’re from and what they want.

What kind of American are you? That question, and all its attendant anxieties, are the prevailing mood of this moment. And depending on how you identify, “this moment” might stretch back decades (perhaps even centuries) or to just last week, when a majority of Americans voted to reinstate Donald J. Trump as president.

It’s no surprise, then, that we might turn to culture to help us make sense of the moment. The task should have been straightforward, especially since so many of this year’s movies seem to be vying for the title of “most politically salient.” Yet few of the most obvious mainstream contenders resonated with me. While Civil War considers the violent consequences of extreme factionalism in the U.S., it fails to speak persuasively on how the country might reach or avoid such a point to begin with. The Apprentice, starring Sebastian Stan as a young Trump and Jeremy Strong as his mentor Roy Cohn, is an absorbing character study of the ghoulish figure we’ll have to call president again. But although parts of Ali Abbasi’s film illustrate how the news media fed into Trump’s early mythologizing — lessons still worth heeding — they feel thin in comparison to its bawdy depiction of Trump as a grifter motivated by daddy issues.

Conclave, which stars Ralph Fiennes as a cardinal caught within the maelstrom of gossip, betrayal and ego, renders the papal appointment as a nail-biting election. The comparison to the Harris versus Trump showdown is obvious — the papacy must choose between the lesser of two evils — but the fun of Edward Berger’s picture doubles as its weakness. Watching the Vatican as a cesspool of cattiness and political scheming is so entertaining that it’s easy to forget about the institutional malfeasance at the heart of it all.

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II makes an admirable attempt to acknowledge corrupt systems instead of individual actors, by gesturing at imperial rot and the insatiable appetites of those in command. But the nagging ambiguity of its politics allows anyone — even those with Goliath-like political influence — to see themselves as a David. A subversion of these tropes that have more to say than simply “empire is bad” would have been welcomed.

An obvious place to start is with a handful of documentaries that are both informative and instructive as to how we got here. Bad Faith, directed by Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones, and God & Country, directed by Dan Partland, investigate the history of Christian Nationalism and the predictability of movement leaders’ alliance with Trump, with the former delving deeper into the history of religious movements in the United States and the latter drawing fascinating conclusions about how current conservative podcasters are used to foment right-wing fears.

Both films argue that the Christian Right did not emerge as a response to Roe v. Wade, as many might believe, but were mobilized by desegregation and incentivized by money. A 1971 lower court ruling that decided segregated institutions would lose their tax-exempt status incensed folks like televangelist and Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, who did not want to integrate their churches. Anti-government views took root, and the conservative faction worked to accumulate power. Their 1981 presidential campaign to elect Ronald Reagan — who, as a twice-married celebrity California governor, contradicted many of the values espoused by the Christian Right — was the first of the movement’s many incongruous alliances.

Abortion was, however, a key issue during this election cycle, and it’s another area around which the Christian Right has strategically organized for decades. In Preconceived, directors Sabrine Keane and Kate Dumke give some background about the movement’s anti-abortion efforts since Roe v. Wade. Their clarifying doc concerns crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) — offices around the U.S. that advertise themselves as abortion clinics when they, instead, try to prevent pregnant people from getting them — to lay bare the contradictions within the conservative mission and reveal its real goals.