Zero Dark Thirty really stands up well. I have it dvr'd and watched the Abbottabad assault sequence at the end right after seeing the Fox News interview with the SeAL who killed bin Laden. The sequence of events is amazingly close to every detail he described, down to the brick false door and the way the chopper crashed.
Great movie by cinema's best female director.
They haven't made a good Civil War movie in a long time. If you haven't seen Cold Mountain, I would rent it immediately, but that was 2003. I heard Lincoln is good, but Tony Kushner wrote it, and I won't see anything he screen writes for after that awful travesty Munich.
There's a great little TV flick called The Crossing, starring Jeff Daniels as George Washington, which starts with Washington's early defeats and moves on through him crossing the Delaware to victory. You can watch the whole thing online for free:
There's the John Adams mini-series that came out on HBO a couple of years ago, with Paul Giamatti playing Adams that was directed by the same guy that did The King's Speech.
Maybe you would like The Artist, a nichey silent film made a couple of years ago that won Best Picture. Not exactly the Marx Brothers, but it has the feel of a throwback black and white silent film.
I really hated Thr Artist. It gives a completely simplified notion of silent cinema.