Part 1 – The Masterpieces
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
A gap between what somebody knows and what somebody else knows defines the thriller, and every film in this first tier is precise about who holds which piece. Hitchcock’s formulation was that showing the audience the bomb under the table converts a dull conversation into an unbearable one, and the twenty films below are all variations on that arithmetic.
What separates this tier from the rest is discipline about the gap. The films lower down the ranking generally either close it too early or never establish it clearly, and the ones here hold it open for the length of a picture.
A thriller that makes me wait is doing its job, and one that surprises me is usually covering for a script that never earned anything. Every film in this tier treats the audience as somebody smart enough to hold a secret for two hours. I wish more filmmakers gave us that respect, and it’s the reason I’d hand any of these twenty to somebody who swears they don’t like the genre.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and the whole thriller ranking runs across nine parts.
Every film in this tier generates tension from a different mechanism and none rely on surprise. Take them apart in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
1. Taken (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of Taken (2008)
RLR: 10++++ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"The best pure action film of the century, shot in thirty-six days."
Pierre Morel built the whole film around a single competence and threw away everything else. Bryan Mills knows how to find people. There’s no arc, no crisis of conscience, no third act doubt, and the script gives him a phone call, ninety-six hours and a series of locked doors he opens in order.
The telephone conversation does work a slower film would spend forty minutes on. Mills states exactly what he is and exactly what will happen, the kidnapper answers with four words, and the contract is signed. The remaining eighty minutes are the audience watching it get honored on schedule.
Critics called it thin and were describing the design. The revenge thriller is stripped to the one element that generates forward motion, and the two sequels proved the point by adding back family drama and moral weight and collapsing under it. Nothing in the first film is optional.
People are surprised to see Taken at the top of a list that includes Hitchcock, and I enjoy that surprise more than I probably should.
I don’t rank by prestige. Morel made a film that knows exactly what it wants from the first phone call to the last locked door, and I prefer that discipline to a respectable picture that wanders. The critics who sneered at it were grading the film they wanted to see.
2. Heat (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Heat (1995)
RLR: 10+++ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"The peak of crime cinema, and the two leads share one scene before the end."
Michael Mann spends three hours making both men good at their jobs. That investment is the only reason the coffee shop scene works. Six minutes of two professionals acknowledging that each will kill the other and would prefer not to. Neither man threatens and neither bluffs.
The structure is a mirror. Hanna’s marriage is failing because he can’t stop working and McCauley’s life is empty because he never started, and Mann cuts between the crews so relentlessly that by the final act the audience has a stake on both sides of the line.
The downtown shootout was recorded with live blank rounds on location so the gunfire reverberates off real buildings, and Val Kilmer’s reload is still shown in firearms training. That authenticity isn’t decoration.
It insists that these are jobs performed by people who trained. Mann hired weapons advisers and trained the cast for months before a frame was shot.
Waingro is the loose variable and Mann puts him in the first scene for that reason. One man on the crew who kills when he doesn’t have to, and every catastrophe across the next three hours traces back to him. A professional operation with one unprofessional member is a different film from one under pressure.
The coffee shop scene is my favorite six minutes in any crime film, and it works because Mann spent the whole first act paying for it.
Two men at a table, both of them good at something terrible, and I believe every word they say. Too many later heist pictures copied the shootout and skipped the diner. They took the noise and left behind the reason anyone cared who walked out of that bank alive.
3. Die Hard (1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of Die Hard (1988)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"One building, one man with no shoes, and the film that reorganized the action genre."
John McTiernan shot an entire film in one building and made the geography the plot. Nakatomi Plaza has thirty-five floors, an elevator shaft, an air duct system, a roof and a parking level, and by the end of the second act the audience could draw a floor plan from memory.
Bruce Willis was a television comedian and the casting was considered a mistake. McClane bleeds continuously, panics on a radio, picks glass out of his feet and talks to himself to stay calm, and the vulnerability separated the film from every action picture that preceded it.
Alan Rickman was thirty-nine and had never made a film. Hans Gruber is polite, educated and running a robbery disguised as terrorism, and Rickman plays him as a professional irritated by an amateur. The crew filmed the fall off the tower by dropping him a floor early without warning.
The radio relationship with Al Powell does the emotional work and costs the film almost nothing. Two men who never meet until the final minute, talking through a handset while one of them is dying by degrees, and Reginald VelJohnson carries half of it from inside a parked car.
