Pleasantville
— In 1999, around the film’s release, Philip French wrote about Pleasantville for the Observer:
After a Hitlerian orgy of book-burning, the destruction of decadent art and notices saying ‘No Coloureds’ have appeared in shop windows, they draw up a code of conduct to restrict change and keep everyone and everything in its place. At this point, the film becomes a deadly serious fable about the current conflict between the free-thinking liberal heirs of the Sixties and the right-wing adherents of family values and religious fundamentalism who wish to restore an innocent prelapsarian America that never really existed.
It seems, 24 years later, Pleasantville is more relevant than ever.
(1998) Director/Screenplay: Gary Ross. Cast: Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, J. T. Walsh, Don Knotts