Interior Chinatown

At the fictional Ivy League Winchester University, a student named Sam White hosts a campus radio show called Dear White People, and a blackface party blows the campus open. The film follows four Black students working out who they are in a place that wants them to be one thing. A campus satire played straight, with sharp jokes and no easy heroes.

Why it’s here: The film takes the 'post-racial' campus story and shows how every Black student is asked to perform one version of themselves. What's punk is that the satire turns on its own heroes too. What's pedagogical is the vocabulary it gives you: code-switching, respectability, who gets to define blackness. It sits next to Sorry to Bother You in the catalog.

Two Victorian bachelors each invent a fictional alter ego named "Ernest" to escape their obligations, until both fictions collide with the women they're courting — who each insist on marrying a man named Ernest. Adapted from Oscar Wilde's play.

Why it’s here: Punk in weaponizing wit against Victorian propriety — every double life and invented relative is Wilde mocking a society obsessed with appearing respectable rather than being honest. Pedagogical in showing how absurd social rules reveal themselves once you refuse to take them seriously.