Part 3 – The Excellent
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
Every film in this tier is rated 9 and several of them reached that on almost no money. Pontypool is one room and a radio desk. District 9 delivers an entire occupation through eviction paperwork. Misery is two people and a bedroom.
The pattern is that constraint forces a decision, and the decision becomes the film. That is true of the expensive entries too: The Insider has nothing physical at stake for most of its length and Mann shoots a confidentiality agreement like a loaded weapon.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the third of nine parts.
Annie Wilkes, John Doe, Hans Landa and Kyung-chul are four completely different threats and only one of them explains himself. Build opposition in the Antagonist Handbook.
1. Misery (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Misery (1990)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Two people and a bedroom, and Kathy Bates won Best Actress for a horror film."
Rob Reiner adapted Stephen King with two actors and one house and won Kathy Bates an Academy Award, an outcome a horror performance almost never gets. Paul Sheldon crashes his car in a Colorado blizzard and is pulled out by the wrong person. Reiner had made The Princess Bride and Stand By Me and this was his third King adaptation.
Bates plays Annie Wilkes as somebody whose politeness is the frightening part. She does not shout for most of the film, she apologizes, she uses invented profanity, and the register shifts without warning and then shifts back as though nothing happened. Bates was forty-one and had spent two decades in theatre with almost no film work behind her.
The hobbling is the scene everybody remembers and the novel is considerably worse. King has Annie amputate a foot with an axe and cauterize it with a blowtorch. William Goldman argued for keeping it and Reiner refused on the grounds that the audience would stop watching.
The typewriter is the film’s best object. A missing n, a demand for correct paper, a burned manuscript, and a writer forced to produce work he despises for an audience of one. King wrote it about cocaine and about readers who wanted more Carrie, and both readings hold.
2. Falling Down (1993) [full review]
► Read the full review of Falling Down (1993)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"A laid-off engineer abandons his car in traffic and walks across Los Angeles."
Joel Schumacher put Michael Douglas in a short-sleeved shirt and a tie, abandoned him in a Los Angeles traffic jam, and let him walk west across the city becoming progressively more armed. The film was read as endorsement on release and it is not. Schumacher shot in Los Angeles in the summer of 1992, months after the riots, and the heat is real.
The construction is careful about what D-Fens actually is. He has been unemployed for a month and has not told anybody, he has a restraining order against him, and the family he is walking toward is frightened of him. Every grievance he voices is real and none of them justify him.
Robert Duvall’s Prendergast is the counterweight and the film gives him the same day in a different register. Last shift before retirement, a wife who calls constantly, colleagues who do not respect him, and he absorbs all of it and goes home. The two men meet for ninety seconds.
The neo-Nazi surplus store scene is where the film states its position out loud. A man who assumes D-Fens is on his side is corrected violently, and the correction is the only moment the character is unambiguously right about anything. Douglas has said the part was the hardest of his career because the film never lets him be right.
3. Carlito’s Way (1993) [full review]
► Read the full review of Carlito’s Way (1993)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Built entirely on dread instead of surprise, and the ending is the first shot."
De Palma and Pacino made a second crime film together and it is better than Scarface in every way that matters. Carlito is out of prison on a technicality, genuinely intends to retire, and spends the film being pulled back by obligations he cannot refuse without becoming somebody else.
Sean Penn’s Kleinfeld is one of the great supporting performances. A coked-out lawyer who got Carlito released and now expects a return, and Penn plays the deterioration across months without ever asking for sympathy. The scene on the boat is where the film turns and neither man says what has happened.
The Grand Central sequence is De Palma at his best. Escalators, a concourse, a ticket hall, a shifting geometry of pursuers, and Carlito ninety seconds from a train to Miami. The audience knows where everybody is at every moment, the hardest thing in action staging.
4. Se7en (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Se7en (1995)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
"It rains for the entire film except the end, and by then you know that cannot be good."
Fincher took a studio thriller and refused to light it. The city has no name, it rains for six of the seven days, and Darius Khondji processed the stock to crush the blacks so entire scenes take place in rooms the audience cannot fully see.
The structure is a countdown the detectives never get ahead of. They arrive after every murder. The sloth victim is alive and that is worse. John Doe is not caught, he walks into a police station covered in blood and surrenders, and the last act is him directing the ending he wrote.