Everything the genre did for the next twenty years came out of this. The single location, the hostage structure, the disposable henchmen with names, the villain who wants money and says he wants something else. Die Hard on a bus, on a plane, on a ship: the pitch existed because this worked.
4. No Country for Old Men (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of No Country for Old Men (2007)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"The Coens adapt McCarthy and refuse the audience the confrontation it has been promised."
The Coens strip the score entirely and leave the film with wind, boots on gravel and the compressed-air bolt. Silence does what a score would do and does it better, because the audience has to listen for threat instead of being told where it is. By the midpoint every quiet room is dangerous.
Chigurh is a consequence with a haircut. The coin tosses work because he’s indifferent to the outcome, and the gas station attendant survives on a result that means nothing to either of them. Menace built from indifference outlasts menace built from appetite. McCarthy declines to supply an origin, a wound or anybody who knew him before.
The hotel sequence with the transponder is the best-constructed suspense writing in modern American cinema. Two men in a corridor, a light under a door, a device counting distance, and no music anywhere. Every beat is spatial and the audience can run the geometry themselves. Then the film kills Moss offscreen, hands the last twenty minutes to Bell, and ends on a man describing a dream about his father. Audiences walked out angry. The thriller machinery was never the subject, and the opening voiceover said so before the money was found.
This is the film that answers anyone who says a thriller needs a score to be frightening. The Coens did it with wind and a compressed-air bolt. I understand why audiences walked out angry, and I think they were wrong. The ending is the bravest choice in the picture, and a film that trusts me with a dream about a father beats any shootout I thought I wanted.
Jaws withholds its shark for eighty minutes and Rear Window never leaves one room. Learn when to slow down and when to stop in the Pacing Handbook.
5. Rear Window (1954) [full review]
► Read the full review of Rear Window (1954)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"A man in a wheelchair watches a courtyard, and the audience can only see what he sees."
Hitchcock built an entire Greenwich Village courtyard on a Paramount soundstage, thirty-one apartments with twelve fully furnished, and then shot the whole film from inside one of them. The camera leaves Jeff’s apartment exactly once and the audience notices immediately. The set required the stage floor to be dug out so the courtyard could sit below street level, and it was the largest interior ever built at Paramount.
The constraint is the argument. Jeff can only see what he can see, so every piece of evidence arrives incomplete and every interpretation is his. Hitchcock never gives the audience information Jeff lacks, so the question of whether he’s right stays open for most of the running time.
The script writes Grace Kelly’s Lisa as the person who does things. Jeff is immobilized and spends the film watching, and it’s Lisa who crosses the courtyard, enters the apartment and is caught. The film hands the physical risk to the character Jeff has been dismissing as decorative.
The flashbulb sequence is the entire film’s logic paid off. Jeff has one tool, it’s a camera, and he uses it as a weapon because the only thing he can do to a man walking toward him is make it hard to see. Hitchcock spent two hours establishing that he can’t run.
6. North by Northwest (1959) [full review]
► Read the full review of North by Northwest (1959)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"The wrong-man chase perfected, and the template every spy thriller since has followed."
Ernest Lehman set out to write what he called the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures and produced a wrong-man chase across four states with no plot obligations whatsoever. Roger Thornhill is mistaken for a man who doesn’t exist and spends two hours running from that.
The crop duster sequence is the most studied set piece in the director’s work and it’s built on emptiness. Bright sun, flat Indiana farmland, no music, no shadows and nowhere to hide, inverting every convention the thriller had established about where danger hides. Ernest Lehman wrote the screenplay as an original and called it the Hitchcock picture to end them all.
Cary Grant plays Thornhill as an advertising man whose entire skill set is talking, and the film keeps putting him in situations where talking is useless. The auction sequence is the exception and it’s the only time he solves a problem with his actual profession.
The MacGuffin is government microfilm and Hitchcock couldn’t have cared less. He said so repeatedly. The film’s interest is in movement, in a man being pushed across a map, and the last shot cuts from a hand pulling somebody onto a ledge to a train entering a tunnel.
7. Psycho (1960) [full review]
► Read the full review of Psycho (1960)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"The protagonist dies in the first act and the film has to start again."
Hitchcock funded it himself, shot it with his television crew in black and white for under eight hundred thousand dollars, and Paramount thought so little of it that he took a percentage instead of a fee. It made over fifty million dollars. Hitchcock bought up copies of the Robert Bloch novel to keep the ending out of circulation.
