Manchurian Candidate, The

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Angela Lansbury's frighteningly in-check performance is alone worth the trip.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

A veritable salad of mixed genres and emotional textures, this exciting black-and-white cold war thriller runs more than two hours and never flags for an instant...A powerful experience, alternately corrosive with dark parodic humor, suspenseful, moving, and terrifying.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Here is a movie that was made more than 25 years ago, and it feels as if it were made yesterday. Not a moment of The Manchurian Candidate lacks edge and tension and a cynical spin. [Re-release]

Empire Kim Newman

A dazzling spy thriller that’s still amazing.

Los Angeles Times Sheila Benson

The Manchurian Candidate proves that its fascination is intact. [12 Jan 1998, p.C1; Re-Release]

The New Yorker Pauline Kael

It may be the most sophisticated political satire ever made in Hollywood. (As quoted by Roger Ebert)

Variety Staff (Not Credited)

One of the wildest fabrications any author has ever tried to palm off on a gullible public. But the fascinating thing is that, from uncertain premise to shattering conclusion, one does not question plausibility of the events being rooted in their own cinematic reality.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Manchurian, with its fatalistic, dreamlike quality, comprises two of [Frankenheimer's] finest hours. [Re-release]

Entertainment Weekly David Everitt

This gonzo satiric thriller is a riveting portrait of early-60's paranoia. [15 Nov 1996, p.82]

Time Richard Corliss

The performances are daring and assured, especially Lansbury's holy terror of Momism and Harvey's snide, pathetic pawn, brainwashed by both KGB AND CIA. [21 March 1988, p.84]

TV Guide Staff (Not Credited)

But it is Angela Lansbury's incestuous, power-mad mother who makes your blood run cold. This was the peak of the first part of her career, which depended upon these hardbitten kind of characters. Forget Hitchcock--here's the monster mother of all time.

Washington Post Hal Hinson

An exceedingly loopy satire of the entire American political circus, and could be viewed as offensive to the sensitive-souled in either camp. And time hasn't in the least softened its bite. [Re-release]

Film Threat Stuart Swineford

Complaints? Sure, I had a few: The liberal use of insta-sweat whenever the character in question is experiencing tension, Harvey's aforementioned accent, one over-used shot composition that places the action at a great distance with a giant-headed supporting actor in the extreme foreground. [Re-release]

The New York Times Bosley Crowther

The film is so artfully contrived, the plot so interestingly started, the dialogue so racy and sharp, and John Frankenheimer's direction so exciting in the style of Orson Welles when he was making Citizen Kane and other pictures that the fascination of it is strong. So many fine cinematic touches and action details pop up that one keeps wishing the subject would develop into something more than it does.