When I first saw "The Parallax View" around 20 years ago, I thought it was mostly boring and aimless. I just tried giving it another chance and watched it on AMC. It's even more boring than I remembered! There are a few tense scenes interspersed with lots of odd stuff that has nothing to do with the plot. Many individual scenes are dragged out painfully, and the long scene where Beatty is shown a weird film in some sort of testing at the Parallax Corporation is one of the strangest, most self-indulgent scenes ever in a major Hollywood movie. I'm afraid I wasn't a fan of Pakula's "Klute" either, but I do like "All the President's Men," which showed a much greater sense of economy and generated a true sense of paranoia. And to my mind, the political masterpiece of Beatty's career is "Bulworth."
Review of The Parallax View
