Most Thursday nights in college, my friends who were studying filmmaking and I would get together for a movie night and spend at least an hour debating which movie to watch.
What was the one genre that saved us endless arguments and made us all happy? The murder mystery one. Following clues, talking about who’s to blame, who looks suspicious, who’s going to die before the middle of the movie… It’s all incredibly satisfying, alone or with company. Except, of course, when you guess who the murderer is in the first five minutes of the movie and then you only see a succession of scenes that prove you right.
Director Rian Johnson and his all-star cast (Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Michael Shannon, Daniel Craig) bring the Agatha Christie-style murder mystery to life in this story of a wealthy family whose crime-novel writer patriarch has died unexpectedly. suspicious. It’s a charming, winding story that combines elements of Succession and The Game of Suspicion , where millions of dollars are at stake and everyone is a suspect.
Game night turns into reality when its host, Brooks (Kyle Chandler), is kidnapped. Max (Jason Bateman), Annie (Rachel McAdams) and their friends must follow clues to save Brooks before it’s too late, embarking on a wild adventure involving underground fight clubs, Faberge eggs and their creepy neighbor, Gary ( Jesse Plemons).
Using the repeating time game à la Stuck in Time , and blending it with the best of the mystery thriller genre, this film’s success builds on an inventive twist on the classic genre. After she is murdered by a masked killer on her birthday, college student Tree must relive the day over and over again until she can find the identity of her killer and save her life.
Based on Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel, Lost is the kind of movie that leaves you totally in a daze once it’s over. Ben Affleck stars as Nick Dunne, a college professor and writer whose seemingly perfect marriage to his beautiful wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), begins to unravel when Amy mysteriously disappears.
Scream , the original film from the iconic Wes Craven-created 1990s franchise, tells the story of high school girl Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and her friends as a masked killer terrorizes their small California town.
Robert Altman’s 1973 version of Raymond Chandler’s classic mystery novel is a total stoner-noir trip to Los Angeles. Private investigator Philip Marlowe does a friend a favor and finds himself entangled in a web of suspicious deaths.
The game of suspicion
Based on the board game, this 1985 black comedy tells the story of a group of seven strangers who become suspects after one of them is murdered. As the body count increases, you are invited to play the game and find out who is responsible: Colonel Mustard in the library with the chandelier? The movie has three different endings, just to keep you on your toes.
Set in 1950s Los Angeles, LA Confidential is a neo-noir film about three cops (Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe and Kevin Spacey) whose investigation into a series of murders unravels in a mysterious web of corruption and lies. It all adds up to an award-winning movie about dirty cops, the classic Hollywood scene, and the crime that lurks beneath the surface of sunny California.
Frances McDormand gives an Oscar-winning performance as a pregnant Minnesota cop on the trail of two killers in this classic dark comedy from the Coen brothers. If you don’t immediately think of Fargo when you see a wood-cutting machine or hear “Bet on it,” you should check it out right now. With its powerful cast (Steve Buscemi, William H. Macy) and an icy white backdrop, Fargo is a jaw-dropping movie time and time again.
Is Ted Cruz the Zodiac Killer? Perhaps. But this movie is not about that. Yet this 2007 film from director David Fincher is a gripping take on the story of the infamous serial killer who terrorized San Francisco in the late ’60s and ’70s, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo.
Murder on the Orient Express
In this award-winning adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel, detective Hercule Poirot is on his way home when a wealthy American businessman is murdered aboard his train. Stopped on the tracks in a snowstorm with an unknown murderer hiding in plain sight, every passenger is a suspect and Poirot must solve the mystery.
Perhaps The Maltese Falcon kicked off the genre, but it is with this adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel that it reached its peak. The true benchmark of the genre, of the detective surrounded by attractive and dangerous women, lost among false leads like the fog that surrounds the city, is this huge classic starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall directed by the great Howard Hawks.
Memories of Murder (Chronicle of a serial killer)
We’ve already talked a lot about this modern classic from Parasite director Bong Joon-ho. It tells the story of the first serial killer in South Korea and, although he was captured in real life years after the film was released, the search for this police couple laid the foundations for the 21st century thriller that followed Zodiac or True Detective .
We would not say anything outrageous if we ventured to say that we can consider Billy Wilder as the best screenwriter in the history of the medium (although very different, we would also say the same about Ingmar Bergman).