Kevin Spacey’s name was kept off the posters and out of the opening credits so the audience would not anticipate him, and the studio agreed. He appears with forty minutes left and the car ride to the desert is the film’s best writing. New Line had wanted Denzel Washington, who turned it down and has said publicly that he regrets it.
Andrew Kevin Walker wrote it while working in a Tower Records store in Manhattan and has said the city in the script is the one he was walking home through. New Line bought an earlier draft with a different ending and the original was restored by an administrative error.
The box was the fight. New Line wanted an alternative ending with a chase and Fincher and Pitt both refused, and the shooting script Pitt signed for had the original. The contents are never shown in any frame and the entire third act depends on a courier’s face and Somerset’s reaction.
The Sixth Sense, 12 Monkeys and Se7en all withhold something structural and none of them cheat to do it. Study the shapes in the Story ARC Handbook.
5. 12 Monkeys (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of 12 Monkeys (1995)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"Determinism with no escape hatch, and the film closes the loop in front of a child."
Gilliam expanded Chris Marker’s La Jetee from twenty-eight minutes of still photographs into a feature and kept the central device intact: a man watching his own death as a child without knowing what he is looking at. Everything in the film is already fixed. Marker’s original was assembled almost entirely from still photographs with one moving shot.
Bruce Willis plays Cole as somebody being broken by the travel instead of strengthened by it. He is filthy, confused, medicated and frequently wrong about what year he is in, and the performance has almost none of the star register he was being paid for.
Brad Pitt was nominated for Jeffrey Goines and the performance is genuinely uncomfortable. Constant movement, constant talking, a physical restlessness that never stops, and the film keeps it up long enough that the audience stops being able to tell whether he is a suspect. Pitt trained at a psychiatric facility for weeks and had trouble stopping afterward.
The loop closes at an airport and Gilliam holds on a child watching a man die. Cole has seen this his whole life and has been trying to reach it, and the film’s position is that he was never going to change anything. The observer in the background is the actual answer.
6. The Game (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Game (1997)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"A man’s life is dismantled by a company he hired, and nobody can tell what is real."
Fincher followed Se7en with a film in which nothing can be verified. Nicholas Van Orton is given a birthday present, a participation game with no stated rules, and within a week his bank accounts are empty and people are shooting at him. Fincher shot it in San Francisco with Michael Douglas, who was fifty-two and did most of it himself.
Michael Douglas plays a man whose entire identity is control being systematically stripped of it, and the physical performance is the reason the film works. He is genuinely frightened and increasingly filthy, and by the Mexico sequence he has nothing left to operate with. The film cost fifty million dollars and took a hundred and nine, an outcome nobody at the studio expected.
The ending requires a quantity of planning that cannot survive examination and the film knows it. Fincher has been open that the logistics do not hold. What holds is the experience of the two hours before it, and the audience’s willingness to forgive depends entirely on whether they were frightened.
7. Face/Off (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Face/Off (1997)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"The operatic peak of nineties American action, and the premise is completely absurd."
John Woo’s best American film, and the premise is so absurd that committing to it completely was the only available strategy. An FBI agent takes the face of a terrorist in a coma, the terrorist wakes and takes his, and both men then have to live in each other’s houses.
Travolta and Cage are each playing the other actor’s performance, a genuinely difficult technical exercise and mostly succeeds. Cage as Archer is restrained and grieving. Travolta as Troy is enormous and enjoying himself. Neither is doing an impression of a character. Woo had made The Killer and Hard Boiled in Hong Kong and this is his last American film that works.
The family material is what separates it from the rest of Woo’s American work. Archer’s daughter is afraid of him, his marriage is dead, and Troy is a better father than Archer was. The film states that plainly and refuses to resolve it. The script had been circulating since 1990 with Stallone and Schwarzenegger attached at one point.
The church shootout is the last great Woo set piece, with the doves, the slow motion and the standoff through a mirror. The boat chase afterward is where the film runs out and the last twenty minutes are conventional in a way nothing before them was.
8. The Sixth Sense (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Sixth Sense (1999)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"The twist is famous and the film underneath it is better."
Shyamalan wrote a ghost story that is structurally a two-hander about a man who cannot reach his wife and a boy nobody believes, and the supernatural material is the smaller half. It made close to seven hundred million dollars and defined his career permanently. Disney sold the distribution rights before release and lost several hundred million dollars doing it.
