Part 4 – The Very Good
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
This tier is where the ranking crosses from 9 to 8, and the films at the top of it are mostly solving a problem the genre normally avoids. Room has to make a captivity readable without becoming exploitation. Prisoners asks what a decent man does when the law runs out. Parasite spends an hour as a comedy about competence before the floor gives way.
The films lower down are more conventional and often better made than their reputations. Klute wins an Academy Award by abandoning its own missing-person plot. The Terminator is structured as a slasher and has been mis-sold as an action film for forty years.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the fourth of nine parts.
Gone Girl, Get Out, Parasite and Snowpiercer all turn on a midpoint that reclassifies everything before it. Study the shapes in the Plot Handbook.
1. The Adjustment Bureau (2011) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"A high concept that stays personal, and almost none of them manage that."
George Nolfi expanded a Philip K. Dick story of about twenty pages into a feature and kept the central idea intact: reality is administered and the administrators are middle management. Men in hats carry notebooks and adjust outcomes on a schedule. Nolfi had written the Bourne Ultimatum screenplay and this was his first film as director.
The bureaucratic texture is the film’s best decision. The agents are not omnipotent. They spill coffee, they miss windows, they get reprimanded by a supervisor, and one of them is visibly tired of the job. The conspiracy runs on shift patterns. Emily Blunt trained with a contemporary dance company for the performance sequences.
Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have genuine chemistry and the film needs it, because the entire premise depends on the audience agreeing that this particular relationship is worth breaking causality for. The first conversation in a men’s bathroom does most of that work. Terence Stamp arrives in the last act as the agent sent when the others fail.
The doors are the one piece of genuine invention. Hats let the agents move through ordinary doorways into other parts of the city, and the chase in the last act is two people running through New York using a stolen hat and no map. It is a good idea executed cheaply.
2. Snowpiercer (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Snowpiercer (2013)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"A class system arranged front to back along a train."
Bong Joon-ho adapted a French graphic novel into a film set entirely on a train circling a frozen earth, with the class system arranged front to back. The structure is literal and the film never pretends otherwise. Harvey Weinstein demanded twenty minutes of cuts and Bong refused, delaying the American release by a year.
The forward movement gives the picture its shape. Each carriage is a different world with a different lighting scheme, and the revolt has to take them in order. A greenhouse, an aquarium, a classroom, a nightclub, and the audience understands the scale of the train by how long it takes to cross it.
Tilda Swinton’s Mason is the film’s clearest statement. Dentures, spectacles, a Yorkshire accent and a speech about shoes belonging on feet instead of heads, delivered as a sincere administrative lesson. The character was written for a man and Swinton asked for it. The train set was built in Prague and each carriage was a separate practical build.
The ending refuses the revolution. Curtis reaches the engine and is offered the job, and the film’s position is that the rebellion was designed and budgeted for as a population control mechanism. The only genuine escape is off the train entirely. Song Kang-ho plays the security specialist who designed the doors and is paid in a narcotic.
3. Prisoners (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Prisoners (2013)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"The detective plot is genuinely good and it is not the subject."
Villeneuve and Roger Deakins shot a missing-child film in Pennsylvania in permanent November rain, and the film runs two hours and thirty-three minutes of almost unrelieved pressure. Two girls disappear on Thanksgiving and the first suspect is released within a day for lack of evidence.
Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover as a survivalist carpenter whose preparedness is useless against the one thing he prepared for. He abducts and tortures the released suspect across several days, and the film neither endorses it nor lets the audience look away from what it does to him.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki is the counterweight and the performance is built almost entirely on restraint and a facial tic. He is competent, methodical and solves the case correctly, and the structure means he arrives everywhere later than the audience wants him to. Deakins was nominated and lost. That was becoming an annual event by that point in his career.
The ending is a whistle under the ground and a cut to black. Villeneuve holds on Loki hearing something he may not have heard, and the film stops. It is the most argued-about final second in modern American thrillers and it is exactly right. Aaron Guzikowski’s screenplay sat on the Black List for three years before production.
4. John Wick 1-4 (2014-2023) [full review]
► Read the full review of John Wick 1-4 (2014-2023)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Four films built out of a dog and a car, and the worldbuilding is the achievement."
Four films across nine years, built by stunt performers who decided the audience should be able to see what is happening. Wide frames, long takes, no shaky camera, and a lead who trained for months so the fights could be shot without cutting away from him.
The first film’s premise is famously thin and that is the design. A retired hitman’s dog is killed and the picture spends ninety minutes on the consequences. The economy means every scene is about execution instead of motivation, and nothing has to be explained twice.
