President Michael Douglas is a widower whose new girlfriend, Annette Bening, happens to be a lobbyist for the environmentalists nagging his administration to get a bill passed. The film is so new-age Democrat, your heart will bleed against its better judgment. (Really, there is no such thing as a Hollywood movie about Washington with a Republican's perspective.) The running commentary on the film is that it's a highly sanitized idealization of the early Clinton administration, with Michael J, Fox as a variation on George Stephanopoulos. But it's actually, a classy blueprint for NBC's "West Wing." PG-13. Directed by Rob Reiner.

If you ignore all the computer-generated sequences in which Tom Hanks schmoozes with various dead presidents, what's left is that great scene on the mall. Yes, it was digitally enhanced too, but when Forrest and Jenny wade across the reflecting pool for their reunion, your eyes got misty. Then you ask, "how clean is that water?" PG-13. Directed by Robert Zemeckis.

It was popular. It was expensive. It had that awesome shot of the White House being taken out by a mothership tractor beam. It's a DC movie more for that reason than any other — that and the sight of first lady Mary McDonnell doing the only bit of acting here. A film for anyone living in contempt of the local architecture. PG-13. Directed by Roland Emmerich.

Add this turkey to the list of cops-in-the-district thrillers. This Wesley Snipes vehicle, about another sex scandal ending in death and cover-up is an atrocity that somehow manages to be entertaining almost by accident. What makes it an essential film about Washington is that it's as if every line of dialogue drops a person, place or thing associated with the city. That said, the badness is so flagrant you might consider writing your congressman. R. Directed by Dwight H. Little.

Oliver Stone's films are not terribly imaginative representations of Washington as an urban entity. But he makes ruminations that strike at the heart of what makes the city an international magnet of insanity and paranoia. Cryptic encounters in parks and corridors, diabolical phones, grotesque interpretations of real DC icons, agit-prop agenda that make the CIA look naïve: Washington is an overwhelmed landmark in Stone's two period pieces that weren't about their eponymous figures so much as they are trying to approximate the spell/curse they cast on a nation. Stone brilliantly reconstructs the city and its landmarks to do this, then films with jerky rhythms and rotating camera stocks — as to render Washington the stuff of Cubist art. R. Directed by Oliver Stone.