Part 2 – The Near Perfect
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
The films in the first tier mostly withhold information. The films here mostly show the work. Zodiac is about paperwork and jurisdictional boundaries. The Insider makes a confidentiality agreement into the most frightening object on screen. Nightcrawler is a man methodically building a small business.
That is a harder thing to sustain than a chase, because procedure has no natural climax and the writer has to supply one. The entries that manage it are here; the ones that reach for a shootout instead are further down.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the second of nine parts.
Mulholland Drive, Oldboy and The Prestige all conceal their structure until the last reel and none of them cheat. Take the shapes apart in the Plot Handbook.
1. Mulholland Drive (2001) [full review]
► Read the full review of Mulholland Drive (2001)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"A rejected television pilot rebuilt into the most demanding American film of its decade."
Lynch shot it as a television pilot for ABC, the network rejected it, and French financing let him add about forty-five minutes and turn it into a feature. The seams are visible and the film is better for them, because the first two hours behave like a series that has been cancelled mid-thought.
The structure is a fantasy followed by the facts. Betty arrives in Los Angeles, is immediately brilliant, rescues an amnesiac and solves a mystery, and none of that is true. Diane Selwyn is a failed actress who paid to have a woman killed, and the first two hours are what she tells herself.
ABC rejected the pilot after seeing a cut the network described as incomprehensible, and Lynch spent close to a year believing the material was dead before StudioCanal offered him seven million dollars to finish it as a feature. He wrote the final forty-five minutes in a single sitting.
Naomi Watts had been in Los Angeles for a decade without a break when Lynch cast her, and the audition scene is the performance that changed her career. She plays it badly, then plays it brilliantly, and the film is explicitly about the gap between those two readings.
Club Silencio is where the film states its method out loud. A magician explains that everything is a recording, a woman sings and collapses while the voice continues, and Lynch has told the audience that nothing they are watching originates where it appears to. Nobody in the theater is listening.
2. The Bourne Series (2002-2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Bourne Series (2002-2016)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"The films that made Bond stop and start again."
Doug Liman made the first one for sixty million dollars against studio resistance, rewrote Ludlum’s plot almost entirely, and replaced the Cold War apparatus with a man who cannot remember why he is good at this. The amnesia is not a gimmick. It is the only reason the audience can identify with him.
Paul Greengrass took over for Supremacy and Ultimatum and brought handheld camera and cut rates that changed action filmmaking for fifteen years, mostly for the worse in other people’s hands. In his the geography holds, because he shoots coverage first and cuts for pressure instead of to hide.
The Waterloo Station sequence is the series at its peak and it is entirely about information. Bourne is watching a journalist he is trying to keep alive, CIA analysts are watching him, and the audience is ahead of everyone. Nothing explodes and it is the most tense ten minutes in the franchise.
Legacy and the 2016 return are where it stops. Jeremy Renner’s film substitutes a different chemically enhanced asset and has no memory question, and the Damon return gives Bourne an answer he had already been given. The series ran out of the thing it was built on.
3. Oldboy (2003) [full review]
► Read the full review of Oldboy (2003)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"Fifteen years in a room, and the reason is worse than the imprisonment."
Park Chan-wook adapted a Japanese manga, discarded its ending, and replaced it with something considerably worse for everybody involved. Oh Dae-su is imprisoned in a room for fifteen years without explanation, released without explanation, and given five days to find out why. The manga ends with a considerably gentler explanation that Park discarded outright.
The corridor fight is one continuous lateral take of about three minutes, shot seventeen times across three days, with Choi Min-sik carrying a hammer against a dozen men. Nobody in it looks skilled. He is exhausted, he gets stabbed, and the camera never cuts away to help him.
The revenge structure inverts at the reveal. Dae-su believes he is the one taking revenge, and the film’s actual position is that he has been inside somebody else’s revenge for the entire fifteen years. The imprisonment was not punishment. It was preparation. Everything he found had been placed for him, and the placement is visible on a second viewing.
The ending is the most argued-about in Korean cinema and it hinges on whether the hypnosis worked. Dae-su asks to have the knowledge removed, the film shows a smile that may be relief or may be nothing, and Park has consistently refused to say which.
4. The Prestige (2006) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Prestige (2006)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Two magicians destroy each other, and the film tells you the trick in the first line."
Nolan adapted Christopher Priest and structured the film as the trick it describes. The pledge, the turn, the prestige, stated in the first minute by Michael Caine, and then executed on the audience across two hours with both magicians keeping journals that lie to each other.
