The Manchurian Candidate: Critic Reviews

The Manchurian Candidate is meant to creep us out by building on a foundation of paranoia just this side of solid. Demme builds his model on stilts of fancy that let too much hot air blow through.

Jonathan Demme, updating John Frankenheimer's classic exercise in cold war liberal paranoia, has made a witty, anxious thriller for a new age of political uncertainty.

A case of smart and talented people trying to jam a Cold War square into a Gulf War circle.

A stylish hoot: entertainingly edgy and ludicrous all at once.

It shunts through the material, doing some interesting synthesizing, some genetic recombining, but it all adds up to something less powerful and interesting than the original.

Demme's film is more nuanced, less crazy-brilliant and, yes, probably less necessary, but it's still a confirmation of all the anxieties out there on the table and festering in our heads.

Following a dozen years of docs, light comedy, and p.c. weepies, Candidate represents Demme's best dramatic filmmaking since The Silence of the Lambs.

In movie heaven, the original is still the one for all time. Still, this update is remarkable for its performances, resolve and timeliness, and could well revive the snoozing political-thriller genre.

An even more powerful comment on its time than the movie on which it's based.

This is one popcorn movie that provides food for thought, all the while remaining tense and witty.

This is an intelligent and detailed work, full of fine performances.

Far from a disgrace, but it's not freewheeling enough, not strange enough to make sense of our gathering dread.

The first version was acidulous and brazenly absurd; this one is doggedly, wretchedly earnest.

Demme has taken a story we thought we knew and, while making its outlines mostly recognizable, rotated it into another dimension of conspiracy.

I liked it, but I was also a bit disappointed.

Strikes me as a very artful cover -- about the cleverest imaginable transliteration of the story from its historical moment to ours.

Washington, Schreiber, Streep and company -- and Demme -- have managed to make all the malevolent machinations seem relevant again.

That rarest of remakes: a reworking that puts an interesting new spin on a familiar premise but stands strongly on its own.

The rare remake that takes on its own times and spirit. It's not better than the original -- in some areas it's weaker -- but it is its own movie.

Demme never captures the clammy paranoia of the original, instead settling for a competent but largely hollow reinvention.

This political thriller about a brainwashed soldier being positioned for the White House provides a delectable network of dramatic tripwires that teases the mind and quickens the pulse.

Uniformly excellent performances keep this destabilizing tale ticking, yet one can't help wishing Hollywood had combined this cast and these timely themes with a little bit of imagination to come up with something fresh.

Given a story with meat and purpose and importance, Demme delivers a masterfully cast and smartly constructed film of devastating effectiveness.

This one plays more like a contemporary techno-thriller with ultra-clammy '70s conspiracy thriller overtones, and Demme milks the atmosphere of pervasive, sleep-deprived dread beautifully.

Packed with strong performances and a literate script, it is rich in resonances torn from the headlines.