The construction is the achievement and it is genuinely fair. Malcolm never speaks directly to anybody except Cole. Nobody hands him anything. Every door he opens was already open. The red motif marks every scene where the two worlds touch, and the film shows the audience the rules repeatedly.
Haley Joel Osment was eleven and the performance is the reason the film is not merely a twist. The scene in the car where he tells his mother what her own mother said is played without any effects at all, and Toni Collette does the whole thing in reaction.
The twist has damaged its own film culturally, because two decades of imitation trained audiences to hunt for one. Watched now without expectation it is a film about grief and communication in which the reveal is the least interesting element. Shyamalan has never escaped the expectation it created and has said so in several interviews since.
9. The Insider (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Insider (1999)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"A film that makes contract law frightening."
Michael Mann made a thriller in which the threat is litigation and nobody is shot. Jeffrey Wigand knows what the tobacco companies knew, Lowell Bergman wants it on Sixty Minutes, and CBS declines to run it because the network is being sold. Mann adapted a Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner and CBS cooperated with none of it.
Russell Crowe was thirty-five playing a man in his fifties and the performance is entirely internal. Wigand is not heroic. He is angry, proud, socially difficult and correct, and the film is precise about how much of his motivation is about being disrespected. Crowe gained thirty-five pounds, greyed his hair and slowed his speech for the part.
The golf course scene is the film’s thesis. Wigand is told that his confidentiality agreement has been expanded retroactively, with no threat and no raised voice, and Mann shoots it in wide daylight on manicured grass. Corporate power looks exactly like courtesy. Wigand’s confidentiality agreement was genuinely expanded after he had already signed it.
The hotel room sequence where Wigand comes apart is Mann at his most controlled. No score for most of it, a fax arriving, a man in a room he cannot leave, and a wife on a telephone who has stopped being on his side. Pacino plays Bergman as somebody who is right and insufferable in exactly equal measure.
Inglourious Basterds is four conversations at a table and the tension is entirely in language. Learn the technique in the Dialogue Handbook.
10. Battle Royale (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Battle Royale (2000)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"A school class on an island, and the director had been fifteen in a munitions factory."
Kinji Fukasaku was sixty-nine, had lived through the war as a teenager conscripted into a munitions factory, and made a film about a government forcing a class of fifteen-year-olds to kill each other. The Japanese Diet debated banning it. Fukasaku had directed Battles Without Honor and Humanity and was dying while he made this.
The premise is delivered with total bureaucratic flatness. An instructional video, a cheerful presenter, a bag of randomly assigned weapons, and collars that explode. The administrative register is what makes it unbearable, and not the violence. No American distributor would touch it for a decade and it circulated on imported discs.
Takeshi Kitano plays the teacher and the film gives him a private grievance that is never fully explained. He is disappointed in the class, he has a difficult daughter, and the last scene between him and Noriko is the only warmth in the picture. Kitano was already Japan’s biggest star and took the part for a fraction of his usual fee.
The film’s argument is generational and specific to Japan in 1999, about adults who wrecked an economy blaming the children who inherited it. Everything that borrowed the premise afterward kept the arena and dropped the argument. The Hunger Games comparison has been made constantly and Suzanne Collins has denied reading it.
11. Traffic (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Traffic (2000)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Three narratives, none of which resolves the others, and a color system that tells you where you are."
Soderbergh shot three storylines in three color grades and operated the camera himself on all of them. Mexico is bleached yellow, Ohio is blue and cold, San Diego is warm and natural, and the audience knows which thread they are in before a face appears.
The structure argues that the drug war is a system nobody inside can see whole. A judge appointed as drug czar whose daughter is using, a cartel wife discovering what her husband did, two DEA agents guarding a witness, a Tijuana officer working for a general. None of them meets most of the others.
Benicio del Toro carries the Mexican thread almost entirely in Spanish and won the Oscar for it. Javier Rodriguez wants a lit baseball field for the kids in his neighborhood and that is the whole of his ambition, and the film ends on him in the stands watching a game.
12. Swordfish (2001) [full review]
► Read the full review of Swordfish (2001)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"The opening monologue is better than the film’s reputation and the bus sequence is better than both."
Dominic Sena made a film whose opening monologue is better than its reputation and whose bus sequence is better than both. John Travolta explains what is wrong with Dog Day Afternoon for two minutes, and the film never again reaches that level of confidence. Halle Berry was paid an additional half million dollars for a scene lasting seventeen seconds.
