2015 has been a disorienting political year, and 2016 promises to be even dizzier: maybe some political movies can help us figure it all out. But let’s put aside the conspiracy thrillers, in which the public carries on thinking that everything is basically normal while unseen puppetmasters decide our fate. (See “Parallax View”; see it anyway, if only for the seventies style.) What we need are what might be called electoral thrillers, the kinds in which the passions of crowds matter most. The situation can get extreme, thanks to voters or would-be voters. Sometimes, that’s even a good thing.

1. “Meet John Doe” (1941)

“Is there a crowd in the street?” the mayor of an unnamed city asks. It’s the central question of the movie. Frank Capra, the director, takes as his romantic subject the relationship between Ann Mitchell, a reporter played by Barbara Stanwyck, who claims in a column that “John Doe” has written her a letter saying that he will kill himself as a “protest against civilization,” and John Willoughby, the homeless man whom Ann and her editors hire to pretend to be John Doe when the authenticity of the column is questioned. Ann writes more columns in his name, and then barnstorming speeches and radio addresses, setting up the political plot: a narcissistic industrialist, who owns the paper, plans to use the John Doe clubs that spring up to organize a third party, with himself as its candidate. The guise is populism; the goal is “an iron hand in the White House.” According to TCM, Capra hired two hundred plumbers for eight nights to create an artificial rainstorm for the filming of the tumultuous scene at the John Doe Convention, at Los Angeles’s Gilmore Field. It’s also raining outside the dive bar where the hardboiled editor, played by James Gleason, makes one of cinema’s great drunken professions of American patriotism, telling Willoughby, “I’m a sucker for this country. I like what we got here. I like it.”

Key quote:

Doe: “Lately I’ve been watching when I talk to them. I can see something in their faces. I can feel that they were hungry for something.”

2. “The Best Man” (1964)

The stuff of political reporters’ dreams: a brokered convention, as scripted by Gore Vidal. The delegates are split between Henry Fonda’s William Russell, the high-class former Secretary of State (“ ‘Intellectual’—you mean I wrote a book? Well, as Bertrand Russell said...”), and Senator Joe Cantwell, played by Cliff Robertson, who has made his name warning that Communists have infiltrated the mafia, or maybe vice-versa. Vidal doesn’t stack the deck; Russell is a misogynistic philanderer whose marriage is a sham, has a nervous breakdown in his past, and takes pride in his own dithering. Cantwell and his wife really adore each other, and the dirt that Russell has on him (an allegation of gay sex during wartime) is false, and Russell knows it. Some elements of Cantwell’s style are jarringly contemporary: he’s written a popular book called “The Enemy Around Us,” and answers foreign-policy questions by saying, “We gotta get tough.” In the movie, though, there are at least three other plausible candidates—two Senators and a governor—waiting in the wings. Today’s G.O.P. may not be able to muster that.

Key quote:

Cantwell: “You don’t understand me. You don’t understand politics. You don’t understand this country—the way it is, and the way we are. You’re a fool.”

3. “Z” (1969)

The film for imagining a political moment on the brink. “Z,” directed by Costa-Gavras, is filmed in French and set in an unnamed country but is based on the true story of an assassination and the breakdown of democracy in Greece. Early on, several opposition-party staffers face a basic campaign problem: how to get a hall for a speech that their boss, known as the Deputy (played by Yvens Montand) will give. This sets up an extraordinary sequence in which the Deputy makes his way through the packed streets around the venue. Remove the simple elements of electoral democracy—prevent people from renting a hall big enough to hold the crowd—and the situation can get extreme and, in Greece’s case, tragic. In the midst of one riot, a police officer cuts a protester’s hair. Bonus: After watching “Z,” Greece’s recent crises, and the attendant passions, make a little more sense.

Key quote:

Journalist: “Are you a martyr like Dreyfus?”

General: “Dreyfus was guilty!”

4. “Seven Days in May” (1964)

“This is the astounding story of a military plot to overthrow the government of the United States,” as the trailer puts it. But it’s also about street politics, much more so than “The Best Man.” (Both were released a few months after the Kennedy assassination.) Demonstrators circle the White House, saying that the President's arms deal is an act of treachery (some lines from recent G.O.P. debates could be dubbed in); the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster), who is leading the plot, speaks to a cheering crowd at Madison Square Garden; and the finale involves a gamble by both sides about what the public will do. (The cast also includes Ava Gardner and Kirk Douglas.) The screenplay, by Rod Serling, keeps returning to a question that President Lyman (Fredric March) asks General Scott, in response to the charge that he’s ignoring the voice of the people: “Well, where the hell have you heard that voice?”