The Baffler Presents: Facing the Future

This travelogue by Alexandra Pelosi and Aaron Lubarsky follows George W. Bush on the campaign trail ahead of his contested victory in 2000, examining the relationship between politicians and the media.

Comparable to Michael Moore’s documentary portraits, The New God is Tsuchiya Yutaka’s dogged attempt to understand Japanese youth culture and its discontents towards the end of the big capitalist 20th century.

An action-packed work of 21st-century Blaxploitation depicts a grassroots militia takeover in response to a thinly veiled metaphor for Reagan’s “war on poverty,” which doubles as a contemporary critique.

Warren Beatty plays a senator who takes out a hit contract on himself, and suddenly finds the courage to call it like he sees it, in a ripe artifact of Clinton-era progressive self-loathing.

Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph are subjects of a military time-travel experiment who wake up 500 years into the future to discover the average IQ has plummeted and morons rule the planet.

In a future where eugenics has become the norm, an aspiring astronaut stuck on earth due to the supposed inferiority of his genes assumes a new identity in a bid to join the space program.

In a fascinating, fearless snapshot of race relations after the assassinations of MLK and Malcolm X, a racist insurance salesman wakes up one morning to discover his skin has turned black.

Nancy Kelly’s adaptation of Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s novel tells the story of a Chinese woman sold by her family into servitude in the 19th-century American west.

Performance artist, filmmaker, and all-around mischief-maker Christoph Schlingensief embraces hardcore schlock to engage with xenophobia towards Eastern Bloc refugees around German reunification.

Mexicans remotely operate robot laborers across state lines while living in poverty at home in Alex Rivera’s cyberpunk thriller about tech surveillance, corporate hegemony, and climate catastrophe.

An upstart pop star-turned-politician builds a platform on the grievances of America’s overlooked youth majority in a film that raises galvanic questions about ageism, civil rights, and drug culture.

A private detective is embroiled gets to the bottom of a robotics company CEO’s mysterious suicide in 2030s Chicago in a sci-fi blockbuster loosely tethered to ideas from Isaac Asimov’s eponymous novel.