A 50th Anniversary screening of Alan J. Pakula’s ominous vision of America – captured in the wake of the assassination of the Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King and just before the scandal of Watergate is about to break.

Conspiracy and creeping paranoia seeps through every frame of Alan J Pakula’s The Parallax View - even the architecture and the soundtrack communicate dissonance and unease. Made two years before Pakula’s definitive Watergate film All the President’s Men, Warren Beatty plays a reporter who becomes caught up in the fall out from seeing a Presidential candidate assassination - a shockingly dramatic opening sequence.

Unlike the fearlessly heroic journalists Woodward and Bernstein, as played by Redford and Hoffman, Beatty’s reporter is drawn deeper into the corporate and political conspiracy enveloping him. It leads to an ending that does not result in exposure, but rather echoes Chinatown’s devastating conclusion.

Cinematographer Gordon Willis’ coolly stylized compositions give visual expression to a mood of the pervasive sense of dread and mistrust that defined the 1970s.

A 2K restoration c/o Park Circus and Paramount Pictures. The 35mm original colour negative was scanned in 4K in 2021; remastered in 2K by Criterion; 2K DCP created by Paramount with the original mono audio soundtrack.

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