• MGM

News flash: It's hot! And dry! The American West bakes, the Colorado River slows to a trickle and the future of our water supply seems perilously shaky. It's not a pretty picture, H20-wise.

Movies have had a long history of understanding that the need for water—and the control of that resource—could drive a narrative, even if that idea manifested itself in a variety of different ways. As we make our way through this scalding summer, and ponder the parched future ahead, here's a do-it-yourself film festival of movies revolving around water and power.

Chinatown: The 1974 detective thriller starring Jack Nicholson is probably best known for Robert Towne's Oscar-winning script, which became almost a paradigm for teaching the art of screenwriting, and included the memorably creepy family history of Faye Dunaway's Evelyn Mulwray. All of the narrative's film-noir-esque machinations, however, surround the efforts by Noah Cross to develop the Los Angeles suburbs by getting water rights to divert to previously worthless arid land. Sadly, the well-known final line "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" served as a kind of shorthand for how futile it can feel to expect that powerful people will ever face the consequences of their actions.

Tank Girl: Long before the superhero movie surge of the 2000s, director Rachel Talalay's 1995 feature adapted the British comic-book series of the same name, so this one isn't remembered very much. Lori Petty plays the title character, a member of a commune in the Australian outback in the year 2033, protecting one of the few remaining independent sources of water after a comet hitting the earth created a mega-drought. Malcolm McDowell plays the villain who maintains control over most surviving humans by monopolizing water control under a single corporation. The oddball story includes soldiers created by fusing human and kangaroo DNA, but it now seems even stranger that the creators had to imagine a comet hitting the earth as the cause of a catastrophic water-shortage scenario.

• Paramount Pictures

Rango: Director Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean) continued their collaboration in animated form for this 2011 Western bursting with weird animation, unusual character design and a plot focused around a drought-ridden Mojave Desert town. The pet chameleon protagonist finds himself lost in the middle of the desert, where he creates a heroic persona for himself in the drought-stricken town of Dirt. Aside from being uniquely-styled among 21st-century CGI features, it also builds its narrative around the idea of water as currency, and a villain manipulating Dirt's water supply in order to facilitate his real estate speculation. Chinatown's Noah Cross would feel right at home.

• Warner Bros. Pictures

Mad Max: Fury Road: The long-awaited 2015 continuation of director George Miller's Mad Max franchise was justifiably praised for its dynamic chase sequences and old-school action choreography. But don't forget that warlord/white slaver Immortan Joe gets his power over the people in his post-apocalyptic landscape by controlling the flow of water. As valuable as gasoline remains in that world, it's still a memorable moment when a crowd gathers for turning on of a giant pipe, aware that there's no other way for them to get the water they need to survive.

• National Geographic Films

Water & Power: A California Heist: Marina Zenovich's 2017 documentary got a shot of recognition recently when clips were showcased in John Oliver's Last Week Tonight episode about water (the same episode that mocked Gov. Spencer Cox's "pray for rain" message). Mostly, the film is a celebration of investigative journalists like Mark Arax, and the advocacy groups who sort through documents, attend board meetings and do leg-work to find the connections between shell companies and those who control the water in California. There might not be much that's sexy about investigating public utilities, but Water & Power recognizes that where the very stuff of life is concerned, it's crucial to have people on the side of the public.

Bacurau: The Brazilian writer/director team of Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles crafted this strange, violent, unpredictable 2019 kinda-Western set in a remote Brazilian village, where a wealthy mayor has created an upstream dam that all but cuts off the local water supply, requiring the delivery of water via tanker truck. The rest of what happens is better left discovered than described, but it builds on the idea that these people are so without value that not only can their water be taken away, but they barely count as people. And unlike Chinatown, there's at least the wish-fulfillment here that someone cruel enough to manipulate water doesn't have to get away with it.