Word: paranoid
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...paranoid thriller is an expanding genre in movies and popular fiction.* The idea is to start from a thinly fictionalized version of a political tragedy like one of the Kennedy assassinations and build on it a thickly embroidered explanation that caters to the suspicion that such murders are plotted by a malevolent Establishment. It is apparently comforting for many people to believe that the course of the world is changed more by rational planning, however evil, than it is by irrational individual actions...
...conspiracy. If, on the other hand, the conspiracy is all powerful, then the audience is robbed of the basic pleasure of identifying with the protagonist's triumph over the odds. Pakula opts for the latter resolution in Parallax and it is a downer. Though a touch of paranoid fantasizing can energize an entertainment, too much of it is just plain crazy-neither truthful nor useful. And certainly nothing for responsible men to try to make a buck with in the movies. ∎ Richard Schickel
...called a novelty-is that this time the machine is a man, one Harry Benson, who has had a computer implanted in his brain. Subject to unpredictable fits of rage, Benson used to beat his wife and take potshots at the neighbors. He has been diagnosed as a paranoid psychotic and has volunteered for the implantation. Still the operation reinforces his deepest fear: that mankind, at the hand of science, is being changed into a race of machines...
...other hand, it is a good idea not to press him too hard about his opinion of the North Vietnamese, with whom he passed the time: more than six years. "Petty, vindictive, mean little people," he is likely to say, "an armed group of paranoid children." He has good reason to think so, for as Commander Richard A. Stratton, a naval aviator shot down over North Viet Nam, he became one of the most famous symbols of the American agony over the war. Photographs of Stratton, bowing deeply to his captors as he confessed to "war crimes," dramatized suspicions that...
Speiser's portrayal of Lenny at his last obscenity trial in New York in '65 is devastating. Haggard, hounded and profoundly paranoid, he speaks first to an imaginary listener outside the courtroom and then to the judge. Speiser has gleaned and woven together from Bruce's last performances an account in Bruce's own words of his 19 busts. In Chicago a foolish bigoted judge puts on a show for the electorate. It's Ash Wednesday and the jurors he addresses all sport ashened foreheads. "It was like the goddammed Spanish Inquisition." The plain clothesmen who are sent...