The two secrets are deliberately unequal and that is the point. Borden’s is mundane and requires a life of total sacrifice. Angier’s is impossible and requires him to drown himself nightly. The film argues that the cheaper trick costs more. Angier never understood the difference.
Every clue is on screen. The double knot, the hats in the field, the bird cage, the phrase about the man’s hands, Fallon’s presence in scenes he has no reason to be in. Nolan shows the method repeatedly and relies on the audience watching the wrong hand.
Christopher Priest’s novel is structured as competing journals running across four generations, and Nolan compressed the whole thing down to two men and a single rivalry. The framing device with the descendants is gone entirely, and Priest has been publicly positive about every one of the changes.
Bowie’s Tesla is the element that makes the film divide people, because it introduces actual science fiction into what had been a period drama. It is also the only way the argument closes: one man’s obsession produces a machine that works, and the machine is worse than the fraud.
Vertigo gives away its twist two-thirds through and True Detective runs two timelines against each other. Work out who knows what in the Point-Of-View Handbook.
5. Zodiac (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Zodiac (2007)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"A serial killer film about paperwork, and nobody is caught."
Fincher shot it like a research project and the obsession is the subject. Graysmith is a cartoonist, not an investigator, and the film follows him across twenty-two years while the case destroys his marriage and his career and returns nothing except a conviction he cannot prove.
The film is scrupulous about what is known. Where the evidence is thin it says so, and it includes the handwriting analysis that does not match, the fingerprint that clears nobody and the jurisdictional mess across four counties, all of which weaken its own candidate.
The basement scene has no violence in it and is the most frightening sequence Fincher has shot. A man offers to show Graysmith some posters, floorboards creak overhead when nobody else should be in the house, and the film lets the audience calculate how badly this could go. Nothing happens.
Robert Downey Jr. plays Paul Avery as a man being eaten by the story in real time, and the arc is the one the film actually completes. He starts as the most capable person in the room and ends on a houseboat, and Fincher gives it about eight scenes across two decades.
6. Argo (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Argo (2012)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"A fake science fiction film used to extract six people from Tehran, and it happened."
Affleck adapted a declassified CIA operation in which six American diplomats hid in the Canadian ambassador’s residence in Tehran and were extracted using a fake science fiction production as cover. The operation was real and remained classified until 1997. Tony Mendez received the Intelligence Star in secret and could not tell anybody about it for eighteen years.
The Hollywood material is the film’s best writing and its biggest structural risk. Alan Arkin and John Goodman are running a joke about an industry while people are hiding from execution six thousand miles away, and Affleck cuts between the two registers without letting either undercut the other.
The airport sequence is invented almost entirely. There was no runway chase, no last phone call, no Revolutionary Guard pursuit. Affleck has acknowledged this, and the film is a useful case in what a fabricated climax buys and what it costs when the real story was already tense.
The Canadian contribution was substantially larger than the film shows and Ken Taylor objected publicly. Affleck changed the closing postscript before release. The complaint was legitimate and the fix was cosmetic. The postscript was rewritten before release and the Canadian complaint was never really answered.
7. Nightcrawler (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Nightcrawler (2014)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"A man discovers freelance crime journalism and turns out to be extremely good at it."
Dan Gilroy wrote and directed a film about a man who films crime scenes for local news and then begins arranging them, and the picture treats him throughout as a successful entrepreneur. Louis Bloom is never presented as a monster. He is presented as ambitious.
Gilroy shot in Los Angeles across four weeks, working mostly at night with a crew small enough to move between locations without pulling permits. The film cost around eight million dollars and took fifty worldwide, rare for something this unpleasant about its own protagonist. Dan Gilroy wrote and directed it as his first feature after two decades of screenwriting.
The business language is the joke and the indictment. Bloom recites management advice he has learned from online courses, negotiates hard, invests in equipment, expands his workforce, and every line of it is real advice being applied to something monstrous. Gilroy has said he wrote Bloom by reading business self-help books and transcribing the vocabulary.
Gyllenhaal lost about thirty pounds and plays the part with a fixed smile and no blinking, and the physical strangeness is doing work the script never has to. Rene Russo is the other half, a news director who knows exactly what she is buying and buys it anyway.
Robert Elswit shot Los Angeles at night as an empty and beautiful place, and the photography refuses to moralize. The city looks good. The footage looks good. The film’s position is that this is a functioning market with a supplier and a buyer. Elswit shot it digitally so the night exteriors could be exposed without additional lighting.
8. Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)
RLR: 9.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The best Die Hard sequel, and its only real problem is not being the first one."
McTiernan brought McClane back to a city instead of a building and the change is the whole film. The first picture was about geography under a character’s feet. This one is about a man being run around Manhattan on a clock by somebody who is deliberately wasting his time.
Samuel L. Jackson’s Zeus does not want to be there and says so constantly, and the film never converts him into a sidekick who learns to love the cop. The argument in the car about race is not resolved. They finish the day still annoyed with each other.
Simon Gruber’s riddles are a misdirection at the scale of the plot. Every puzzle exists to keep the entire NYPD focused on schools and subway stations while a convoy empties the Federal Reserve. The film explains this halfway through and the reveal still lands. The script began as an unrelated project called Simon Says and was adapted into the franchise late.
9. 3:10 to Yuma (1957) [full review]
► Read the full review of 3:10 to Yuma (1957)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"A western that becomes a chamber piece, and the outlaw is captured in the first twenty minutes."
Delmer Daves adapted an Elmore Leonard short story into eighty minutes of two men in a hotel room waiting for a train. Dan Evans needs two hundred dollars to save a drought-stricken ranch. Ben Wade is his prisoner and has considerably more money available. Leonard sold the story to a western magazine for ninety dollars in 1953.
Glenn Ford plays the outlaw and it was against type. That is why it works. Wade is charming, patient and entirely reasonable, and he spends the film offering escalating amounts of money in a tone that never becomes a threat. The pressure is conversational throughout.
The hotel room is the whole second act and Daves shoots it in tight two-shots with a clock visible. Everything outside is a gathering gang. Everything inside is a negotiation between a man who needs money and a man offering it, and the film refuses to let either position be simple.
The Bourne films rewrote Ludlum almost entirely and got better for it. Learn what to keep and what to discard in the Revisions Handbook.
10. Vertigo (1958) [full review]
► Read the full review of Vertigo (1958)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"Hitchcock’s most personal film, and the reveal arrives with forty minutes still to run."
Hitchcock invented the dolly zoom for this film, pushing the camera back while zooming in so the stairwell stretches and contracts without moving. It was shot on a model laid flat, cost around nineteen thousand dollars for a few seconds, and has been used by everybody since.
The structure gives away its own twist two-thirds through. Judy writes a letter explaining the entire deception, tears it up, and the audience now knows everything while Scottie knows nothing. Hitchcock chose that deliberately over preserving the surprise and it is the film’s most radical decision.
What follows is genuinely difficult to watch. Scottie remakes Judy into Madeleine piece by piece, the hair, the suit, the shoes, and the film films it as a man loving a corpse he is assembling. Kim Novak is playing a woman impersonating herself for a man who cannot see her.
It was a commercial disappointment and reviewed poorly in 1958, withdrawn from circulation for years, and restored in 1983. It now regularly tops critics’ polls, the clearest available demonstration that contemporary reception measures something other than quality. It has topped the Sight and Sound critics poll and its 1958 reviews were mostly dismissive.
11. Point Blank (1967) [full review]
► Read the full review of Point Blank (1967)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Avant-garde technique applied to pulp revenge, and it never winks about it."
John Boorman took a Richard Stark novel and shot it like a European art film. Walker wants ninety-three thousand dollars he is owed and works methodically up a corporate chain to get it, and Boorman refuses to confirm whether any of it is happening. Boorman had made one previous feature and MGM gave him final cut, an arrangement that almost never happened.
Lee Marvin plays the part almost without expression and Boorman shoots him walking. The LAX corridor runs over a minute on heels hitting tile, cut against a woman in an apartment, and the sound arrives before he does. It is the most imitated walk in the genre.
The organization Walker fights turns out to be an organization. Offices, receptionists, executives who cannot authorize a payment that size, a man who explains he does not carry cash. The mob has become a corporation and nobody inside it can find the money either. Westlake disliked the adaptation and refused to license the Parker name for it.
12. Get Carter (1971) [full review]
► Read the full review of Get Carter (1971)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"A London gangster goes north to bury his brother and takes the town apart."
Mike Hodges shot Newcastle as an industrial wasteland and put Michael Caine in it wearing a London suit that marks him as foreign in every frame. Jack Carter has come north for his brother’s funeral and stays because the death does not add up. Hodges had come out of documentary television and shot most of it with available light.