The hacking is nonsense and the film is not interested in pretending otherwise. Hugh Jackman is asked to break a Department of Defense system in sixty seconds with a gun to his head, and Sena shoots it as a performance instead of a technical problem.
The explosion sequence is the one piece of genuine filmmaking. A three hundred and sixty degree bullet-time shot of a building collapsing outward, achieved with a rig of a hundred and thirty-five cameras, and it cost more than most of the rest of the production.
13. The Bourne Identity (2002) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Bourne Identity (2002)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"A man works out what he is from what his own body can do."
Doug Liman made it 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 the only reason the audience can identify with him.
The fight choreography changed the genre. Matt Damon trained in Filipino martial arts for months and the Paris apartment sequence is close-quarters, fast, ugly and shot with enough coverage to follow. A pen is used as a weapon and the film treats it as ordinary.
The Mini chase through Paris is the last great practical car sequence before digital took over. A small car in narrow streets, real stairs, real traffic, and Liman shooting from inside the vehicle so the audience is at the driver’s eye level throughout. Liman reshot roughly a third of the film after test screenings and Universal nearly shelved it.
Clive Owen’s Professor is the film’s best minor decision. A rival asset with four lines of dialogue who dies in a field telling Bourne they both look at people the same way, and the entire sequel is set up in about ninety seconds. Owen had just made Croupier and was on nobody’s list for a Hollywood part at that point.
The Insider generates two and a half hours of dread out of depositions and faxes. Work out where pressure actually lives in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
14. The Departed (2006) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Departed (2006)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Scorsese’s first Best Picture, and it is a remake of a Hong Kong film."
Scorsese remade Infernal Affairs, moved it to South Boston, doubled the running time and won the Academy Award he had been denied for thirty years. The additions are mostly profanity, a psychiatrist both men are sleeping with, and Jack Nicholson doing whatever he decided to do that day.
DiCaprio is doing the best work in the picture and it took years for that to be acknowledged. Billy Costigan is falling apart continuously, medicated, unable to prove he is a policeman to anybody, and the panic attacks are played as a man running out of physical capacity.
Scorsese had been nominated five separate times without winning and the Academy gave him Director and Picture for a remake. Several critics noted at the time that it was a strange way to correct the record. Thelma Schoonmaker also won for the editing of the final ten minutes.
The elevator is where the film separates from its source. Scorsese kills almost everybody in the last ten minutes and then adds an execution the original refused, converting an ambiguous ending into a resolved one. The rat on the railing is the one moment the film explains itself.
15. Michael Clayton (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Michael Clayton (2007)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"A legal thriller where almost nothing happens in a courtroom."
Tony Gilroy had written the Bourne films and directed this himself, and it is the opposite of them. Nobody runs. A law firm’s outside counsel has a breakdown during a deposition and the firm’s fixer is sent to manage it, and the management is the plot.
Tom Wilkinson’s Arthur Edens is the film’s engine and the opening monologue is the best writing in American film of that decade. Six minutes of a man describing the moment he understood what he had spent his career doing, delivered over black and a car park.
Tilda Swinton won for a performance built almost entirely on rehearsal. Karen Crowder practises her answers in a hotel room, sweats through blouses, and every confident public statement the film shows has been preceded by a scene of her assembling it. Swinton has said she found the character more frightening to play than anything supernatural.
The last shot is two and a half minutes of George Clooney in the back of a taxi doing nothing. He has won, the fare is running, and Gilroy holds on his face past the point of comfort while the credits start. It is the correct ending and no studio would greenlight it now.
16. Live Free or Die Hard (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"A genuine return to form after twelve years, held back by a PG-13 certificate."
Len Wiseman brought McClane into a cyberterrorism plot twelve years after the last one and the result is the best of the later sequels, a low bar cleared with room. The film is at its strongest when it stops being about computers. Willis was fifty-two and insisted on doing a substantial amount of the physical work himself.
Timothy Olyphant’s Gabriel is written as a former government contractor executing a systematic infrastructure attack, and the plan is coherent. Traffic, finance, power, in that order, and the film explains it once and then trusts the audience. The film was released as Die Hard 4.0 outside North America, and nobody has ever explained that.
The action is practical far more often than it needed to be. The car into the helicopter, the elevator shaft, the tunnel sequence with the vehicles reversing, all staged with real objects. The fighter jet at the end is where the film loses its footing entirely.
