The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
Average Rating: 7.1/10
Reviews Counted: 200
Fresh: 162 | Rotten: 38
While not the classic its predecessor is, this update is well-acted and conjures a chilling resonance.
Average Rating: 7.1/10
Critic Reviews: 45
Fresh: 35 | Rotten: 10
While not the classic its predecessor is, this update is well-acted and conjures a chilling resonance.
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Average Rating: 3.2/5
User Ratings: 66,149
My Rating
Movie Info
Jonathan Demme directed this updated remake of John Frankenheimer's 1962 cult favorite The Manchurian Candidate, a pioneering examination of political conspiracy and psychological reconditioning. Major Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington) and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) are two soldiers who served in the same company during Operation Desert Storm, but their paths following their tours of duty have been very different. Shaw, the son of powerful congresswoman Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep),
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Cast
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Denzel Washington
Major Bennett Marco -
Meryl Streep
Eleanor Prentiss Shaw -
Liev Schreiber
Sgt. Raymond Shaw -
Jon Voight
Senator Thomas Jordan -
Kimberly Elise
Rosie -
Jeffrey Wright
Al Melvin -
Ted Levine
Colonel Howard -
Bruno Ganz
Richard Delp -
Simon McBurney
Dr. Atticus Noyle -
Vera Farmiga
Jocelyn Jordan -
Robyn Hitchcock
Laurent Tokar -
Miguel Ferrer
Colonel Garrett -
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All Critics (202) | Top Critics (45) | Fresh (170) | Rotten (38) | DVD (30)
Happily, this extremely timely entertainment matches, even perhaps surpasses its predecessor.
Top CriticDemme serves the picture completely.
Strikes me as a very artful cover -- about the cleverest imaginable transliteration of the story from its historical moment to ours.
Far from a disgrace, but it's not freewheeling enough, not strange enough to make sense of our gathering dread.
Beautifully made and unsurpassingly creepy, it's the rare remake with something contemporary to add.
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.
If it isn't the original's equal, The Manchurian Candidate conjures up an air of menace sufficient to make most modern thrillers look like romantic comedies.
Sleek remake is more violent than original.
This humorless and nonsensical update of The Manchurian Candidate - a total misread of Frankenheimer's classic original - never quite engages, devolving the original's camp and satire into self-serious melodrama.
A rather decent imitation in the end with political subtext and very good performances.
It is as shocking now as it was forty years ago, but nothing in the 2004 version approaches that level of intensity, intelligence, or audacity.
Demme's direction is as punctilious as it was in Silence of the Lambs, careful with details and craftsmanlike with storytelling -- although we do have to work a bit to stay on top of things.
The original film worked also as delicious satire, where this wannabe cousin to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 ignites unintentional laughs.
...an above-average contemporary remake...
Demme's filmmaking has lost none of its jazz.
With an inchoate admonition implanted in its aggrieved, post-modern heart, Demme's Manchurian Candidate is blippy and fractured and smeared with color.
The movie is playing with ideas, and they're important enough to bear thinking about now. What it's playing on are our fears. And they're real enough, and worth addressing.
Impressively accomplished and highly entertaining, with sufficiently smart new twists to keep you guessing all the way to the nerve-wracking climax.
A superb piece of filmmaking by directing icon Jonathan Demme that surpasses the John Frankenheimer original in ways I didn't think possible.
Audience Reviews for The Manchurian Candidate
Super Reviewer
Super Reviewer
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- Eleanor Prentiss Shaw: Sergeant Raymond Shaw.
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- Eleanor Prentiss Shaw: But... but when you smile... oh darling, when you smile, that's what I live for. When you smile.
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- Major Bennett Marco: This isn't an election, this is a coup.
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Foreign Titles
- Un crime dans la tête (FR)
