Fire up those Netflix queues. Lucas Joaquin recommends films to watch during the recession.

Recession and the movies. As Daily Variety will tell you, hard times equals good box office business. That’s because Hollywood assumes that during a recession you, the moviegoing public, crave escape from your misery, and that the easiest place to find that escape is at the multiplex.

But easy escape isn’t for you, right? You’re an adult, after all, an intellectual, and during hard times the last thing you need is some false sense of security. No—what you want are confrontational films. Films at whose heart lie scathing criticisms of our nihilistic, money-hungry society. Films that show how capitalism corrupts even the best of us, sullies us, and forces us, if we ever want to survive in this world, to commit reprehensible acts of evil, eventually stooping to the same base level as all the other scum on this earth, just to get ahead. Isn’t that right? I thought so. Well then, friend, here are a few choices to help you nurture all that righteous indignation. Enjoy.

“The Sweet Smell of Success” (1957, Alexander Mackendrick)
You art types might know it as the source for Christopher Wool’s painting, “Cats In Bag Bags In River,” but the film’s got another line that’s apt for anyone struggling to get by during recession time: “Watch me run a fifty meter dash with my legs cut off.” Press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) commits one morally reprehensible act after another in a bid to get in good with his boss, the all powerful gossip columnist, J J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), but nothing he does is quite good enough. Featuring one of the best scripts of all time by legendary leftist playwright Clifford Odets, the film is one of the most clear-eyed indictments of capitalism ever printed on celluloid. With beautiful on-location cinematography in 1950s midtown-Manhattan by the great cameraman James Wong Howe.