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This slow-moving but intense, stylish, visually sumptuous political thriller directed by Alan Pakula (best known for Klute, All the Presients Men, and and Sophie's Choice) somehow combines a preternatural clarity with a misty dissonance: it's like someone shattered the 1960s political assassinations and jumbled them together into a dream. Warren Beatty is great as the callow but dedicated reporter whose curiosity gets him in waters farther over his head (on some occasions literally) than he could have imagined. Several of the film's aspects are, and are probably intended to be, reminiscent of Hitchcock: the way things and people are not as they seem, and a final explosion of menace in the cheerful public environment of a political rally. One of the key films in the political conspiracy theory genre.

This justly famous film by Alan Pakula (The Parallax View, Sophie's Choice, All the President's men) ostensibly starring a very young Donald Sutherland as a small town cop turned private investigator who searches for a missing friend in big bad NYC would have qualified as a well-made but standard hard-boiled mystery if it were not for the stellar performance of Jane Fonda as the call girl whose help he enlists for his search, which lifts it into the category of a classic: rarely in film has a performance let us know a character so thoroughly. Advisory: drug use and language, scary but not too graphic violence, sex rather restrained by current standards.

One of the best political thrillers and one of Brian de Palma's best films, Blow Out features John Travolta in top notch performance as a sound engineer for an independent film making company in Philadelphia which specializes in cheesy soft-porn/slasher films: while out recording night sounds on a creekside for his audio library he sees a car plunge into the water and dives in to save the female passenger but too late to save the male driver, who turns out to be a leading candidate for the US presidency. Later, he realizes from the sounds he recorded that the blow out which caused the accident was caused by a gunshot, something which understandably the powers that be don't want known.

Nancy Allen's deliberately flighty performance as the rescued woman provides a perfect foil to Travolta's solidness, and the convoluted plot unfolds through both obvious and subtle allusions to historical events (Chappaquiddick, Dallas) and classic cinema (the title's resemblance to Blow Up is not accidental, and the scenes of mayhem in public venues like a large train station or a patriotic fireworks display where the crowds have no idea what's happening are very Hitchcockian.) Rated R for elements which don't seem all that shocking today. An extremely interesting film. The Criterion special edition DVD is as good as you would expect.