Along with The West Wing, here are some entertaining campaign pictures to help take your mind off this bleak season.

State of the Union (1948): A drag, but Frank Capra's drama is still the most influential liberal election movie, with a stunning and uncharacteristically "sincere" turn by Katharine Hepburn as the conscience of the candidate (Spencer Tracy).

The Manchurian Candidate (1962): Joe McCarthy as a mole for the Red Chinese in this gorgeous satire. Builds to the best (and most unintentionally rousing) Big Speech of all.

The Best Man (1964): Gore Vidal the didact, not the debunker, but compelling anyway for how crisply he lays out the ends-vs.-means debate and for Franklin Schaffner's excitingly lurid direction.

The Candidate (1972): Worth seeing for its Altmanesque technique and new-style cynicism about the emptiness of the political process. "What do we do now?"

Tanner '88 (1988): Slow and sometimes self-congratulatory, but Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau had a lot to congratulate themselves for. This HBO miniseries takes you deep inside the drudgery of a modern presidential campaign, with sideways forays into political philosophy.

The War Room (1993): He's rangy, but James Carville still looks as if he could swallow the moon in D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus' jumpy documentary of the Clinton campaign's … not brain, exactly—more like cojones. Never has the appetite for shaping public perception been captured so vividly.

A Perfect Candidate (1996): R.J. Cutler co-produced the above and went on (with David Van Taylor) to make this just-as-good documentary about the 1994 Oliver North Senate campaign. North invokes God and gets creamed by a clownish Chuck Robb in the same year that Sonny Bono breezed into office. Campaign manager Don Baker vows to fight dirtier next time. North can be seen as "Ollie" on the TV series Jag.

Bulworth (1998): Warren the White Negro and martyr. The work of a paranoid narcissist, but a fast, loose, and enjoyable piece of seduction nonetheless.

Election (1999): Alexander Payne's brilliant portrait of Sammy Glick (here Tracy Flick, played with gruesome relish by Reese Witherspoon) as a high-school pol and the valiant teacher who tries to stop her.

Interesting Tangents:

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944): Preston Sturges' masterpiece of small-town politics about a well-meaning dweeb who pretends to be a war hero and causes a civic catastrophe.

His Girl Friday (1940): Capital punishment in an election year is at the heart of this superlative adaptation of The Front Page, one of the greatest of all romantic (and newspaper) comedies.

Medium Cool (1969): Real footage of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention and the rioting in the streets in Haskell Wexler's ironic study of journalistic detachment. Not much of a movie, but deservedly famous for putting you in the middle of the clubbing and the tear gas. ("Haskell, it's real!")

The Dead Zone (1983): Here's are some role reversals: Martin Sheen as a not-so-fatherly presidential candidate and Christopher Walken as the tormented savior of humankind who must attempt to assassinate him.

Taxi Driver (1976): In Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader's American classic, ex-film critic Leonard Harris gives one of the best vacuous campaign speeches on film ("We are the people"), chillingly punctuated by the hollow claps of an Arthur Bremer-like Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). At campaign HQ, Albert Brooks reacts angrily to buttons that read, "We are the people"—"We don't pay for the buttons. We send the buttons back."