The Dead Zone

A schoolteacher wakes from a five-year coma able to see a person's future by touching them. His fiancée has married somebody else. He can save people, and it is costing him everything.

Cronenberg made it right after Videodrome and it is the least Cronenberg film he directed: no body horror, no clinical distance, just a truly sad story about a gift that isolates.

Walken is extraordinary, playing Johnny Smith as gentle, exhausted and increasingly alone, and the film builds to the question of whether you would kill a man to stop the future you have seen.

Martin Sheen plays the politician, and the handshake sequence is the best-directed moment in any King adaptation.

It is the warmest thing Cronenberg made and the coldest thing about it is the ending.