The film of the year is Enemy of the State. I don’t ordinarily go in for pronouncements like that, let alone make them in July; but we live in unusual times, and in this case the month hardly matters. Enemy of the State came out in 1998.
In those days, the op-ed chorus was not yet chanting that 9/11 had changed everything, and Edward Snowden, future leaker of the National Security Agency’s secrets, was a 15-year-old high school student. In retrospect, maybe a film critic could be forgiven for having laughed off Enemy of the State, interpreting it as a projection of the conflicts within producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s psyche, rather than praising it as a reasonably accurate depiction, in pop movie images, of the power of a hidden government, permanent…