The structure is the most aggressive thing about it. Marion Crane steals forty thousand dollars and drives, a policeman follows her, she trades her car, and the film establishes her as the protagonist across forty minutes. Then she’s killed, and the audience has to find somebody else to follow.
The shower sequence runs about forty-five seconds across roughly fifty setups and the knife never touches skin on camera. Bernard Herrmann’s strings were written after Hitchcock told him the scene needed no music, and Hitchcock later gave him a raise for ignoring the instruction. Saul Bass storyboarded the sequence and later claimed to have directed it. Hitchcock and Janet Leigh both denied it.
Anthony Perkins plays Norman as nervous, polite and likeable, so the audience spends the middle of the film worrying on his behalf. Hitchcock makes viewers complicit by having them hope the car sinks, and the pause while it stops halfway is the cruelest moment in the picture.
The psychiatrist’s explanation at the end is the weakest scene and Hitchcock knew it. He shot it because the studio insisted the audience be told, and it flattens a film that had been working entirely on implication into a diagnosis delivered by a man nobody has met.
That psychiatrist scene is the one false note in Psycho, and the studio forced it. Hitchcock had the audience in the palm of his hand and somebody in an office decided they needed a lecture. Everything else in the film is as cruel and as clever as American movies got in 1960, and I’d put that pause in the swamp up against any jump scare made since.
8. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"A political thriller so precise it was effectively withdrawn after Dallas."
John Frankenheimer adapted Richard Condon and made a political thriller so strange that audiences in 1962 couldn’t classify it. A platoon is captured in Korea, conditioned, and returned home with one member programmed as an assassin and the rest carrying an implanted memory of his heroism.
The garden party sequence is the film’s signature and nothing else in the period attempts it. The camera rotates through a ladies’ horticultural meeting and a Manchurian briefing room in the same continuous movement, with the same dialogue, so the audience experiences the conditioning instead of being told about it.
Angela Lansbury was three years older than Laurence Harvey and plays his mother as the most frightening figure in American political cinema. Eleanor Iselin is running the operation, has been from the start, and her final scene with her son is the film’s real horror.
Frank Sinatra bought the rights after the assassination and the film was effectively unavailable for twenty-five years, generating a persistent story about suppression. The reason was contractual and not political and the legend outlived the explanation. Sinatra held the rights personally and the film sat unavailable until a 1988 rerelease brought it back into circulation.
9. Le Samouraï (1967) [full review]
► Read the full review of Le Samouraï (1967)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"The founding text of the quiet assassin, and Delon barely speaks."
Melville opens on a man lying on a bed in a grey room with a caged bird, holds it for several minutes with no dialogue, and puts a fabricated samurai quotation on screen beforehand that he invented himself. That opening is the whole film’s method stated immediately.
Alain Delon speaks fewer than a hundred lines. Jef Costello puts on a hat, adjusts the brim in a mirror, steals a car, changes plates, tests an alibi and commits a murder, and Melville shoots every step as procedure. The competence is the characterization. Melville had the set repainted grey three times before he was satisfied with the absence of warmth.
The color palette was drained deliberately, grey and blue with almost nothing warm, and the influence on everything from Ghost Dog to John Wick to Drive is direct and acknowledged. Jarmusch and Refn have both named it by title. Refn has called it the most important film he ever saw and Jarmusch built Ghost Dog directly out of it.
The ending is the only moment Jef does something inexplicable, and Melville refuses to explain it. He walks into a club with an unloaded gun and raises it at a woman he has no reason to kill. The bird has stopped moving. The film gives the audience nothing else.
I love any film that trusts silence this much.
Melville lets a man put on a hat and I’m more nervous than I am during most chase scenes. Imitators copied the grey suits and the stillness and forgot the discipline underneath. A quiet hitman with nothing going on inside is just a slow movie. Jef has a whole life in that apartment, and Melville never once explains it.
Chigurh, Hans Gruber, Frank Booth and a computer with no malice are four entirely different threats. Build opposition that works in the Antagonist Handbook.
10. The Conformist (1970) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Conformist (1970)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"A man joins the fascist secret police because he wants to be ordinary."
Bertolucci and Vittorio Storaro shot a film about Italian fascism as a series of impossible compositions, and the photography is the argument. Marcello moves through rooms that are too large, too symmetrical and too empty, and the architecture keeps insisting on an order he’s trying to join.
