The Conversation (1974)

This actually works well as a companion piece to Crimes and Misdemeanors, as both have to do with the limits of personal ethics and conscience. Gene Hackman plays a very successful professional surveillance or wiretap expert who might be developing a conscience do in part to the new assignment he's undertaken, one which he only partly understands. Interesting examination of paranoia it takes us into the weird seldom explored world of the surveillance industry, that convention sequence is just so strange, it reminded me a bit of the sequence in the 2nd season of Mad Men at the Aerospace conference with the guy giving the presentation on nuclear war and all the attendees just treating it as though it were a presentation about milk to water ratios in chess slices. This is an interesting, rather low key work, great character piece for Hackman. 4 out of 5.