After his recent disastrous remake of Charade in The Truth About Charlie, Jonathan Demme returns to form with his remake of John Frankenheimer's riveting 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate.

While remaining true to the essence of the original, Demme smartly updates the story to the present, infusing it with an urgent topicality and the edgy, paranoia-steeped atmosphere of the great post-Watergate thrillers of the early 1970s.

Meryl Streep brilliantly, chillingly plays a highly successful and wholly amoral New York senator ruthlessly determined that her son (Liev Schrieber), a decorated hero in the first Gulf War and now a senator in his own right, is selected as the vice-presidential candidate at her party's national convention. Streep insists her character is based not on Hillary Clinton, but more on Margaret Thatcher.

As the moral centre of the drama, Denzel Washington plays a bespectacled US army major with more than a passing resemblance to Colin Powell. The film, which builds to a terrific climax, opened in the US last Friday, the day after the Democratic Party's convention, and is set to open here on November 5th, three days after the US presidential election.