The premise is a man who wants to be normal above every other consideration. He joins the secret police, marries a woman he finds boring, and agrees to assassinate his former professor, and the film presents all three as the same decision made three times. The Paris sequences are lit warm and the Rome sequences are lit cold, and Storaro reverses the convention by making the fascist interiors beautiful. The dance hall scene, with Anna and Giulia circling each other while the room closes in, is among the most reproduced sequences in European cinema.
Bertolucci films the assassination in the forest at length and Marcello does nothing. He sits in a car and watches through glass while a woman runs toward him and is killed against the door, and the camera stays on his face. Bertolucci arranges the whole film to reach that passivity.
11. Jaws (1975) [full review]
► Read the full review of Jaws (1975)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"The mechanical shark kept breaking. That is why the film works."
The mechanical shark failed constantly in salt water and Spielberg had to shoot around it, the most productive equipment failure in film history. The animal is absent for the first eighty minutes and present as a barrel, a fin, a point of view and two notes. John Williams delivered two alternating notes and Spielberg initially thought he was joking. The cue does what the absent shark can’t, and by the midpoint the audience has been trained so completely that Spielberg can generate panic by using it when nothing is there.
The first hour is a municipal argument. A mayor who won’t close the beaches, a town that needs the Fourth of July, and a police chief with no authority and a fear of water. The shark is a business problem before it’s a threat.
Robert Shaw’s Indianapolis speech was rewritten on the night by Shaw himself after versions from Howard Sackler and John Milius, and he delivered it in two takes. It converts Quint from a caricature into the only person on the boat who understands what’s in the water.
Jaws makes me happy in a way few thrillers do. Spielberg lost his shark and found a better movie, and I love that the first hour is a town council refusing to close a beach. Anyone who has watched officials protect a holiday weekend over common sense knows that mayor. The Indianapolis speech is the best acting in the film, and Shaw wrote the version that made it to the screen.
12. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) [full review]
► Read the full review of Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Rio Bravo relocated to a decommissioned police station, made for a hundred thousand dollars."
John Carpenter remade Rio Bravo as a siege film in a decommissioned Los Angeles police station, shot it for a hundred thousand dollars in twenty days, and scored it himself on a synthesizer in three days. The result is the leanest thriller of the decade.
The gang is deliberately anonymous. No leader, no negotiation, no stated motive beyond a blood oath sworn in the opening minutes, and Carpenter never gives them dialogue. They arrive in silence with silenced weapons and the absence of explanation makes them frightening. Carpenter cut the original negative himself under a pseudonym to keep costs down.
The ice cream truck sequence broke the film in several countries. A child is shot at close range on camera in the first act, the censors in the United Kingdom refused it outright, and Carpenter has said he included it so the audience would understand there were no rules.
13. WarGames (1983) [full review]
► Read the full review of WarGames (1983)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"A teenager nearly starts a nuclear war looking for video games, and the computing is right."
John Badham made a film about a teenager who dials into a military computer and nearly starts a nuclear war, and it’s the rare technology thriller that got the technology close to right. War dialing, default passwords and social engineering are all in it and all real.
The film changed American law. Reagan watched it, asked the Joint Chiefs whether it could happen, and the resulting review contributed directly to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984.
Almost no thriller has a documented legislative consequence. No thriller before or since has a documented act of Congress attached to it in the public record.
The tension comes from institutional inability to stop a process instead of from a villain. NORAD can’t tell a simulation from an attack, the humans in the loop have been removed because humans hesitate, and the machine is doing exactly what it was built to do.
The tic-tac-toe resolution is the film’s cleanest idea. The film teaches Joshua futility by making it play a game it can’t win against itself, the only argument available against a system with no capacity for meaning. The line about the only winning move has outlived the film.
I’ve got a real affection for WarGames because it respects the machine. Most hacker movies since have treated computers like magic boxes with blinking lights, and this one put default passwords and war dialing on screen and got them right.
It feels its age in places, and that keeps it a notch below the others here for me. The idea at its center hasn’t aged a day.
14. Blue Velvet (1986) [full review]
► Read the full review of Blue Velvet (1986)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"A severed ear in a field, and the most disturbing film released by a major studio."
