This Warren Beatty thriller puts all the anxieties and tension of the 70s into a blender – and delivers a perfectly paranoid pulp mystery
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atching Hollywood cinema in 2026 can make for a curious experience. Take a look out the window, and you’ll notice that the US, and indeed the world, is in a polycrisis – though you’d hardly know it from the films at the multiplex. The odd timely picture aside, Hollywood today directly engages with the present moment only rarely; more Minecraft Movie than One Battle After Another.
In the 70s, when things were arguably last in a comparably sorry state – Kent State, Vietnam and Watergate for the US, economic crises and violent acts of world revolution globally – popular cinema responded very differently. Out of the establishment-sceptical New Hollywood that emerged after the demise of the Hays code, there came a wave of confronting social and political dramas, strongly allegorical sci-fi, and paranoid thrillers, including one of the most deliriously entertaining examples of the latter ever made: The Parallax View.
It plays like an airport novel that’s been deep-fried in conspiracy theories and post-counterculture cynicism. While investigating the murder of an RFK-like presidential hopeful, reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) discovers that a mysterious corporation, Parallax, is operating seemingly in league with or even above the government, recruiting political assassins through psychological tests with shades of mind control experiments like the CIA’s MKUltra. Along the way, our hero survives explosive acts of terrorism, has a run-in with a murderous bent cop and gets into a fistfight with a good ol’ boy.
