Film

God Bless America

A terminally ill man and a teenage girl embark on a murder spree targeting reality TV personalities and cultural villains. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detectives creator Bobcat Goldthwait directs this pitch-black comedy that swings wildly between slapstick and genuine moral vertigo. It's provocative, uneven, and genuinely uncertain whether it's congratulating its protagonists or horrifying you—which is rather the point.

TMDb rating3.5

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you enjoy sour, furious satire that aims its venom at pop culture and smug certainties, and you don't mind a comedy that wants to make you wince as well as laugh.

Skip it if you need characters to stay likeable or a gentler comic tone, since its rage is deliberately nasty and rarely lets up.

What it asks of you: It runs 104 minutes and stays in a hard, mean register from start to finish, so it wants your full attention and a tolerance for ugliness.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Falling Down1993

Michael Douglas as an ordinary man having an extraordinary breakdown, filming his toxic rage as it metastasizes into action. Scorsese-adjacent character study about American fury that's equally ambivalent about its own protagonist.

But The 90s have curdled some of its satire, and it can tip toward validating the grievances it means to critique.

Falling Down poster

Heathers1989

Winona and Christian Slater as teen murder-suicide artists in a high school hell. Darkly funny, visually inventive, and genuinely satirical about conformity and cruelty in ways that have only aged better.

But The violence is stylized but persistent, and the tone shifts unpredictably—some find that brilliant, others exhausting.

Heathers poster

Natural Born Killers1994

Stone's media-saturated fever dream of two killers made celebrities by their own slaughter. Visually baroque, genuinely angry about American spectacle, and it means every formal experiment it throws at you.

But The self-awareness can feel smug, and the film's critique of media exploitation sometimes feels uncomfortably close to participating in it.

Natural Born Killers poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from God Bless America

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Happiness1998

Both are films that refuse the comfort of righteous anger, instead examining the self-deception and moral cowardice in their protagonists. Neither offers the satisfaction of justified violence.

Todd Solondz's anthology of suburban despair: affairs, pedophilia, loneliness, infidelity, all treated with deadpan precision. It's obscene and hilarious and devastating, and it never looks away or offers comfort. The closest spiritual cousin to Goldthwait's moral sickness.

But The subject matter is genuinely vile—child sexual abuse, rape fantasy—and the film doesn't soften it. It's not exploitation, but it's not cathartic either.

Happiness poster
More like this (8)

The King of Comedy1982

Scorsese and De Niro's masterclass in cringe and delusion. A failed comedian's obsession with a talk-show host spirals into kidnapping; it's funny in the worst way, which is the right way.

But There's no warmth here. It's a study in pathology, not catharsis, and can feel punishing to watch.

The King of Comedy poster

A Clockwork Orange1971

Kubrick's controversial adaptation of violence as both spectacle and philosophical problem. It's formally audacious and genuinely unsettling in ways that force you to examine your own disgust and complicity.

But The sexual violence is graphic and deliberate. It's not entertainment; it's provocation, which some rightly find intolerable.

A Clockwork Orange poster

Nightcrawler2014

Jake Gyllenhaal as a sociopathic LA stringer who films urban carnage for profit. Sleek, morally putrid, and crystal-clear about how spectacle corrupts everyone it touches, especially the audience.

But It's relentlessly grim with no redemption in sight. Some will find it nihilist in a way that exhausts rather than illuminates.

Nightcrawler poster

American Psycho2000

Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, a Manhattan investment banker whose interior monologue is a catalog of murders and designer labels. Satire about consumption and masculinity that's both hilarious and genuinely nauseating.

But The violence against women is deliberate and difficult. The satire can be opaque—you're never quite sure what the film thinks.

American Psycho poster

The Wolf of Wall Street2013

Scorsese and DiCaprio's three-hour cocaine-fueled rant against financial deception. It's seductive and appalling in equal measure, and you end up complicit in its own excess, which is rather the lesson.

But Its critique of excess gets blurred by how entertaining the excess is. Some find that moral confusion a flaw rather than the point.

The Wolf of Wall Street poster

Observe and Report2009

Seth Rogen as a bipolar mall cop whose vigilante crusade against petty crime turns genuinely violent. Unexpectedly dark, genuinely uncomfortable, and unafraid to let its protagonist remain broken and unlikeable throughout.

But The tone is deliberately unstable and the humor punishing. It mistakes cruelty for honesty, which some will reject entirely.

Observe and Report poster

Hightown2020

Both use violence and cruelty as expressions of existential despair rather than ideology. Both ask whether the murderer or the lost man are suffering more than their victims.

A surreal, purgatorial TV movie about a man trapped in an endless night moving through bars and encounters that grow increasingly dreamlike. It's formally strange, genuinely eerie, and treats cruelty and degradation as states of being rather than plot points.

But It's deliberately disorienting and slow. There's no narrative satisfaction, no closure—just a mood that becomes increasingly suffocating.

Hightown poster

Come and See1985

Neither film believes in catharsis through violence. Both suggest that killing, whether for ideology or disgust, is a kind of suicide, and that our appetite for spectacle of suffering makes us murderers too.

Elem Klimov's Soviet WWII film following a boy recruit into the Eastern Front's mechanized hell. It's formally and spiritually the opposite of Goldthwait's comedy—deadly serious, documentarian in its horror—but it shares the same conviction that we are all complicit in atrocity.

But It's one of the most difficult films ever made. The violence is unflinching, the despair is total, and there is no release. It requires something close to endurance.

Come and See poster

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Recommended by

Falling Down, Cheap Thrills, Four Lions, The Great Buck Howard, World's Greatest Dad, Mayhem, Tromeo & Juliet, The Matador, The Quiet Family