Lynch opens on white picket fences, red roses and a fire truck moving in slow motion, then a man collapses watering his lawn and the camera goes into the grass to find insects. The whole film is stated in ninety seconds and never becomes any less direct about it.
Dennis Hopper wasn’t cast until he called Lynch and said he was Frank Booth. The performance is unpredictable in a way almost nothing else in American cinema manages, because the audience can’t work out which tone any given line will arrive in. Hopper had been out of work for years and this film restarted a career that ran another three decades.
Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey isn’t an innocent observer and the film is precise about that. He asks to be hit. He hides in the closet by choice. Lynch refuses to let the protagonist be a witness, and the middle of the film is about a young man discovering something in himself he didn’t want.
The tonal control is the technical achievement. Roy Orbison played straight and used as a threat, a robin at the end delivered with total sincerity, and a police procedural running underneath a nightmare. Lynch never signals which mode a scene is in and the audience is never settled.
Silence of the Lambs gives the audience night vision and takes it from Clarice. Work out who knows what and when in the Point-Of-View Handbook.
15. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
"Hopkins is on screen for about sixteen minutes and won Best Actor."
Jonathan Demme shot almost every conversation with the actors looking directly into the lens, so the audience occupies the position of whoever is being addressed. When Lecter interrogates Clarice, he’s interrogating the viewer, and Demme uses the technique so consistently that it’s invisible. It’s one of three films ever to take the top five Academy Awards and the only horror picture among them.
Anthony Hopkins is on screen for about sixteen minutes and won the Academy Award. The performance is built on stillness and the decision not to blink during the first meeting, and Demme keeps him behind glass for most of it so the threat is entirely verbal. Jodie Foster’s Clarice is the film’s actual subject and the script never lets her forget her position. Every room she enters contains men who outrank her, the camera repeatedly frames her surrounded by taller people, and Crawford uses her as bait and tells her afterward. The night vision sequence is the most efficient piece of suspense in nineties cinema. The audience can see and Clarice can’t, the film gives them the advantage instead of the character, and the entire sequence runs on wanting to warn somebody who can’t hear you.
The night vision sequence is the hardest three minutes on this list for me to sit through, and the film earns it by spending two hours on how small the men who outrank her make Clarice feel in every room. When she wins, she wins on competence and nerve. That satisfies me more than any amount of heroic muscle, and the imitators that came after never understood it.
Ted Levine’s Buffalo Bill is handled with a care the imitators dropped. The film states explicitly, through Lecter, that he’s not transsexual and that the pathology is about self-hatred and transformation, and it still caused a protest at the Academy Awards with a real case behind it.
16. Jurassic Park (1993) [full review]
► Read the full review of Jurassic Park (1993)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"About fifteen minutes of dinosaurs in a two-hour film, and it changed everything."
Spielberg has the dinosaurs on screen for around fifteen minutes of a hundred and twenty-seven, split between practical animatronics and computer animation, and the restraint is why the effects still hold thirty years later. Stan Winston’s T. rex was a nine thousand kilogram machine that worked in rain.
The water glass is the most efficient piece of foreshadowing in blockbuster cinema. Two concentric ripples, no sound design, no reaction shot, and the audience understands everything about what is approaching before anybody in the vehicle does. Spielberg was editing Schindler’s List in Poland while approving these effects shots remotely by satellite.
The kitchen sequence is a horror film inside a family adventure and Spielberg shoots it that way. Two children, reflective surfaces, an enclosed space and animals that hunt in pairs, and the raptors are established earlier through a feeding scene nobody in the audience forgets.
Malcolm delivers the film’s actual argument at a lunch table and the picture then spends two hours showing it. Hammond’s people were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think whether they should, and the park fails through ordinary systems failure instead of malice.
17. Leon: The Professional (1994) [full review]
► Read the full review of Leon: The Professional (1994)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Besson’s best film, and the most uncomfortable relationship in mainstream action cinema."
Besson opens with a hit and spends the rest of the film on domesticity. Leon waters a plant, drinks milk, sleeps sitting up in a chair with a gun, and watches Gene Kelly musicals in an empty cinema. The routine makes the disruption legible. Gary Oldman plays Stansfield at a tone that shouldn’t work and does, because Besson gives him a rhythm. He’s quiet, then abruptly not, and the pill-taking ritual before each escalation gives the audience a signal to dread. He’s the only person in the film with institutional power.
