The usual pitfalls of assembling holiday movie lists are doubled and deepened when choosing the best Fourth of July movies. You’ve got your movies where there’s a scene or sequence set on Independence Day, but aren’t about or set exclusively on that date; you’ve got your movies everyone identifies with the holiday despite not actually addressing it directly (basically any movie about an American institution or well-liked president); you’ve got Americana mood movies that, again, don’t have much to do with July 4th; and, on top of that, you’ve got Hollywood blockbusters that are synonymous with the spectacle of fireworks and explosions, especially movies that heavily feature fireworks and/or explosions themselves. In true American tradition, this list of the best Fourth of July movies has a little bit of everything despite promising, in principle, to forswear all of them. The idea here is not to concentrate on movies that pay tribute to the American experiment (seriously, is anyone in the mood for that right now?) or feature a lot of stuff blowing up real good, but are mostly set on or around the Fourth of July, literally or in spirit (and yes, sometimes this means including the occasional movie with one famous Independence Day sequence if the rest of it works thematically). To avoid the head-in-sand ignorance of history that makes the Fourth of July sometimes difficult to wholeheartedly enjoy, this list also includes movies from throughout the past century of cinema, so you can have your choice of Independence Day eras, through genres ranging from drama to rom-com to musical to sci-fi. Say this for American cinema: It contains multitudes. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) All told, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is probably a better movie about the political process. You can find that on plenty of Fourth of July movies lists, along with John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln. But rather than turn this into a lineup of presidential movies that have jack to do with the actual holiday, let’s just allow that Frank Capra made a hell of a picture with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with James Stewart as an idealistic senator who fights (and filibusters!) political corruption. If it once seemed like a rose-colored-glasses view of America, it looks like full-blown fantasy by now. But the Fourth of July is very much about that fantasy, and sometimes those can give us something to aspire to. Watching Stewart filibuster in the name of decency is a pretty timeless way to do that. Also, it’s apparently inspired by the real-life senator who blew the lid off the Teapot Dome scandal, making it a weirdly relevant American history text (even though we will be largely avoiding those going forward). Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) It’s admittedly a little odd that the absolute #1 Turner Classic Movies Fourth of July biopic doesn’t chronicle the lives of any of the Founding Fathers or their spiritual descendants, but a guy who wrote a bunch of patriotic songs and once played Franklin Roosevelt in a musical. At the same time, it’s also fitting that the definitive American paean to patriotism is actually about a guy selling that stuff to the public with a lot of self-interested pizzazz—and all the more delightful that he’s played by James Cagney, who at the time was a gangster-picture mainstay hoping to return to his song-and-dance man roots. (The movie also reps a casual flex for director Michael Curtiz, who, no big deal, put this out the same year as Casablanca.) Much of the movie is a revue-like assortment of songs from George M. Cohan, performed by Cagney in character; combined with the standard biopic scenes, this pads the runtime past two hours. But if the literally flag-waving performances of “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and “Over There” are unabashedly cornball, a least they also tacitly admit how much of their patriotic sentiments amount to unadulterated pageantry—and provide ample excuses for Cagney to tap-dance. Honestly, there are any number of noirs that probably better represent the overall spirit of America, but no classic film so accurately recreates the aesthetics of a small-town July 4th parade. It’s only missing some kids on bikes decorated with flags and streamers. Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! and The Long, Hot Summer (1958) Real-life couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward had two different summer-themed movies out in 1958. Neither was actually released in the summertime—and neither of them are all-timer classics compared with the best Paul Newman movies—but they make for a solid Fourth of July double feature, especially starting with Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys!, a neo-screwball Fourth of July comedy from famed director Leo McCarey, then at the tail-end of his career. In his youth, he directed comedy classics like Duck Soup and The Awful Truth, then made the less zany likes of Going My Way and An Affair to Remember. With Rally, he returned to a reoriented form of screwball located at the intersection of ‘40s rom-com classics, ‘50s CinemaScope opulence, ‘60s sex comedies, and just plain sitcoms (which is to say, multiple cast members from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis appear here). Newman and Woodward play a classic couple-at-odds—over his cranked-up version of ‘50s horniness and her eagerness to serve her community by volunteering for as many committees as possible. When the U.S. Army comes to their small Long Island town hoping to man a top-secret project, she joins the protest and he joins the army’s PR effort, all complicated by the appearance of infidelity (which is to say, Joan Collins appears here). The Independence Day pageant she puts on is pretty offensive settlers-and-natives stuff (not to mention material generally now seen as Thanksgiving more than Fourth of July), and the eye-filling sets and colors of the time aren’t necessarily compatible with the necessary speed and wit of screwball. But the spectacle (which does, at least, include the costumed whites playing “natives” attacking real soldiers!) and movie stars add up to All-American time-capsule entertainment that does poke at the tension between self-interest and community cooperation. The Long, Hot Summer is rather less zany, and far less of an Independence Day production, though it may actually evoke summer more vividly than its comedic counterpart. (Plus, at one point the characters attend an outdoor picnic event with patriotic decorations, which we can only assume is Fourth of July-related.) It combines material from several William Faulkner stories for an appropriately languid melodrama involving an opportunistic drifter (Newman), a ruthless businessman and patriarch (Orson Welles!), and his independent-minded daughter (Woodward). Rally ‘Round the Flag is more in the spirit of the holiday, but if you want to make it a Newman/Woodward double to see what else the famous duo was up to in ‘58, Summer can double the time spent in luminously colorful seasonal CinemaScope. The Music Man (1962) If we’re being real, the great American musical about our willingness to be whipped into a fervor by con men is “Marge vs. the Monorail,” but because that Conan O’Brien-written gem of a Simpsons episode was hilariously inspired by The Music Man, the movie version of the source material will have to do. Con man Harold Hill (Robert Preston) slides into River City, Iowa, on the Fourth of July, riding the exuberance of the celebration (and also the abiding fear that the town’s pool table will corrupt their innocent children) to sell everyone marching-band uniforms and equipment. As a high-spirited musical, it’s basically a dazzling parade about the fakery and sales pitches of parades—with, of course, growing redemptive sincerity underneath. Still, as far as cornball celebrations of community spirit go, at least this one acknowledges how twined up they can be with showmanship and outright deception. Plus, the Meredith Wilson song-score has at least a couple of numbers that I’d happily swap in for “The Star-Spangled Banner” at ballgames. Jaws (1975) An obvious choice, perhaps, but maybe the best and most American Fourth of July movie ever made: Beach-read source material, set largely near a beach, becomes the first proper summer blockbuster, centering on a town whose venal mayor who simply refuses to close the beaches for the lucrative Fourth of July holiday weekend, no matter how clearly dangerous the situation gets. There’s dark Americana, too, in Quint (Robert Shaw) narrating the tale of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, and even, really, in the trio of men getting on a boat together to save the day by blowing shit up. Blow Out (1981) Is Brian De Palma’s masterful Blow Out included here just for having one of the best fireworks scenes ever put to film? Especially considering that while they’re happening in Philadelphia, they’re also in celebration of, uh, “Liberty Day,” a fictional holiday keyed to the Liberty Bell? Ah, but consider this: It’s a really good fireworks scene. There’s also a pulse of uncanny paranoia behind the idea of renaming and rebranding what’s pretty obviously Independence Day-coded, especially in a movie where a sound guy (John Travolta) accidentally records evidence of a possible political assassination. Though the movie has plenty of room for De Palma’s meta flourishes (the opening sequence is his movie-within-a-movie riff on slasher films of the era), Blow Out also feels fuller and more complete than some of his pure-pleasure exercises—a bridge between the political paranoia of the post-Watergate ‘70s and the sensations of the post-slasher erotic-thriller ‘80s. Cape Fear (1991) The Fourth isn’t so readily identified as a Thanksgiving-level symbol of forced familial discomfort or a Christmas-style delivery system for dysfunction, which means its potential for menace is often overlooked by movies looking