From the intersectional feminism of Hidden Figures to the Blue Lives Matter vibe of Patriots Day.

The movie industry doesn't move quickly. Films take time to finance, time to get made, and time to be marketed. They're not fleet enough on their feet to be responsive to of-the-moment events, which is why, in the midst of a shitshow as all-consuming and gut-wrenching as our current presidential election, the gap between what's happening in the world and what's playing in your local multiplex can feel Grand Canyon–sized.

But that doesn't mean that a movie can't or won't be positioned as relevant, especially when stressing a title's social or political importance can give it a boost at the box office and during awards season. A movie's perceived meaningfulness — in terms of the weighty themes it tackles, or what it means for representation, or which parts of history it brings to screen — can be helpful for marketing, for making buying a ticket seem like supporting a cause, whether the picture actually deserves a sheen of substantiality or not.

In the wake of #OscarsSoWhite and as we arrive toward the end of a year in which the country tore itself to bits, one of the ironies of the upcoming Oscar race is that the movie that currently has the best shot at winning Best Picture is Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone's resolutely innocuous musical La La Land. It's a lovely and winsome love story between two showbiz strivers, and it reflects the turbulence of 2016 only in providing an escape from it. Most of the rest of this season's spread of serious cinema is at least lightly aligned with a cause.

Here's a look at how the fall's important (or sometimes just self-important) movies address the issues we can't escape.

Hidden Figures

Based on a true story? Sure is — that of Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji P. Henson in the movie), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), black mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and scientists who worked for NASA during the space race.

Themes it's touting: Racism and sexism. Like the title suggests, Hidden Figures is about people who have effectively been rendered invisible by most tellings of this moment in history. It's about the black women who helped launch astronauts into orbit, even though it meant working in a part of the country that required them to be segregated in their own department and to sit in the back of the bus, and even as they were underestimated because of their gender. It will arrive in theaters months after a presidential candidate told a black community they were living futureless lives and asked “what the hell [they] have to lose,” not to mention his degrading women in “locker room” talk. Hidden Figures is one big intersectional retort, delivered while wearing some sweet period outfits.

Telling marketing moment: The trailer stresses the many indignities these women had to deal with, as well as their resilience and their senses of humor. But it's the promotional panel Fox arranged at the Toronto International Film Festival in September to promote the presumably still-being-finished movie that speaks most pertinently to the value of its putting empowering representation on screen. After seeing clips from the film for the first time alongside the audience, Henson cried, saying, “It's so important, right? I'm a girl from the hood, OK? I didn't grow up with much. So all I had was dreams and hope. If I had known about these women coming up, maybe I would have aspired to be a rocket scientist. Not to say that I have a bad journey, but what I’m saying is that nowadays, this is all kids of color feel like they have: sports, rap, acting. And there’s so much more important work to be done.”

Hopper Stone / Twentieth Century Fox

Hell or High Water

Based on a true story? Nope — it features an original screenplay written by Sicario's Taylor Sheridan.

Themes it's touting: White poverty and the predatory financial institutions hovering over it. Hell or High Water is about two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) who embark on a bank robbing spree to get enough money to pay back a reverse mortgage their mother, who recently died, took out on the family farm to pay for her medical bills. It's one of the only bigger films this year to brush up against some of the white working-class issues media outlets have been so focused on in an attempt to explain the rise of Trump, its characters desperate to just hold on to what they have in a West Texas filled with dead businesses and debt relief ads. Conveniently, the brothers in Hell or High Water channel their rage toward the finance industry rather than redirect it at immigrants, which softens the movie significantly, but also makes it go down easier as a thriller.

Telling marketing moment: While a lot of Hell or High Water's marketing stresses that it's a heist movie, and a righteous one at that (“Justice isn't a crime,” the tagline insists), there's been some tentative surfacing of its larger relevance. The third trailer, in particular, starts with Mexican–Native American Texas Ranger Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham) talking about how “all this was my ancestors' land, 'til these folks took it.” Now the banks, he adds, are taking it from them, with Pine's character describing poverty as a disease passed along through generations, one he's willing to go to jail to save his children from.

Lorey Sebastian / CBS Films

The Birth of a Nation

Based on a true story? Yes, on the story of Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831.

Themes it's touting: The horrors of slavery and a moment of violent revolt against them. Nate Parker's passion project has, at this point, petered out — any momentum it may have had as an Oscar prospect, box office hit, or cultural phenom ended when revelations about an alleged sexual assault in Parker's past, the victim of which killed herself, re-emerged (not to mention a series of wincingly awful interviews Parker gave on the topic). But before then, The Birth of a Nation was being saluted after its rapturous reception at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival as potentially the year's most urgent movie, portraying black characters rising up against white oppressors in swooping Hollywood style — as Parker himself put it, a “black Braveheart.”

Telling marketing moment: Fox Searchlight has walked a wobbly line between tying the film to larger activism in and on behalf of the black community, and self-promotion. The studio held voter registration drives at certain theaters during screenings of the movie, but also used screengrabs from the debate to lightheartedly push the opening date. While the movie creates a continuum between the behavior of slave patrols stopping black people on the road to harass them and present-day police violence, a TV spot more callously spliced footage from the movie with photos from Black Lives Matter protests — depending on where you stand, either calling attention to or attempting to co-opt the movement.

Fox Searchlight

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