Ubu Roi

Pierre Delacroix, a Black TV writer, pitches a modern minstrel show as a deliberate insult to get fired, and the network loves it. It becomes a hit, and the satire spins out of his control. It was shot on digital video and is one of Lee's most uncomfortable films.

Why it’s here: The film turns the lens on who profits from caricature and who agrees to wear it. What's punk is that Lee refuses to make it comfortable: the audience laughing is the target. What's pedagogical is media literacy in its harshest form: how a joke becomes a product, and how the person making it stops being able to say no. It contains harsh imagery by design. Pairs with Sorry to Bother You and Network.

London, 2027. No child has been born anywhere on Earth in eighteen years. Britain has sealed its borders, hunts refugees and keeps order with a police state, while the rest of the world falls apart. Theo, a jaded civil servant and former activist, is pulled into smuggling a young woman out of the country, because she is pregnant.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the refusal to explain: Cuarón builds a future that looks like a slightly worse present, with caged immigrants, suicide kits and bombings as background noise, and trusts you to notice. The long, unbroken takes put you inside the chaos instead of watching it from a safe seat. The pedagogy is in how it shows a society coming apart from the top: fear of outsiders sold as safety, resistance groups fighting each other, and hope treated as something fragile that has to be carried by hand. It is violent and bleak, so it suits adults and older teens, and its final note is hope, not despair.