The idea that Donald Trump is acting from a governing strategy or a conception of national interest "seems completely disconnected from reality," Chotiner says.
In the biggest films of 2025, artists grappled with the country's divided politics and increasingly fractured relationship to the truth. Can these works of fiction bring us closer to reality?
Hailey Benton Gates, the director of the "military-industrial-complex romantic comedy" "Atropia," recommends a few books that share a kinship with her new film, about actors working in a fake village where U.S. soldiers train.