The Film Experience‘s Nathaniel R. is calling Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America (’85) a significant Independence Day film. In fact, Rogers calls it “an obvious, easy choice.” Brilliant, hilarious and endlessly rewatchable as Brooks film is, is there anyone out there who has said to themselves or their friends, “Lost in America? You have to ask? Totally great film to watch on the 4th of July!”

LIA “has a great many trenchant observations about American lives in the Reagan years in the form of its willfully self-deluded yuppies played by Julie Hagerty and Brooks himself,” he writes, “but the myths it demolishes about following one’s heart and all that cuts much deeper into the national psyche than satirizing just one decade. Constantly hilarious in a characteristically deadpan, mordant way, Lost in America is easily the most cynical title on this list, cynical enough that a less gifted comic mind might not have been able to balance out the humor with the acid, but there’s no rule that a national holiday can’t be used as a time for frank self-reflection and an acknowledgement of the nation’s character flaws.”