17. Pontypool (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of Pontypool (2008)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"An infection carried by language, in one room, on almost no money."
Bruce McDonald made a zombie film set entirely inside a radio station in rural Ontario where the infection is carried by the English language. Nothing is shown. The whole event arrives as call-ins, traffic reports and a stringer describing a crowd. McDonald shot it in about two weeks on a budget under two million Canadian dollars.
Stephen McHattie plays a washed-up shock jock who has been demoted to a small-town morning slot, and the voice is the entire production budget. He narrates a catastrophe he cannot see, becomes progressively less sure the callers are real, and keeps broadcasting. McHattie had been a character actor for thirty-five years and this is the lead he never got.
The mechanism is the film’s one genuinely original idea. Certain English words become infectious, understanding is the vector, and the only cure is to break the meaning of the word by using it wrongly. The last act is two people deliberately speaking nonsense. Tony Burgess adapted his own novel and the mechanism is considerably stranger on the page.
Pontypool never leaves a radio booth and District 9 tells you the ending before it starts. Learn what timing buys in the Pacing Handbook.
18. District 9 (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of District 9 (2009)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Worldbuilding delivered entirely through logistics and paperwork."
Neill Blomkamp expanded his own short film with thirty million dollars from Peter Jackson and shot Johannesburg as itself. The ship arrives over a city that already had forced removals in its history, and the film never has to explain the parallel. Blomkamp had been attached to direct a Halo film that collapsed, and Jackson funded this instead.
The documentary opening is doing structural work instead of stylistic. Talking heads, archive footage and security camera material establish that Wikus is already finished, so the audience watches the first act knowing the ending is bad and not knowing how. It cost thirty million dollars and took over two hundred, and was nominated for Best Picture.
Sharlto Copley improvised most of his dialogue and had never acted. Wikus is a middle manager, a nepotism hire, cheerful and cruel in the first twenty minutes, and the film makes the audience follow him without ever making him admirable. Copley was a producer friend of Blomkamp’s and had appeared in the original short for free.
The film abandons the documentary format around the midpoint and most people do not notice. Blomkamp has said it was a practical decision instead of a design one, and the shift is the single most criticized thing about an otherwise disciplined picture. The sequel has been announced repeatedly across fifteen years and has never gone into production.
19. Inglourious Basterds (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of Inglourious Basterds (2009)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
"Five chapters of people talking in four languages, and the violence is brief."
Tarantino wrote a war film in which almost nothing is a battle and everything is a conversation with a table between two people. Five chapters, four of them built on somebody trying to pass, and the tension comes entirely from language. Tarantino had been writing the script on and off for close to a decade before shooting it.
Christoph Waltz won for a part several actors had turned down because it required fluency in four languages. Landa is polite, delighted and entirely without loyalty, and the opening farmhouse scene is twenty minutes of a man being courteous to somebody he has already decided about.
The basement tavern sequence is the film’s best construction and the most instructive. The Germans are suspicious, the disguise is holding, and the whole thing collapses on a hand gesture indicating the number three. One detail, established earlier, deployed without comment. Michael Fassbender was largely unknown and had learned German for an entirely different project.
Tarantino wrote the opening farmhouse scene as a short film years before the rest of the screenplay existed, and it plays almost entirely unchanged. Waltz has said the four languages were the reason several other actors passed on the part and the reason he took it without hesitating at all.
The ending rewrites history and the film has been arguing with itself about that since release. Hitler dies in a burning cinema, killed by a Jewish projectionist and a Tennessee lieutenant, and the last line is Tarantino talking about his own film through a character’s mouth.
20. I Saw the Devil (2010) [full review]
► Read the full review of I Saw the Devil (2010)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Revenge pursued past the point where it means anything."
Kim Jee-woon built a revenge film in which the protagonist catches the killer in the first act, beats him, releases him with a tracker, and repeats the process. The premise is the argument about what revenge does to the person taking it. The Korean ratings board rejected it twice and Kim cut roughly ninety seconds to secure release.
Lee Byung-hun plays Kim Soo-hyun as a man methodically converting himself into something worse to finish the job. The film is explicit that each release causes further deaths, and it refuses to let him be unaware of that. He knows. He continues. Lee and Choi had worked together before and barely spoke during the shoot.
