Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Anoushka Slater While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Leofwine_draca THE PARALLAX VIEW is another gripping conspiracy thriller from the decade that made so many of them. Warren Beatty plays a crusading reporter investigating the mysterious deaths of a number of his peers, deaths which may or may not be connected to the murder of a politician at which he was present a few years previously. This film is different from the others I've watched, far less complex in terms of plot. It's very much a visual experience which reaches a high in a montage of imagery which attempts to get across what it feels like to be brainwashed. Beatty is a solid lead and there are some good supporting players like Anthony Zerbe and Hume Cronyn, while the level of suspense and paranoia is high. There are also some great set-pieces, particularly early on, with the only let down being the bit where they don't have the money to show a plane exploding. The film's air of ambiguity helps a treat too.

bkoganbing If you are given to conspiracy theories than you should look no further than The Parallax View which goes way over the top in saying that all the assassinations in that spate of them and also attempts were the product of one group of secret conspirators who are our permanent government. The extremes should love this film from the John Birch Society to the WikiLeaks fans.Warren Beatty is a reporter for a Seattle newspaper and is on the scene of an assassination of a U.S. Senator and presidential candidate at the Space Needle. By the way talk about a place with no possible getaway.A few years later Paula Prentiss comes to him scared out of her mind in that several witnesses of said assassination are becoming dead themselves. Shades of the Warren Report. Beatty investigates further and finds an outfit called the Parallax Corporation which seems to be looking for loner types who can be manipulated. The image of Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan etc. Seems like our assassins seem to be cut from the same mold.What can I say, but Beatty becomes a victim of his own story.I saw The Parallax View when it came out in theater years ago. It's still for the paranoid minded among us. I think it's a way bit much, but who knows with today's news and our president considered a Moscow stealth candidate.Stranger things have happened.

treywillwest 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.

AaronCapenBanner Warren Beatty plays reporter Joe Frady, whose investigation of the assassination of a U.S. Senator leads him to a multinational corporation called Parallax, which seems to specialize in training assassins for various missions. Joe infiltrates this group as a member, where he is made to watch a fast-moving slide-show of various images meant to invoke an emotional response. This all leads to the eventual revelation that Joe may well have not seen coming, or been prepared for...Unsuccessful conspiracy tale directed by Alan J. Pakula makes very little sense when all is said and done, and has only minimal suspense or dramatic impact. Not believable, though had elements of comedy potential that went unrealized.