to pry the fractured family unit further apart. Not so for Martin Scorsese, who has not made a Christmas or Thanksgiving picture but sure as hell set his sweaty remake of the 1962 thriller around Independence Day. Like De Palma, it seems plausible that he did this just to stage an extremely memorable fireworks display, in this case for an early moment where ex-con Max Cady (Robert De Niro) lingers on the property of the lawyer Samuel Bowden (Nick Nolte) who he believes (correctly, as it turns out) intentionally tanked his defense. Fireworks light up the room as Samuel and his wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) have sex, then draw Leigh’s attention to the window, where she gets her first look at Cady, resplendent in his single-minded desire to harass the family. But it’s not just the one scene where Cape Fear works up an Independence Day sweat. Scorsese shoots a Fourth of July parade with a similar eye for the unsettling—frozen patriotic scenes passing by the family as Cady watches them from across the street. Blown Away (1994) How’s this for fireworks: At the time of its release, the bomb-squad-versus-mad-bomber thriller Blown Away featured what was allegedly the biggest-ever on-screen explosion in a motion picture. That record has since been broken and is allegedly currently held by the James Bond movie Spectre, although director Michael Bay insists that his film Pearl Harbor is the true and unacknowledged champion. (He has, as far as I can tell, not offered any hard numbers to back that up, a feat of petty braggadocio that would probably earn the American-fuck-yeah-themed Pearl Harbor a space on this list were it not for the fact that it is not at all, not remotely, even a tiny bit good, at all.) Anyway, the point is that Blown Away, wherein former IRA soldiers Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones square off in Boston around Fourth of July weekend, isn’t just a stuff-blowing-up movie; it’s a genuine display of Hollywood ingenuity that would be largely outmoded within a decade or so of its release. (In a world less saturated with CG, there would be way more competitors for its onetime biggest-explosion title.) The movie itself is fairly absurd, notable at the time for fizzling out the same summer that Speed made a better, sleeker, faster mad-bomber picture. But for old-fashioned firepower and plenty of questionably accented hamming from Jones, Blown Away still rules. Independence Day (1996) In retrospect, the reign of July 4th as Big Willie Weekend was brief. Independence Day ushered Will Smith into box office dominance for ‘96, Men in Black worked as a comic de facto sequel the following year, and Wild Wild West gloriously blew the concept to hell in ‘99. Honestly, there’s a case to be made for Wild Wild West as the representative July 4th Smith film on this list; at very least, it’s better than any of the Men in Black sequels, one of which attempted to re-establish Big Willie Weekend in 2002, and failed, not financially, but spiritually, because the national mood had passed. Smith had to settle for mere “Mr. July” status (Bad Boys II in 2003 and I, Robot in 2004), and then he took his Make Literally Any Movie Into a Hit show into other months for the remainder of his reign (though he did circle back for Hancock in ‘08). The movie that started it all is the most eye-rolling of gimmes for this list, a movie named after the damn holiday, about re-establishing America’s birthday as the world’s in the face of cataclysmic alien attacks. It’s basically a serious version of the Futurama revelation that Richard Nixon’s head is now President of Earth. And yet! This is the Fourth of July movie to end all Fourth of July movies, in part because it briefly looked as if the holiday might be rechristened for our lord and savior Big Willie instead. It was not to be, which just leaves a cornily rousing (and rousingly corny) disaster-ensemble throwback to unite us all by calling its shot early, blowing up the White House during the Super Bowl and then doing it all again when the actual holiday finally arrived. Dick (1999) An exception for the no-president-movies rule must be made for Dick, because while it is technically about Richard Nixon (Dan Hedaya, giving Anthony Hopkins a run for his money by way of giving Dan Aykroyd a run for his money), it’s also a blast of accidentally patriotic summertime fun, viewing the Watergate scandal through a surprisingly nuanced entry point: the misadventures of two slightly ditzy but ultimately self-possessed teenage besties. Betsy (Kristen Dunst) and Arlene (Michelle Williams) wind up unwittingly entangled with Nixon’s undoing when hanging out at Arlene’s Watergate building apartment, while twists on the standard intrigue are acted out by a cast of SNL and Kids in the Hall ringers. The movie accurately represents the Watergate break-in as happening just before school lets out for the summer, and Arlene’s subsequent infatuation with President Nixon (the girls serve as his White House dog-walkers) is