Caine plays Carter with no warmth available. He is polite, quiet and entirely without hesitation, and the most famous shot is him standing naked in a doorway with a shotgun making a phone call. The violence is quick, ugly and usually inflicted on people who are terrified.
The discovery at the center is the film’s black heart and Hodges plays it with no music. Carter watches a reel of film in a projection room, understands what happened to his niece, and the rest of the picture is a man doing what he was always going to do with an added reason.
The ending is why the film matters. Carter finishes the job, walks a beach dumping evidence, and is shot by a hired man who has been in the background for two acts. No music, no recognition, no last words. The body goes into the tide and the credits run.
13. Westworld (1973) [full review]
► Read the full review of Westworld (1973)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"Crichton’s original is tighter and scarier than the series it produced."
Michael Crichton wrote and directed it himself and produced the first feature film to use digital image processing, pixelating footage to represent the gunslinger’s vision. The processing took roughly eight hours per second of finished screen time. Crichton had published The Andromeda Strain three years earlier and directed this himself at thirty.
The premise is a resort where paying guests can shoot, drink and sleep with androids without consequence, and the film’s argument arrives as an engineering problem instead of a moral one. The technicians describe the malfunctions spreading like an infection and admit they do not understand the systems they built.
Yul Brynner plays the gunslinger as an inversion of his own role in The Magnificent Seven, same costume, same posture, no expression at all. He walks. He does not run and he does not stop, and Terminator, Halloween and most of the slasher cycle come directly out of that decision.
Louis Bloom is never diagnosed, Walker is never explained, and Holden Ford is too pleased with himself. Build people that specific in the Character Writer’s Handbook.
14. The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974 and 2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974 and 2009)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"A subway hijacking as a test of whether a city can physically deliver a million dollars in an hour."
Joseph Sargent’s 1974 film is about the New York transit system and the 2009 remake is about two men on a phone. That difference explains why one still works. Sargent spends real time on the control room, the dispatcher boards and the physical problem of moving a train with no driver.
Robert Shaw plays Blue as a former mercenary running a military operation on a commercial subway car, and the crew’s discipline generates the tension. They have a timetable, they have fallback positions, and they kill on schedule instead of in anger. Walter Matthau opposite him is tired, rude and competent.
The 2009 version replaces procedure with psychology. Travolta shouts, Denzel confesses to a bribe, and the two develop a relationship the original had no interest in. Tony Scott shoots trains in a way that makes the geography unreadable, fatal for a film about where a train is.
The original ends on a sneeze. Matthau has one piece of evidence, knocks on a door, and the film ends on a reaction from a man who thought he had escaped. Sargent cuts immediately. The remake ends with a bridge chase and explains itself twice on the way.
15. Three Days of the Condor (1975) [full review]
► Read the full review of Three Days of the Condor (1975)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"A CIA researcher survives because he has read an enormous number of books."
Sydney Pollack adapted James Grady’s novel, cut the timeline from six days to three, and made the most paranoid of the seventies conspiracy films. Joe Turner reads books for the CIA, goes out for lunch, and comes back to find everybody in his office dead.
Robert Redford plays Turner as somebody with no field training and a good memory, and the film is careful that every survival is improvised from reading instead of from skill. He knows how the phone system works because he read about it, a genuinely unusual competence for the genre.
Max von Sydow’s Joubert is the film’s most interesting character and he is a contractor with no politics. His final conversation with Turner is a professional offering career advice, and the warning he gives about how this will end is delivered as kindness. Von Sydow took the part on the condition that Joubert never be given a political motive.
The last scene is the bleakest in American cinema of the period. Turner has given the story to the New York Times and Higgins asks him how he knows they will print it, and the film cuts on Turner’s face before he answers. Pollack shot an alternative and refused to use it.
16. Total Recall (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Total Recall (1990)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"The film never resolves whether any of it is happening, and every element supports both readings."
Verhoeven adapted a Philip K. Dick short story with a seventy million dollar budget and a practical effects team, and the film has never once resolved whether any of it is happening. Dick’s story is eight pages. Almost everything in the picture is invention built on its premise.
The evidence for the fantasy reading is planted early and never emphasized. The Rekall salesman describes the exact scenario Quaid then lives, including the brunette and the Mars setting, and the film lets it pass as a scene about customer service. Nobody points at it.
Rob Bottin’s effects are the reason it holds up. The eyes, the mutants, the head that opens, the X-ray scanner: all practical, all physically present on set, and the film is grotesque in a way computer effects have never managed since. Bottin’s team built the animatronics over eighteen months and most of them work on camera only once.
