by Josh Sewell
Over the past month or so, I’ve had the privilege of helping with a cool project for the Atlanta Film Critics Circle that I can talk more about later. Regardless, it has allowed me to revisit a ton of great political thrillers, as well fill in a few blind spots in my cinema history with some bona fide masterpieces.
I mean, I'll take any excuse to spend time with films like All the President’s Men (1976), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Blow Out (1981), JFK (1991), One Battle After Another (2025), Chinatown (1974), North by Northwest (1959), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Argo (2012), Crimson Tide (1995), The Hunt for Red October (1990), No Way Out (1987), Oppenheimer (2023), The Parallax View (1974), The Post (2017) and Sicario (2015).
Whether these films depict real events or fictional stories, all of them reflect specific moments in American culture and take the temperature of society at the time they were made. If nothing else, they're a great starter kit for people to revisit some classic movies or experience them for the first time. I was in the latter group for several that made the list – I just saw Blow Out, The Conversation, Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View a couple of weeks ago.
Almost none of these films end with smiling characters giving each other hugs, so I’ve been in a pretty dark headspace lately. These stories are harrowing and deeply cynical (some, like The Parallax View, are downright nihilistic), but they all reflect the national attitude about politics at the time they were made. For many classics of the genre, that would be the post-Manson and post-Watergate eras, which weren’t too far apart.
They hit theaters relatively soon after the last dying gasps of the Hays Code in the late 1960s, when movies could now include violence, profanity, sexuality, nudity and other elements that used to be prohibited, such as the hero losing (possibly even dying) and evil going unpunished. As such, movies like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View – both co-written by Lorenzo Semple Jr., who also helped create the ’60s Batman television show – featured Hollywood golden boys like Robert Redford and Warren Beatty, but also lots of shadowy government assassins killing innocent people in graphic ways (for the time, at least).
The most revelatory political thrillers in my recent marathon were Chinatown and Blow Out. Because of pop culture osmosis, I knew all the big twists from the former before watching (it was a massive influence on the excellent Who Framed Roger Rabbit, after all). But it was a pleasure to watch Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in their primes, despite the pitch-black subject matter.
It was also chilling to consider what might’ve prompted director Roman Polanski to tackle such bleak material so soon after his wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by Charles Manson’s followers. (And, yes, ponder how a sensitive artist who’d experienced such monstrous horrors in his life could go on to commit vile acts of his own just a few years later.)
However, I was absolutely floored by Blow Out, arguably the best film writer/director Brian De Palma and actor John Travolta made in their entire careers. It’s – without exaggeration – an absolute masterpiece that jumped into my list of all-time favorites. The story of a sound engineer who accidentally captures proof of an assassination and uncovers a murderous conspiracy is haunting and scary. Although it sounds like a contradiction, De Palma’s tragic, perfect finale is heartbreaking and strangely beautiful.
These films may seem quaint now – “isn’t it shocking that our government is corrupt and murderous?!” – but they serve as both time capsules and a trail of breadcrumbs to show how we got to our current moment. Now perhaps a new generation of filmmakers can blaze a new path forward and help us fix it, a sentiment writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson alludes to in the brilliant final scene of One Battle After Another.
I mean, I'll take any excuse to spend time with films like All the President’s Men (1976), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Blow Out (1981), JFK (1991), One Battle After Another (2025), Chinatown (1974), North by Northwest (1959), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Argo (2012), Crimson Tide (1995), The Hunt for Red October (1990), No Way Out (1987), Oppenheimer (2023), The Parallax View (1974), The Post (2017) and Sicario (2015).
Whether these films depict real events or fictional stories, all of them reflect specific moments in American culture and take the temperature of society at the time they were made. If nothing else, they're a great starter kit for people to revisit some classic movies or experience them for the first time. I was in the latter group for several that made the list – I just saw Blow Out, The Conversation, Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View a couple of weeks ago.
Almost none of these films end with smiling characters giving each other hugs, so I’ve been in a pretty dark headspace lately. These stories are harrowing and deeply cynical (some, like The Parallax View, are downright nihilistic), but they all reflect the national attitude about politics at the time they were made. For many classics of the genre, that would be the post-Manson and post-Watergate eras, which weren’t too far apart.
They hit theaters relatively soon after the last dying gasps of the Hays Code in the late 1960s, when movies could now include violence, profanity, sexuality, nudity and other elements that used to be prohibited, such as the hero losing (possibly even dying) and evil going unpunished. As such, movies like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View – both co-written by Lorenzo Semple Jr., who also helped create the ’60s Batman television show – featured Hollywood golden boys like Robert Redford and Warren Beatty, but also lots of shadowy government assassins killing innocent people in graphic ways (for the time, at least).
The most revelatory political thrillers in my recent marathon were Chinatown and Blow Out. Because of pop culture osmosis, I knew all the big twists from the former before watching (it was a massive influence on the excellent Who Framed Roger Rabbit, after all). But it was a pleasure to watch Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in their primes, despite the pitch-black subject matter.
It was also chilling to consider what might’ve prompted director Roman Polanski to tackle such bleak material so soon after his wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by Charles Manson’s followers. (And, yes, ponder how a sensitive artist who’d experienced such monstrous horrors in his life could go on to commit vile acts of his own just a few years later.)
However, I was absolutely floored by Blow Out, arguably the best film writer/director Brian De Palma and actor John Travolta made in their entire careers. It’s – without exaggeration – an absolute masterpiece that jumped into my list of all-time favorites. The story of a sound engineer who accidentally captures proof of an assassination and uncovers a murderous conspiracy is haunting and scary. Although it sounds like a contradiction, De Palma’s tragic, perfect finale is heartbreaking and strangely beautiful.
These films may seem quaint now – “isn’t it shocking that our government is corrupt and murderous?!” – but they serve as both time capsules and a trail of breadcrumbs to show how we got to our current moment. Now perhaps a new generation of filmmakers can blaze a new path forward and help us fix it, a sentiment writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson alludes to in the brilliant final scene of One Battle After Another.
Reach out to Josh Sewell at joshsewell81@gmail.com or on BlueSky @joshsewell.bsky.social
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