Bronwen and I really liked this Jonathon Demme remake of the Sinatra/Lansbury classic, and yes, we know we’re almost alone in that. This one featured Denzel Washington as the Gulf War major brainwashed by the Manchurian Corporation to make one of his soldiers, again Raymond Shaw played by Liev Schreiber, a congressman and then vice president and then president to please his mother, this time played with wonderful abandon and control by Merrill Streep as the loving, incestuous, and brutal mother/Senator staging all this. All the acting is very good, and the script is taut and true in a totally paranoid manner. I bought into it immediately. Others felt it palled beside the original. I think this a less stylized piece and, in that sense, more believable. Perhaps it just pushed all my paranoid buttons. Again, the acting is really fine. We also liked the shorts included on the DVD about the making of the film, the actors, and the director