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25 Essential Conspiracy Theory Movies
A survey of some of film’s best paranoid political thrillers.
It’s tough to remake a classic as respected and well-known as Frankenheimer’s original, but director Jonathan Demme reshapes the material in his own style, putting the emphasis on characters and the personal costs suffered by the brainwashed Major Marco (Denzel Washington) and the damage done when the unscrupulous attempt to profit by undoing democracy from within. Set in a Los Angeles filled with coded messages, secret hideouts, seemingly ancient songwriters, serial killers that target dogs, and other oddities, the film plays like a cross between Inherent Vice and Foucault’s Pendulum that somehow makes more sense the weirder it gets and the deeper Sam falls into the crack in reality opened up by the disappearance of a neighbor (Riley Keough) under (maybe) mysterious circumstances. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play, respectively, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose probe of a curious break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters puts them on a journey through a shadowy world of slush funds, dirty tricks, and dubious cover stories — and eventually to the President of the United States himself.
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