Verhoeven’s position is that both readings are correct and he has said so repeatedly. The white-out at the end is either the terraforming or the lobotomy, and the film gives Quaid a line about it being like a dream immediately before cutting out. Verhoeven has said in several interviews that he shot it so both readings would remain fully available.
17. Presumed Innocent (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Presumed Innocent (1990)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"A prosecutor investigating the murder of the colleague he was sleeping with."
Alan Pakula adapted Scott Turow and made the best American courtroom thriller of its decade by keeping it procedural. Rusty Sabich is a prosecutor assigned to investigate a colleague’s murder, is having an affair with the victim, and is charged with killing her. Turow wrote the novel on a commuter train while working as an assistant United States attorney.
Harrison Ford plays the part with the star quality removed. Rusty is guarded, self-justifying and not especially likeable, and the film never gives him a scene that asks the audience to root for him. The performance is the least comfortable he ever gave. Ford took the part immediately after Indiana Jones and the studio was unhappy about it.
The legal material is accurate because Turow was a practising attorney, and the film keeps the procedural texture: chain of custody on a glass, a missing file, a judge with a history, and a defense built on a technicality instead of on innocence. Pakula had made Klute and All the President’s Men and understood procedure better than anybody working.
The last five minutes reframe the entire picture and Pakula shoots them in a basement with a hammer on a shelf. The confession arrives calmly, from the person nobody suspected because the film gave them no interiority at all, and Rusty’s silence afterward is the actual ending.
Westworld built a park twice, forty-three years apart, and the series version hides a timeline inside it. Study the method in the World Builder’s Handbook.
18. True Detective – “The Long Bright Dark” (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of True Detective – “The Long Bright Dark” (2014)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.8/10
"Three time periods, two unreliable accounts, and a body arranged in a cane field."
Cary Fukunaga shot the entire first season himself and the continuity shows in the opening hour. Louisiana in 1995 is photographed as industrial landscape: refineries, cane fields, a flooded church. The crime scene under the tree is staged as ritual and the episode explains none of it.
The dual timeline is the structural engine. Two detectives are interviewed separately in 2012 about a case from 1995, and both are lying to the camera about something. The audience watches the 1995 footage and then hears the 2012 account of the same day. Neither man knows what the other has said, and the audience is the only party holding both accounts.
McConaughey’s Cohle talks and Harrelson’s Hart does not want to hear it. The car conversations work because Hart is a reasonable man being lectured, so the audience shares his irritation while also finding Cohle more interesting. Pizzolatto keeps both responses live. Both actors took substantial pay cuts to make the eight-episode commitment work around their schedules.
19. Westworld (2016-2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of Westworld (2016-2022)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"One of the best seasons of science fiction television, followed by three of the most spectacular collapses."
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy took Crichton’s premise and rebuilt it from the androids’ side. That is the change that makes a series possible. The first season withholds its own timeline, running two periods thirty years apart and presenting them as concurrent. HBO spent roughly a hundred million dollars on the first season and shut the production down for months mid-shoot.
Anthony Hopkins plays Ford as a man who has spent decades building something and has one remaining intention nobody has identified. The performance is almost entirely stillness and courtesy, and the final episode reveals that every apparent obstruction was part of a single plan. Hopkins has said he took the role without reading past the pilot and trusted the Nolans entirely.
Season one is close to perfect and the decline afterward is steep. Season two multiplies timelines past the point of legibility, season three abandons the park entirely, and season four was cancelled mid-arc with the series removed from the platform that made it. The fourth season ended on a cliffhanger that will not now be resolved by anybody.
The maze is the season’s best device and the most misread. The audience spends ten episodes assuming it is a puzzle for the guests, and it is a diagram of consciousness intended for the hosts. The Man in Black has been solving the wrong problem for thirty years.
20. Mindhunter – “Episode 1” (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Mindhunter – “Episode 1” (2017)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
"A pilot that refuses to do any of the things a pilot normally does."
Fincher opens the series with a hostage negotiation that fails, and Holden Ford watches a man kill himself while he is still talking. The rest of the hour is Ford deciding that the Bureau’s vocabulary for why people do this is inadequate. Fincher directed four of the first season’s ten episodes and set the visual grammar for the rest.
The look is deliberately unglamorous. Fluorescent classrooms, motel carpets, a beige FBI basement with a boiler in it. Fincher shoots conversation with locked-off cameras and long takes, and the restraint makes the interview material land as content instead of as style. The series was adapted from John Douglas’s memoir about founding the FBI Behavioral Science Unit.
