22 Years Later, Denzel Washington's Paranoid Conspiracy Thriller Is Still One of the Best Ever Made

Despite the fact that he was one of the last century's most talented filmmakers, much of Jonathan Demme's filmography outside The Silence of the Lambs (one of two Demme pictures preserved by the National Film Registry) remains criminally underseen — especially his 2004 remake The Manchurian Candidate. Based upon the 1962 John Frankenheimer thriller starring Frank Sinatra, Demme's film rockets the original from paranoid Cold War fantasies into the ambient unease of the War on Terror.