Director Jonathan Demme (1944)

Richard Condon’s 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate (2004), is a political thriller that tells the story of a prominent U.S. political family and their son’s involvement in a Communist conspiracy. The novel has been adapted into two feature films with the same title, released in 1962 and 2004 respectively. In the story, Major Bennett Marco and his infantry platoon are captured during the Korean War in 1952 by an elite Soviet commando unit. They are eventually brainwashed into believing that Sergeant Raymond Shaw saved their lives in combat, leading to him receiving the Medal of Honor. Years later, Marco, ...

The American legal drama film, Philadelphia (1993), was written by Ron Nyswaner and directed by Jonathan Demme. Andrew Beckett, a senior associate at the largest corporate law firm in the city, keeps his homosexuality and status as an AIDS patient hidden from his colleagues. Despite attributing a lesion on his forehead to a racquetball injury, it is actually Kaposi’s sarcoma, a defining condition of AIDS. Beckett takes several days off work to try and conceal the lesions and manages to finish the paperwork for an assigned case. He then instructs his assistants to ...

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is an American psychological horror thriller film directed by Jonathan Demme and written by Ted Tally, adapted from Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel of the same name. Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee, is tasked with interviewing Hannibal Lecter, a highly-intelligent former psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer, at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Her boss Jack Crawford has sent her to gain insights into another psychopathic serial killer named ‘Buffalo ...