Yellowface

Otto, a Los Angeles punk with no job and no plans, gets taken on as a car repossessor by an older man who tells him 'the repo code'. They chase a Chevy Malibu with something glowing in the trunk. It is a sci-fi, punk, anti-Reagan comedy with a soundtrack by Iggy Pop, Black Flag and Circle Jerks, and its cult status is earned.

Why it’s here: The film is a punk movie that is also about work: Otto's choices are between a supermarket job and a life of taking things from people who can't pay. What's punk is the whole picture: the soundtrack, the generic-labeled cans and the contempt for consumer life. What's pedagogical is its satire of Reaganism and the Cold War. Pairs with Please Kill Me, England's Dreaming and Our Band Could Be Your Life. Note: it is crude, has plenty of 1980s-style violence and casual slurs by characters; older teens and up.

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.