See, this drives me nuts. I find it extremely masculinist to *demand* that artists "critique" events in a manifest way: We must a take these issues head on and reveal the truth of them to people. It's a maddeningly socialist way of thinking about things. Don't these events register in other ways than in immediate, literal consciousness; don't they register affectively and unconsciously? Yes, they do, but the volunteerist command to express the effects in their explicit content erases all this in favor of some pseudo-engagement, and succumbs to the logic whereby the state's actions are totally determinative of social life. So, for instance, Lost in Translation--which no doubt in the Trot imagination is a hideous example of bourgeois decadence--reveals more about the dysphoria produced by mediatized, financialized capitalism than could a thousand "consciously socialist"--gawd, what a terrible phrase--films without actually *presenting* those things. Similarly, The Wire has a lot to say about neoliberalism and its local manifestations without mentioning Greenspan or Rumsfeld or portraying specific political formations. Also, and manifestly, and though it would be dismissed by social realists because it's too big budget and special effecty, the Iron Man movie has some insightful moments about the war in Afghanistan and the industrial-military complex, way more than socialist pictures could.
How do I know? Well, because they exist, *in Hollywood*. They are called Platoon and Wall Street, for instance. And guess what? They completely suck. They reduce complicated racial, class, and imperial questions to morality plays about the correct way to do things. Obviously this appeals to Trots and socialists more generally, but there's a reason no likes socialism anymore.