SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Seen it over 10 times and I still dont understand the story. Not that it is complicated, but lots of events just deliberatedly arent explained at all. This only adds to the suspense though, because man oh man, do I get fascinated watching this slowburning thriller. It has no happy ending and it is not an entertaining funny action thriller at all. So be warned. I guess it is best suited for lovers of movie classics of the seventies, who can appreciate the finer qualities of dark moods and depressing suspense above simple thrilling entertainment. The story is about a journalist portrayed by Warren Beatty, who witnesses an assasination on a senator. Afterwards mysterious deaths start occuring to the few people who witnessed this assasination on the senator. "Somebody is trying to kill me". That's the plot of this paranoia thriller. The struggle of this journalist to find out, who is behind the killings of the witnesses is the nucleus of this very suspenseful story."The Parallax View" is without a doubt the ultimate seventies paranoia thriller. This "paranoia" label was given to numerous other classics too ("Marathon Man", "All the President's Men", "The Conversation") from that period in which some kind of evil agency was out to kill somebody for knowing too many secrets. All these classics were truly the best of independent american cinema from that famous movie making period in which among others also "The Godfather" emerged. I particularly mention "The Godfather" because the photographer of "The Godfather", the famous Gordon Willis, was also used for "The Parallax View". Gordon Willis is known as "the master of darkness", because of his magnificent sub dark lighting techniques. "The Parallax View" looks like a documentary sometimes, coming close to a true to life portrayal of political assasination events that happened in history. Gordon Willis and Alan J. Pakula are to be thanked for that fascinating realism.Director Alan J Pakula truly made his masterpiece with "The Parallax View". The portrayal of evil powers in the dark which control all politcs is done in a way few directors have ever achieved since then. Brilliant classic!

It has become commonplace to identify '70s Hollywood films as their own genre. I'll go one farther and identify this era as a collective, structural autuer. If that hypothesis holds any water, this is one of its impressive works. Made shortly after Watergate, and less than a decade after the JFK assassination, this envisions conspiracies and assassinations not as a disruption of, but a cornerstone of the American establishment. This is, in a sense, not a POLITICAL conspiracy thriller. The US government, or that of any other country, is presented as merely a dope of a greater power- that of the big corporations of whatever stripe. This is a dystopian capitalist democracy- one in which representatives are elected to "officially" be as clueless as the general populace about the real social reality around them. Perhaps the most subversive thing about this very subversive film is that the assassinations don't seem catastrophic, or even troubling. When one takes place, the victim politician is basically a walking sound bite. His sacrifice seems only the continuation of a ritual of banal brutality. In one scene, a film is shown that is supposed to condition the viewer to murderous obedience. It is a montage of images of Americana, including those of violence and oppression. In most '70s conspiracy thrillers, the evil that lurked beneath the surface had a predatory relation to the commonly understood reality. People were putting their trust in a machine that was not what it seemed. Here, the evil is the surface. America IS the conspiracy. DP Gordon Willis has never impressed me more. In his work with Woody Allen and Francis Coppola his show-offy use of shadow and in-the-frame lighting sources seemed at times to distract from the tone or theme of the film, as if Willis was only interested in defining his "look" regardless of its relation to the film's content. Here, it fits the tone of the film perfectly. The final scenes, largely devoid of dialog, in a hall filled with terrifyingly "patriotic" imagery, is gorgeous. Many of the shots reminded me of de Cherico paintings.

Independent minded Senator Carroll is assassinated on top of the Space Needle. The assumed killer falls to his death and a commission declares him to be a lone gunman. Three years later, Lee Carter pleads with reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) to investigate the Carroll assassination. The people around Carroll on that day are getting killed off. Frady finds something disturbing. He is attacked by Sheriff Wicker. He kills Wicker and discovers the name Parallax Corporation among the sheriff's belongings. His boss is Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn) doesn't believe him at first. He suspects that they are recruiting psychopaths and he intends to infiltrate the organization.The first half is really compelling. There is a good sense of paranoia. It fades a little after the plane bombing. They couldn't film the plane exploding. It's the first sign of the movie's limitations. I wish the movie could find the next gear but it's not really there. I also wasn't impressed with the long montage sequence that Frady sits through. It could be much more compelling but it feels derivative of 'A Clockwork Orange'. It's still a very good paranoid thriller.

The golden age of modern filmmaking, the seventies bore witness to the cinematic rise of a cabal of influential and often audacious young filmmakers. Alan J. Pakula was one such individual. His work is utterly and bleakly unique. The worlds his characters inhabit are devoid of mundane truths or realities. NOTHING is as it seems. Every situation. no matter how seemingly ordinary, has an undercurrent of conspiracy or menace roiling just below it's banal facade. The Parallax View is a letter-perfect snap-shot of this societal morass and the era that produced it. It's characters are burned-out, sixties idealists, running on the fumes of the failed counter-culture revolution. Pakula and his peers understood this ALL too well, and their jaded, cynical approach to filmmaking was their one common trait.