Jonathan Groff plays Ford as somebody too pleased with his own curiosity, and the series is clear from the first episode that this is a flaw. The road school sequences show him failing to read a room full of police officers who have actually seen bodies.
The premise is that language is the tool. Sequence killer, not crazy. The episode is about a man arguing for better terminology inside a building where terminology is policy, and it makes that dramatic by attaching it to a career he is risking. Netflix has confirmed the series will not return, leaving the BTK thread permanently unfinished.
Honorable Mentions: Thrillers Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or above and each is on the list.
The Conversation (1974)
Coppola made it between the two Godfather films and Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert who cannot stop replaying one tape. The last shot is a man tearing his own apartment apart looking for a bug he will never find.
The Anderson Tapes (1971)
Lumet put Sean Connery in an apartment building robbery while every participant is being recorded by a different agency for unrelated reasons, and none of them share anything. Christopher Walken is in it at twenty-eight.
Night Moves (1975)
Arthur Penn put Gene Hackman in as a private detective hired to find a runaway and unable to see what is in front of him for the whole film. The last shot is a boat going in circles with a wounded man aboard.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)
Peter Yates and George V. Higgins produced the most convincing criminal dialogue ever filmed, almost all of it men in cars complaining about money. Mitchum plays a low-level gunrunner with no illusions left at all.
The Day of the Jackal (1973)
Zinnemann adapted Forsyth into a procedural with no stars and no suspense about the outcome, since de Gaulle was still alive when the book was published. The tension is entirely in method.
Deliverance (1972)
Boorman put four suburban men on a river in north Georgia and the film is about competence collapsing on contact with a place. The canoes were run by the actors and several of the injuries are real.
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Hitchcock called it his own favorite and it is the one where the threat lives in the house. A niece works out what her beloved uncle is and cannot tell anybody without destroying the family that took him in.
Insomnia (1997)
Erik Skjoldbjaerg set a murder investigation in a Norwegian summer with no darkness at all, so the detective cannot sleep and begins making errors. Nolan remade it in 2002 and softened the protagonist substantially.
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Two men meet in a carriage and one of them treats a hypothetical about swapped murders as a binding agreement. Robert Walker plays Bruno as charming, needy and entirely unable to accept that the conversation was small talk.
Tell No One (2006)
Guillaume Canet adapted Harlan Coben and produced the best foot chase of the decade across a Paris motorway. The plot is preposterous and moves fast enough that nobody notices until afterward.
Notorious (1946)
Hitchcock sends Ingrid Bergman into a marriage as an intelligence asset and lets Cary Grant watch. The wine cellar sequence runs on a key in a hand and a party running out of champagne upstairs.
A Simple Plan (1998)
Sam Raimi adapted Scott Smith and made a film about three men finding four million dollars in a crashed plane and destroying each other over it across one Minnesota winter. Billy Bob Thornton was nominated for it.
Dishonorable Mentions: Thrillers That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each of these had a premise worth the budget and lost it somewhere in the second act.
The Happening (2008)
Shyamalan built a thriller around wind and plants and then had to shoot actors reacting to neither. The threat cannot be seen, fought or fled, removing every available tactic and leaves the cast running from breeze.
Unknown (2011)
Liam Neeson wakes from a coma to find another man living his life, an excellent premise resolved by a twist that makes the first hour retroactively pointless. Every earlier scene stops meaning anything.
Deja Vu (2006)
Tony Scott and Denzel Washington built a time-surveillance thriller with rules that change whenever the plot needs them to. By the third act the technology can do anything, so nothing in it can be anticipated.
Knowing (2009)
Alex Proyas made a numerological disaster thriller with two genuinely well-staged sequences attached to an ending involving alien arks and the book of Ezekiel. The tonal collapse in the last twenty minutes is total.
Sliver (1993)
Phillip Noyce and Sharon Stone in a surveillance thriller recut so heavily after test screenings that the killer was changed in post. The final reveal is delivered by a line of looped dialogue over the back of a head.
Basic Instinct 2 (2006)
Fourteen years late and missing the only thing the original had. Stone is game and the script treats the audience as though the first film never happened, explaining its own premise three separate times.
What Do You Think?
This tier is where the thriller definition stretches furthest. Westworld twice, a Bourne box set, two television pilots and a courtroom drama on the same page is a broad reading of the genre. Tell me which one does not belong.
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