There's a cycling through history, and what is happening today isn't all that dissimilar from what happened a century ago. And that isn't all that different from the century before that.
Storytelling hasn't changed much. And even 100 years ago, there have been masterpieces of film. We can go back to the telling of stories that were appropriate for the time, created by people who had the memory from just a century before.
Charles Dickens told the story of French Revolution in his Tale of Two Cities, and his story was retold in film in the 1935 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities_(1935_film) It provided a common sense visceral story of how runaway ideologies work. It's worth seeing: it's much more appropriate for the present time than what you'd think.
What else would extend the relevant memories that are appropriate for the present time?
Since I purchased a membership to a local repertory cinema and have felt guilty about not making use of the privileges, I've been the past several weeks to watch the month's offering of luscious Golden Age musicals. Have you ever seen Gold Diggers of 1933? I wouldn't have known about it if not for the program. And I would not have otherwise sat through Palmy Days, from 1931, with a plot about the triumph of the entrepreneur, and Busby Berkeley in charge of dozens of braless chorines (this is a pre-Code picture), and Eddie Cantor in blackface. I got through most of my life without being aware of Babes on Broadway, from 1941, with even more over-the-top choreography, a plot celebrating the capacity of Americans to unite for a common cause, and Judy Garland blacking up. Because the times called for them to be, these are potent films—shot through with a decadent, distinctly American fascist aesthetic (this is down to Busby Berkeley), infectiously optimistic...
Are they relevant? Oh well. Maybe not in the way that you're looking for. Then, from the same year, more clearly didactic or critical than Busby Berkeley musicals, and with similar themes, and with a compatible, although perhaps more complicated message: Fritz Lang's Fury.
I pulled The New Babylon (1929) off the list, curious about the Shostakovich score. Storytelling hasn't changed much, but Soviet filmmakers tried their best (the result here is a narrative that is nearly impossible to follow, which didn't turn out to be a durable idea outside of experimental cinema).
Considered a cult classic of communist filmmaker Jean Renoir, there is a little known secret that the script was stolen from French right-wing novelist Jean des Vallières’ Kavalier Sharnhorst.
Must watch. Has the same cultural weight as Casablanca.
