Broadly speaking, all of the MCU’s movies are superhero blockbusters in which the hero takes on a villain and ultimately thwarts them in a big final battle. But producer Kevin Feige has had fun with different genre frameworks from movie to movie. Spider-Man: Homecoming is a John Hughes-style high school comedy. Ant-Man is a heist movie. Thor: Ragnarok is a pulpy space opera.
The Russo brothers’ critically acclaimed 2014 gem Captain America: The Winter Soldier was inspired by the paranoid post-Watergate political thrillers of the 1970s. If you’re a fan of the movie’s style, check out these classic thrillers.
Three Days Of The Condor (1975)
The Russos cast Robert Redford to play Hydra villain Alexander Pierce in The Winter Soldier because he’s the actor most closely associated with the genre that inspired the movie. He starred in a couple of the entries on this list, including Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor.
In the film, Redford plays a CIA researcher who returns from lunch one day to find all of his co-workers dead, drawing him into a widespread political conspiracy.
The Parallax View (1974)
The second installment in Alan J. Pakula’s trilogy of paranoid political thrillers, 1974’s The Parallax View stars Warren Beatty as a reporter who looks into the titular Parallax Corporation and finds that its business is political assassination.
This movie exemplifies Pakula’s command of cinematic tension. The audience only ever knows as much as Beatty’s character, keeping them guessing and sitting at the edge of their seat.
Marathon Man (1976)
Dustin Hoffman stars in Marathon Man as Thomas “Babe” Levy, a grad student and long-distance runner who has no idea that his brother, played by Roy Scheider, is a government agent on the trail of a Nazi war criminal, played by the legendary Laurence Olivier.
Suddenly, his brother is murdered and Babe inherits all the political intrigue surrounding his death. Even his girlfriend becomes a suspect in the espionage case he didn’t know about.
The Day Of The Jackal (1973)
In Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal, a French paramilitary organization bent on assassinating President Charles de Gaulle enlists the help of a notorious contract killer known only as “The Jackal,” played by Edward Fox.
While the hitman shoots his way through anybody who stands in the way of de Gaulle, a Parisian detective comes closer and closer to figuring out his true identity.
The Boys From Brazil (1978)
Hydra’s ill-fated plan to raise an army of brainwashed super-soldiers like Bucky is reminiscent of Dr. Josef Mengele’s plan in The Boys from Brazil, adapted by Heywood Gould from the haunting Ira Levin novel of the same name.
In the movie, Mengele, played by Gregory Peck, clones Adolf Hitler 95 times in the hopes of bringing up a band of Nazi leaders to take over the world with the Fourth Reich.
Blow Out (1981)
Borrowing the premise of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blowup but emulating the style and techniques of Hitchcock, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out is one of the most brilliantly crafted thrillers ever made.
John Travolta stars as a sound recorder who accidentally captures audio of a political assassination while he’s out looking for foley for a horror movie he’s working on. The story is familiar, but De Palma’s telling of it is extremely tense and Travolta anchors the movie with one of the best performances of his career.
Chinatown (1974)
Jack Nicholson’s wisecracking private eye Jake Gittes initially thinks he’s following up a standard adultery case in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, the 1974 masterpiece that practically defined the neo-noir.
However, as Gittes digs a little deeper, he uncovers disputes over California’s water rights and eventually stumbles across the harrowing secrets of Faye Dunaway's femme fatale’s family history. Additionally, John Huston’s Noah Cross is one of the most despicable villains ever put on film.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Marvel has always worn the influence of The Manchurian Candidate on its sleeve. In Captain America: Civil War, Tony Stark even calls Bucky “Manchurian Candidate” at one point.
Released at the height of U.S.-Soviet tensions in 1962, The Manchurian Candidate tells the story of a Korean War veteran who gets abducted and brainwashed by communists. Upon returning to civilian life in America, he’s activated as a sleeper agent to overthrow the U.S. government.
The Conversation (1974)
Francis Ford Coppola made so many of the greatest movies ever made – The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, etc. – that one of them slipped under the radar.
1974’s The Conversation, a taut, tense cinematic response to the paranoia surrounding the Watergate scandal, stars Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who hears something he wasn’t supposed to and gets pulled into a dark conspiracy.
All The President’s Men (1976)
Arguably the greatest entry in the wave of paranoid post-Watergate thrillers is the one about the Watergate scandal itself. The final entry in Alan J. Pakula’s politically charged trilogy, All the President’s Men stars Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporters who brought down the Nixon administration.
Newspaper reporting has never been more thrilling than in Pakula’s perfectly paced 1976 classic. This is largely thanks to William Goldman’s Oscar-winning script, which makes the otherwise dry material engaging.