With Watergate providing ammunition to feed the creative juices of directors and writers in Hollywood, Alan Pakula reached back a little further for the second part of his paranoia trilogy. It serves as a critique of the Warren Commission's findings from almost a decade earlier, a report that always seemed destined to deliver pre-determined answers, rather than the truth.

The apparent whitewash sowed the seeds for the decades of conspiracy theories around the assassination of John F Kennedy that were to follow. Pakula grows one of these into his own take on the rumours, placing Warren Beatty at the heart trying to track down the truth.

He plays investigative reporter Joseph Frady who works for a small-time newspaper. We first…

'This is an announcement, there will be no questions' is the final line of The Parallax View, and it could not be more apt in summing up a film deep rooted in post-Watergate paranoia. Alan J. Pakula delivers a fairly compact thriller with a long reach, tapping carefully into corporate conspiracy as he seeks to bring forth the growing mistrust of the age in political power, and the consequences of too many unknown figures being given too much reach into the lives of ordinary Americans. Warren Beatty's journalist everyman could well be us, caught up in a situation we don't full understand filled with an ominous sense of danger, which Pakula threads across the tapestry of his film. The result…

A 1970s political thriller that features a magnetic lead performance and sure-handed direction, Alan J. Pakula's "The Parallax View" may not be as significant as some of its genre contemporaries; but it is, nonetheless, an engrossing and well made piece of work. Shot in manner that builds distrust and slow-pulling tension, the film is visually compelling and narratively engaging.

"The Parallax View" is built around a reporter investigating a shadowy company's connection to the assassination of a Washington lawmaker. The story itself is straightforward, but Pakula delivers it in a way that shakes its audience with subtle and unsubtle violence, jolting reveals, and an ill-at-ease tone. He builds a world where no one can be trusted, and his protagonist is…

This superb conspiracy thriller from Alan J Pakula is probably the lesser of the trilogy of these he made behind Klute and All The President's Men, but it's a sign of how great they are that this excellent film trails behind them.

This one sees reporter Warren Beatty launching a personal investigation as to why numerous individuals that were present at the assassination of a prominent US senator have suddenly started turning up dead themselves, in numerous different and unusual ways. A conspiracy inevitably unfolds, as does a lack of sympathy and understanding from those he works with.

The formula is a pretty well worn one by now but I would imagine it was a lot fresher back in 1974.…

Paranoia employed as a structuring principle and a governing logic, rather than any interest in clarity or plot coherence. Parallax, “the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions,” translated into a visual language. We think, from the conventional perspective of film spectatorship, that we’re watching a human character, a star no less, go through a series of events, with all his humanity’s attendant agency and all Beatty’s star power’s attendant assumptions about heroism’s triumph. But viewed from a different position, it’s just empty depersonalized figures roaming through networks and systems and repetitions. Machines and mechanics abound in the stunningly composed widescreen frames, as do geometric patterns and formations; the architecture…

The most eye catching sequence is the indoctrination video, where free association of images given a warm, Norman Rockwell-esque nostalgia (the cornfields for 'home', a friendly paternal figure for 'father', a painting of George Washington for 'nation') slowly begin to accelerate, collapse and unravel, the imagery getting darker, more sexual, more contradictory, murkier - adult. The childhood image of political decency, of the somewhat mawkish idea of American public propriety, being interrupted by the televised political violence of the 1960s also characterises the theme of the end of the picture, beginning with a school band and then escalating to the conspiratorial fears around the Kennedy assassinations. I'm tempted to stereotype this as a particularly Baby Boomer perspective, tying the loss…