Whilst the genre has never gone out of fashion, the 1970s were seen by many as a Golden Age of the paranoia-thriller, with Watergate, the Vietnam War and speculation about the Kennedy assassination leading to classics such as The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Winter Kills (1979) and others.
For this piece, we will look at more recent conspiracy-driven motion pictures, which have all used technological advances and the ‘surveillance society’ as a way of ramping up the paranoia.
Interestingly, there is a propensity for certain actors to turn up in this particular film genre – stars such as George Clooney (Syriana, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Michael Clayton, Burn after Reading), Gene Hackman (The Conversation, The Domino Principle, Enemy of the State), Tommy Lee Jones (JFK, Jason Bourne, Shock & Awe, Wander), Jeff Bridges (Winter Kills, Cutter’s Way, Arlington Road, Goats) and our very own Ewan McGregor (The Island, Goats, The Ghost Writer, Haywire).
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