a goofy, hilarious twist on the summer crush; the whole movie nails the feeling of summer-vacation idleness even as major events unfold in the background. Director Andrew Fleming’s previous film before Dick was The Craft, but this is ultimately the more winning (and All-American) portrait of female friendship. Dance Party USA (2006) Aaron Katz is secretly one of the best filmmakers to emerge from the 2000s mumblecore movement, when he made his debut with a movie that’s small and little-seen even by those super-indie standards. Dance Party USA isn’t Katz’s best film—his noir riffs Cold Weather and Gemini compete for that title—but it does illustrate how indies of this style and era were able to capture social and relationship nuances that most movies, even scrappy independent ones, tend to take for granted. This means that some of the teenage characters are pretty unpleasant in a Kids-lite sort of way, and the movie hinges on a deeply disturbing confession from one of them. But if Dance Party USA is less of a vicarious party than you might expect, it also captures a semi-contemporary version of a demographic underrepresented on this list: Teenagers convening before, at, and after a Fourth of July party in search of hook-ups and booze, fumbling through the process of relating to each other on some hard-to-reach deeper level. (That said, if you want a more wistful and romantic version of somewhat more mature young people wandering through their summer break, there’s always Adventureland, and if you want a funnier take on awkward prowling teens, obviously go with Superbad. Can’t go wrong with Greg Mottola for summer!) Southland Tales (2007) In a head-scrambling bit of weirdness worthy of the movie itself, Richard Kelly’s sci-fi oddity Southland Tales was delayed so long that its near-future Fourth of July weekend turned into “next summer” by the time of its late-2007 theatrical release. In that respect, porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), or rather the scientists she cites, may not be right when she notes that the future is expected to be far more futuristic than we initially thought. More likely it will more closely resemble the present, one of the few things Kelly makes clear in his post-terrorism fever dream. For all of the movie’s obtuse proclamations, sci-fi jargon, and side characters played by SNL vets, it does nail the way jingoism bumped up aggressively against unease in the various national celebrations following both the 9/11 attacks and our subsequent Forever War in the Middle East (though in this movie’s timeline, Texas has been double-nuked in the very recent past). In that sense, it’s like a goofier version of Blow Out, one that pre-visions several decades more of Hollywood franchising, especially by casting a pre-superstardom Dwayne Johnson as, yes, a wayward action star, whose screenplay foretells the end of the world. Even more delightfully perverse: It’s one of his best performances. This also gives the movie a funhouse-mirror resemblance to July-level summer blockbusters, at least until the mirror cracks and shatters. The Great Gatsby (2013) Like several of these films, this is more of a general summer-season picture than an Independence Day-specific film, but the riotous Roaring ‘20s parties held by the shadowy rich man Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) sure bring to mind the season’s biggest holiday – never moreso than when Gatsby is first introduced via Gershwin and, yes, fireworks, with a DiCaprio raised glass and to-the-camera grin that contributes to his strange status as the most meme-able superstar in the world. This version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel may be helmed by Aussie Baz Luhrmann, but the perfectly cast DiCaprio bringing to life Gatsby’s arrested-development intensity assures that the adaptation still feels plenty American, and perfect viewing for a holiday that brings equally to mind the country’s great promise and folly. In the Heights (2021) Technically, the fireworks in the Lin-Manuel Miranda/Jon M. Chu musical In the Heights don’t go off to celebrate the Fourth of July; they’re set off during a city-wide New York blackout to help light residents of Washington Heights find their way home in the dark. But the combination of the light show and the setting on the “hottest day of the summer” makes this feel like a particularly apt Independence Day pick. (One quibble: Everyone complains about the heat, but the washed-out cinematography in this film version of the Broadway hit makes the city look overcast, as if the temperature is barely cresting 73 degrees.) Moreover, the reconfigured film version places the showstopping number "Paciencia y Fe" closer to that blackout-and-fireworks action, turning the immigrant-experience story of Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz) into the movie’s centerpiece, a terrifically staged number very much in conversation with “America” from West Side Story (the brilliant remake of which came out the very same year).