Top 15 films to understand America

The Stoneman family finds its friendship with the Camerons affected by the Civil War, both fighting in opposite armies. The development of the war in their lives plays through to Lincoln's assassination and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1862, Amsterdam Vallon returns to the Five Points area of New York City seeking revenge against Bill the Butcher; his father's killer.

A story of family, religion, hatred, oil and madness, focusing on a turn-of-the-century prospector in the early days of the business.

As the Civil War rages on, U.S President Abraham Lincoln struggles with continuing carnage on the battlefield as he fights with many inside his own cabinet on his decision to emancipate the slaves.

In the antebellum United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery.

Jack Crabb, looking back from extreme old age, tells of his life being raised by Native Americans and fighting with General Custer.

A mild-mannered man becomes a local hero through an act of violence, which sets off repercussions that will shake his family to its very core.

A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan 35 years later, where he must once again confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.

Eli and Charlie Sisters, an infamous duo of gunslinging assassins, chase a gold prospector and his unexpected ally in 1850s Oregon.

A working-class Italian-American bouncer becomes the driver for an African-American classical pianist on a tour of venues through the 1960s American South.

Robert Gould Shaw leads the U.S. Civil War's first all-black volunteer company, fighting prejudices from both his own Union Army, and the Confederates.

A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the Vietnam War has on his fellow recruits from their brutal boot camp training to the bloody street fighting in Hue.

A sexually frustrated suburban father has a mid-life crisis after becoming infatuated with his daughter's best friend.

A White couple's attitudes are challenged when their daughter introduces them to her Black fiancé.

Two bikers head from L.A. to New Orleans through the open country and desert lands, and along the way they meet a man who bridges a counter-culture gap of which they had been unaware.