The Manchurian Candidate

Gulf War hero and Democrat congressman Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) is picked to become a candidate for Vice President, partly through the influence of his powerful mother, a senator (Meryl Streep). Meanwhile comrades from his former unit are starting to have nightmares about the operation for which Shaw was awarded the Medal of Honor. Major Marco (Denzel Washington) is determined to dig out the truth…

Twenty years after it came out, this smart 2004 update on Richard Condon’s classic paranoia novel (previously filmed by John Frankenheimer in 1961) feels weirdly prescient in its anxieties around global corporate brainwashing, war profiteering, assassinations and election fixing. Although it never met with the acclaim of the 1961 version, or director Jonathan Demme’s previous thriller, Silence of the Lambs, it could be that this dark, enthralling film stands the test of time better than either of them.

Screening alongside the extraordinary Winter Kills, based on Condon’s 1974 novel.

Demme’s crowning achievement as a genre stylist and the most effective synthesis between the political concerns of his documentaries and his greatest strengths as a dramatist [it’s] a film that was politely received in its time but which has only grown more prescient and resonant with every passing year.

Jim Hemphill, IndieWire (2024)

The sense that reality is cracking open to reveal hidden evil and madness comes through in the filmmaking… Demme’s Manchurian remake feels like a culmination of everything filmmakers learned while working in paranoia thrillers over the next four decades (including JFK).

Matt Zoller Seitz, rogerebert.com

A gourmet-popcorn movie—a hugely entertaining thriller shot through with dark shards of agony and paranoia.

David Ansen Newsweek

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