The Criterion Collection
Mar 10, 2021 — For about five minutes in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, the lights go down on our movie and we’re shown another—an increasingly deranged propaganda short designed to suss out whether someone is Parallax material. That is to say, an...
Features
Sep 20, 2024 — With their virtuosic celebrations of death, giallo films reflect the air of paranoia and fear that haunted Italian society in the 1960s and ’70s, a period when the country was undergoing dramatic, violent changes.
Essays
Nov 18, 2025 — This tale of paranoia and romantic jealousy slyly combines the conventions of popular Mexican filmmaking with the surrealist sensibility that made its director, Luis Buñuel, a legendary figure in his native Spain.
Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.
Essays
Oct 27, 2003 — Attuned to the ineffable weirdness and crushing mundanity of workplace paranoia, Steven Soderbergh’s film finds anger and sorrow in the way we brutalize our means of communication
The filmmaker talks about the hypnotic quality of L’avventura, praises Alan J. Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy, and shares how David Fincher’s The Game helped kickstart his career.
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, producer, and acquisitions executive for Severin Films. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022),...
Patrick Macias is the author of TokyoScope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion and the writer of the Paranoia Girls web comic.
The Daily
Jun 21, 2024 — We open with an Italian neorealist classic, steer through ’70s-era paranoia, and wrap with a blast of gnarly rock ’n’ roll.
Jun 13, 2012 — Tasteful British cinema got a refreshing dose of amorality with Danny Boyle’s stylish and violent tale of greed and paranoia.