The Manchurian Candidate

Don't bother with Jonathan Demme's toothless 2004 remake; the rereleased classic cold war thriller from 1962 by John Frankenheimer packs a harder punch. Laurence Harvey plays the decorated Korean war veteran who arrives back home without any memory of being brainwashed by the communists as a "sleeper", ready to assassinate the president. Frank Sinatra is his army buddy who suspects the plot. The creepy hypnosis scenes prefigure the psychedelic paranoia of Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner: the angry press conference bears a sense memory of the Nixon-Kennedy TV debate. A pin-sharp nightmare.