The relationship is what people argue about and the international cut makes the argument harder to win. Portman was eleven during the shoot. Besson’s framing of Mathilda’s declarations is uncomfortable in ways the film never resolves, and the picture is better whenever Leon’s only response is bafflement.
18. Apollo 13 (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Apollo 13 (1995)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"One of the best procedural dramas ever made, and everybody knew the ending in advance."
Ron Howard made a thriller in which the ending is public record and the tension is total. Everybody in the audience knows the crew came home. The film generates suspense entirely from method, and it works because the method is difficult and explained. The weightlessness was filmed in a KC-135 flying parabolic arcs, twenty-three seconds of free fall at a time, across six hundred and twelve dives. Nothing in the spacecraft interiors is a wire rig, and the physical reality of the actors floating is why the sequences don’t date.
The carbon dioxide scrubber sequence is the best procedural scene in American cinema. A box of parts is emptied onto a table, an engineer states the problem in one sentence, and a room of people builds a square filter that fits a round hole using duct tape and a flight manual cover.
Ed Harris plays Gene Kranz as a man whose entire function is refusing to accept premises. The line about failure not being an option wasn’t said at the time and was assembled from interviews, and Kranz liked it enough to use it as a book title afterward.
Apollo 13 is the film on this page people will say doesn’t belong, and I’d fight for it harder than any of the others. The scrubber scene thrills me more than most gunfights, because it’s a room full of smart people solving a real problem with what’s on the table. Hollywood almost never trusts engineers to carry a scene. Howard did, and it’s the most suspenseful thing he’s made.
Psycho kills its lead at forty minutes and Fight Club is built to survive a second viewing. Study the shapes in the Story ARC Handbook.
19. Fight Club (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of Fight Club (1999)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.8/10
"A film about masculinity that most of its audience took as instruction instead of diagnosis."
Fincher adapted Palahniuk and shot it with deliberate imperfections built in. Cigarette burns in the corner of the frame, single-frame inserts of Tyler before he appears, a print that looks worn. The film is signalling its own unreliability from the first reel and almost nobody catches it.
The narrator has no name and the film never gives him one. That’s the clearest possible statement of the problem. He’s defined entirely by what he owns, what he consumes and which support group he attended that week, and Norton plays exhaustion instead of anger for the whole first act. The film’s argument has been consistently misread since release and Fincher has said so. Project Mayhem is a second identical trap with different furniture, the members lose their names as completely as the narrator had, and the film says this out loud.
The film constructs the twist to survive a second viewing, the hardest version to write. Every scene between Tyler and the narrator plays differently and none of them cheat. Nobody else ever addresses Tyler directly, and the one apparent exception is staged so it doesn’t count.
Helena Bonham Carter’s Marla is the element that makes the ending work and the one most often forgotten in discussions of the film. She’s the only person who has seen both men and the only relationship the narrator can’t resolve by punching himself. That’s why she’s holding his hand in the last shot.
20. Eyes Wide Shut (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"Kubrick’s last film, and the whole thing turns on a dream his wife describes."
Kubrick shot for four hundred days, the longest continuous production ever recorded, and died four days after delivering the cut. The film adapts Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, moves it from Vienna to New York, and keeps almost all of the structure. Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh were both replaced partway through the shoot as the schedule ran past a year.
The whole picture is a man who hears something and can’t stop moving. Alice describes a fantasy involving a naval officer, and Bill spends the rest of the film walking through the city trying to find an experience that answers it. He’s never successful at anything he attempts.
The mansion sequence is the most discussed and the least interesting thing in it. Masks, a ritual, a password from an opera, and a warning delivered by somebody who may have died for it. Kubrick films it as a dream Bill is failing to participate in instead of as a revelation.
The last line is the point and it took thirty years and four hundred days to reach. Alice names the one thing they should do as soon as possible, and Kubrick ends on it immediately. The film has been about two people unable to say anything true for two and a half hours.
Eyes Wide Shut is the choice on this page I expect the most arguments about, and I’m keeping it right where it is.
Everybody talks about the mansion, and I find it the dullest stretch of the film. The picture comes alive for me in the quiet rooms where two married people fail to say what they mean. Kubrick spent four hundred days on a movie about that failure, and it moves me more than any mask ever could.
Honorable Mentions: Thrillers Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in the conversation at this tier and each is on the list to be written.
