A good political thriller is more precious than jewels, the Good Book says. Or it should, anyway, given that bad ones, like the poor, will always be with us. Who today would sit willingly through 2006’s The Sentinel, in which a there-for-the-paycheck Michael Douglas conducts a steamless affair with first lady Kim Basinger? Or Charlie Sheen’s blindingly awful Shadow Conspiracy (1997), mocked by the Washington Post for channeling “a greasy, tubby George Stephanopoulos”?

Even well-received efforts in the genre can age like crab meat in a locked car. Rod Lurie’s The Contender was one of the best movies of 2000 but feels now like a Lewinski-era time capsule, so dated are its sexual assumptions. To rewatch House of Cards is to be appalled that we ever liked it in the first place. If, as the French monarchist Joseph de Maistre famously remarked, “every nation gets the government it deserves,” the same is plainly untrue of government-themed entertainment. Politics simply move too fast for any but the most skilled screen artists to keep up. For every indispensable All the President’s Men, we get a dozen Manchurian Candidate remakes collapsing under the weight of their own irrelevance.