Z's international success is what made the political conspiracy procedural commercially viable, and The Parallax View belongs to the cycle of American films that followed it. The shared shape: a public killing officially closed as the work of one man, an investigator who will not accept it, witnesses who die one at a time, and an organisation that is never fully shown. Pakula's film removes the one thing Z allows, which is that its magistrate does get as far as indicting the officers before the epilogue takes it away. Weighted low deliberately: this is a claim about a cycle rather than a debt either film-maker has stated.