The Wages of Fear (1953)
Clouzot put four desperate men in two trucks carrying nitroglycerin across three hundred miles of South American mountain road, and the suspense is entirely mechanical. A rotted bridge, an oil pool, a boulder. Nothing in the genre has matched the sustained physical dread.
Les Diaboliques (1955)
Clouzot again, with a wife and a mistress conspiring to murder the same man, and an ending the distributor asked audiences not to reveal. Hitchcock tried to buy the novel and lost it by hours. That’s why he made Psycho.
Sorcerer (1977)
Friedkin’s remake of The Wages of Fear opened against Star Wars and was destroyed. The rope bridge sequence took three months and nearly bankrupted the production, and it’s one of the great set pieces in American cinema.
The Vanishing (1988)
George Sluizer built a film around a man who needs to know what happened to his girlfriend more than he needs to be safe, and then gives him the answer. The last two minutes are among the most upsetting in the genre.
The Hitcher (1986)
Rutger Hauer plays a hitchhiker with no motive and no stated goal who spends the film framing a young man for his own murders. Eric Red wrote it and there’s no explanation anywhere in it. That’s why it works.
Dead Calm (1989)
Phillip Noyce put three people on two boats in the Pacific and generated a hundred minutes of suspense from geography and a dinghy. Nicole Kidman was twenty-one and Billy Zane has never been better cast.
Wait Until Dark (1967)
Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman in an apartment with three men running a con on her, and the final sequence turns every light off so the audience is in her position. Cinemas dimmed their houselights for it.
Charade (1963)
Stanley Donen made the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made, with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn chasing a quarter of a million dollars across Paris. A malformed copyright notice put it into the public domain almost immediately.
Blow Out (1981)
De Palma put John Travolta in as a sound recordist who captures a political assassination by accident and spends the film trying to prove it. The final scene is the cruellest joke in his filmography.
Marathon Man (1976)
Schlesinger adapted William Goldman with Dustin Hoffman hunted across New York by a Nazi dentist, and Olivier’s interrogation scene made a generation frightened of a chair. Goldman wrote both the novel and the screenplay.
The Parallax View (1974)
Pakula built a conspiracy thriller in which the protagonist is being managed from the first scene and never works it out. The recruitment montage is five minutes of images with no dialogue and it’s still disturbing.
Cure (1997)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa made a police procedural about a man who persuades strangers to commit murders and whom the police can’t charge with anything. It’s shot in long static wides and the film explains almost nothing at any point.
Dishonorable Mentions: Thrillers That Failed
Also unreviewed here, and worth naming because each had a real premise and lost it somewhere between script and screen.
The Snowman (2017)
Tomas Alfredson has said publicly that ten to fifteen percent of the script was never shot, and it shows in every reel. Fassbender investigates a case that skips steps, and another actor dubs Val Kilmer throughout.
The Forgotten (2004)
Julianne Moore plays a mother whose son has been erased from every record and every memory. That’s a strong premise until the film answers it with aliens conducting an experiment. The reveal converts a grief thriller into nothing in one line.
The Number 23 (2007)
Joel Schumacher and Jim Carrey built a thriller on numerology, so the central mystery can produce any result the plot requires. There’s no way for an audience to reason ahead of a system with no rules.
Passengers (2016)
A dark premise about a man waking a stranger to die with him, reassembled in the edit into a romance. The film knows what it is and flinches, and the third act rescue plot exists to forgive him.
Trespass (2011)
Joel Schumacher, Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman in a home invasion film shot in twelve days. Every character reverses position repeatedly, the reversals contradict each other, and it took under twenty-five thousand dollars domestically.
The Bye Bye Man (2017)
A supernatural thriller that states, breaks and restates its rules across ninety-six minutes. The characters defeat the threat by not thinking about it, removing any possible tactic and any possible tension.
These six make me angrier than plain bad movies, because each one had something worth making. A mother told that her son never existed is a terrific premise, and The Forgotten threw it away on aliens. When a film cheats like that, it wastes the audience’s goodwill along with its own idea, and I have a hard time forgiving it.
What Do You Think?
Thriller is the widest genre on this site, and the top tier is where I test the definition hardest. Jurassic Park and Apollo 13 sitting beside Le Samourai and The Conformist will bother people, and I’m fine with that. A thriller reaches this tier by making me hold my breath, and I don’t care whether it pulled that off with a crop duster or a duct-taped air filter. Tell me which one you’d throw off the list, and bring a reason.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