Choi Min-sik’s Kyung-chul is not given a psychology and does not need one. He is appetite with a vehicle, and the film’s cruelest move is establishing that he is genuinely enjoying the pursuit more than his victim is. Choi had played the protagonist in Oldboy seven years earlier and took this as the inversion.
The ending gives Soo-hyun exactly what he planned and the film shoots it as a defeat. He walks away from a house, the mechanism works, and he comes apart on a street in a way the entire two hours has been arranging. Kim has said the last shot was the first thing he wrote and everything else worked backward from it.
Honorable Mentions: Thrillers Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier and each is on the list to be written.
Dial M for Murder (1954)
A husband arranges his wife’s killing, the plan fails in the first twenty minutes, and the rest is him improvising a frame in real time. Almost all of it takes place in one apartment.
The Wrong Man (1956)
Hitchcock shot a true story of mistaken identity with almost no style at all, and the flatness is what makes it frightening. Henry Fonda is processed through a system that has no mechanism for being wrong.
Rope (1948)
Two students murder a classmate, hide the body in the room, and host a dinner party on top of it. Hitchcock shot it in long takes disguised as a single continuous move and James Stewart is the guest who starts noticing.
Frenzy (1972)
Hitchcock returned to London at seventy-two and made his most brutal film. The reverse tracking shot away from a door, down a staircase and into the street is the coldest thing he ever staged.
The 39 Steps (1935)
The template for every innocent-man-pursued thriller that followed, built on a music hall performer with a perfect memory and a chase across Scotland with a handcuffed couple in the middle of it.
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
An elderly woman disappears from a moving train and everybody aboard insists she was never there. The film spends an hour making the audience doubt the protagonist along with everybody else.
The Secret in Their Eyes (2009)
Juan Jose Campanella built a cold case around a retired investigator writing a novel about it, and the football stadium sequence is a single continuous shot that descends from the sky into a crowd and out through a tunnel.
Headhunters (2011)
Morten Tyldum adapted Jo Nesbo into a Norwegian thriller where a corporate recruiter steals art on the side and picks the wrong mark. The outhouse sequence is the most unpleasant escape in the genre.
The Chaser (2008)
Na Hong-jin sends an ex-cop turned pimp after a client who is killing his women, and the police have the murderer in custody for most of the film and cannot hold him. The failure is bureaucratic and the tension is watching paperwork lose.
Coherence (2013)
James Ward Byrkit shot it in his own house over five nights with no script, giving the actors individual instructions each evening. A dinner party splits into parallel versions and the film tracks every branch.
Green Room (2015)
Jeremy Saulnier trapped a punk band in a backroom at a neo-Nazi venue and let the violence be clumsy and slow. Patrick Stewart plays the owner as a man solving a logistics problem with no feeling attached to it.
Wind River (2017)
Taylor Sheridan set a murder investigation on a Wyoming reservation in winter and built the whole film around jurisdiction and cold. The standoff is resolved in about four seconds and it is the most shocking cut in the film.
Dishonorable Mentions: Thrillers That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had a working premise and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
The Woman in the Window (2021)
Amy Adams in an agoraphobic Rear Window that was reshot after test screenings and sat on a shelf before being sold to Netflix. The reveal requires the protagonist to have forgotten something the film showed her doing.
The Girl on the Train (2016)
Emily Blunt commits fully to a blackout narrator and the film resolves the mystery by having a character explain it in a kitchen. The unreliability stops being a device the moment it becomes a plot point.
Lucy (2014)
Luc Besson built a film on the discredited claim that people use ten percent of their brains and then escalated past any possible stakes. By the third act the protagonist cannot be threatened by anything.
Transcendence (2014)
Wally Pfister shot Christopher Nolan films for a decade and then directed one where Johnny Depp is uploaded to a network and becomes unstoppable within twenty minutes. The film has no idea what its own position is.
The Little Things (2021)
Three Academy Award winners in a serial killer procedural that ends without confirming whether the suspect did anything. The ambiguity is not earned by the preceding two hours and reads as a shrug.
Chaos Walking (2021)
A premise about audible thoughts on a colony world, adapted across six years and multiple reshoots into something with no tension anywhere. Every character broadcasts their intentions constantly, removing all suspense.
What Do You Think?
This tier is nineteen films rated at a 9 and one outlier, and the ordering inside it is chronological instead of ranked. Swordfish sitting level with The Insider will annoy people, and the rewatch scale is doing something specific there. Tell me which one you would promote.
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