Alan J. Pakula’s unofficial Paranoia Trilogy – Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976) – stands as the definitive cinematic exploration of American anxiety. Moving from the intimate, voyeuristic dread of a private investigator in Klute to the vast, soul-crushing corporate conspiracies of The Parallax View, the series culminates in the real-world political decay of the Watergate scandal. United by Gordon Willis’s moody, shadow-heavy cinematography, these films trace the shift from private unease to a total loss of faith in public institutions.

 

As a bonus, we’ve thrown in a couple more of our absolute favourites in the 1970s US paranoia sub-genre – both of which zoom in on surveillance also central to Klute. Sidney Lumet’s Sean Connery-starring heist caper The Anderson Tapes (1971) and the surveillance grandaddy of them all, Francis Coppola’s The Conversation, featuring a never-better Gene Hackman.