Of all the best movies of the 1970s, none are so lacking in big-name stars as Alan J. Pakula’s bitter, intense, conspiracy-driven fever dream, The Parallax View. Even Warren Beatty, by far the best-known of the cast members, was not quite in the same league — in terms of recognition and celebrity, at least — as Redford, Newman, Pacino and other A-listers of the era. And yet it’s that very anonymity of the film’s (uniformly excellent) actors and actresses that provides The Parallax View with so much of its disquieting power: because there are no superstars to distract us, our disbelief is suspended from the very start. Beatty plays an absurdly good-looking investigative reporter who uncovers the frightening shenanigans of something called the Parallax Corporation that owns politicians, orchestrates assassinations, manipulates the media and, in effect, controls the world. The only things that feel dated about this film are the technology the good guys and the villains use to track and attack one another, and the fashions on display.
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