Elizabeth MacRae in The Conversation (1974)

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There is nothing new about paranoia, both as a reality and a metaphor, in the face of the unstoppable encroachment of advancing technologies into the beleaguered realm of personal privacy. Back when director Francis Ford Coppola and star Gene Hackman made The Conversation (1974), there was no such thing as a global positioning device, people were not yet being tracked by their cell phones and facial recognition hardware was but a distant dream. Still, the creepy, cramped reality created by Hackman’s character--a leading expert in electronic surveillance--and his inability to separate real threat from imagined danger casts an unsettling and beguiling spell that is every bit as pertinent and timely today as it was three decades ago.