The world-building is delivered entirely in passing. Gold coins, the Continental, a cleanup service, rules nobody states in full. The films assume the audience will keep up and refuse to stop and explain. That is why the sequels had anywhere to go. Stahelski and David Leitch had both been stunt coordinators and Leitch went uncredited on the first film.
Chapter 2 and 3 expand correctly and Chapter 4 overextends. The Osaka sequence and the Sacre-Coeur stairs are as good as the series gets, and the running time passes two hours and forty minutes, more than a premise this lean can carry. Ian McShane plays the Continental’s manager across all four films.
Keanu Reeves does most of his own work and the gun handling is the detail people who know the subject point at. Magazine changes, target transitions, the specific close-quarters technique used throughout. Firearms instructors show clips of it. Lance Reddick appears as the concierge and died shortly before the fourth film opened.
Keller Dover prepared for the wrong disaster and Ned Racine was never good enough. Build people whose limits are the story in the Protagonist Handbook.
5. Gone Girl (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Gone Girl (2014)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Two unreliable accounts, and the film never asks you to pick a side on moral grounds."
Fincher adapted Gillian Flynn’s novel with Flynn writing the screenplay, and the structure is the book’s: a husband’s present tense against a wife’s diary, with the diary revealed as a fabrication built over months. The film keeps almost every beat. Flynn wrote the screenplay herself and Fincher shot roughly fifty takes of several scenes.
Rosamund Pike plays both Amys and the difference is technical. Diary Amy is warm, self-deprecating and faintly anxious. Real Amy is precise, contemptuous and entirely without doubt, and the transition happens in a single monologue delivered from a moving car. Neil Patrick Harris plays Desi Collings and Tyler Perry the defense attorney.
Ben Affleck was cast for exactly the quality that had damaged his career: audiences find him hard to like and easy to suspect. The press conference smile is the film’s cruelest joke and Fincher shot it dozens of times. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross scored it, their third collaboration with Fincher.
Flynn changed the ending during adaptation and then changed it back, and the reports that the film would diverge from the novel came from an early interview she has since walked back. What reached the screen follows the book almost exactly, including the final scene.
The ending is the part people find intolerable and it is the correct one. Nick stays. The marriage continues as a performance for a national audience with a child on the way, and the film’s position is that this is what the relationship always was.
6. Room (2015) [full review]
► Read the full review of Room (2015)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"An unfilmable problem solved twice, and the second half is harder than the first."
Lenny Abrahamson adapted Emma Donoghue’s novel with Donoghue writing the screenplay, and the first half takes place inside a garden shed. Jack is five, has never been outside, and narrates a world his mother has constructed to be survivable. Donoghue wrote the screenplay before the novel was published, an order of operations that almost never happens.
The escape happens at the midpoint. That is the film’s structural argument. Most stories of this kind end there. This one treats it as the first half of the problem, and the second hour is about two people discovering that leaving was the easy part.
Brie Larson won the Academy Award and the performance is hardest in the after. Joy is twenty-four, has lost seven years, and is being asked by everybody including her own mother to be grateful. The television interview scene is the worst thing that happens to her in the film.
Jacob Tremblay was eight and the film is built on his point of view being genuinely limited. He understands Room as the whole world, television as another planet, and his own rescue as a betrayal, and the picture never corrects him from outside. Joan Allen and William H. Macy play Joy’s parents.
7. Get Out (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Get Out (2017)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Made for four and a half million, took two hundred and fifty-five."
Jordan Peele made it for four and a half million dollars and took over two hundred and fifty. The premise is a young Black man meeting his white girlfriend’s family in the suburbs, and the horror arrives through the register of excessive welcome. Peele had come out of sketch comedy and this was his first film as a director.
Almost every line in the first act is doing two jobs. The father mentioning he would have voted for Obama a third time, the guests appraising his build, the question about whether it is an advantage. All of it reads as social discomfort and all of it is literal.
Peele shot the film in twenty-three days in Alabama for four and a half million dollars and it took over two hundred and fifty worldwide. He won the Academy Award for Original Screenplay and is the first Black writer to do so. The ceremony noted it and the industry mostly did not act on it.
The sunken place is the film’s best invention and it works as image before it works as metaphor. Chris falls backward into blackness while a screen showing the room recedes, and the visual is disturbing whether or not the viewer decodes it. Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford play the parents and both were cast against type.
The bingo auction is the point where the film states what it has been doing. A silent garden party, a portrait on an easel, and a group of wealthy people bidding, and Peele stages it without a word of dialogue because none is required. Daniel Kaluuya was nominated for Best Actor and was largely unknown in America before it.
8. Upgrade (2018) [full review]
► Read the full review of Upgrade (2018)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"A five million dollar science fiction film that delivers a complete vision."
Leigh Whannell made it for around five million dollars and the fight choreography is the reason it works. Grey is paralyzed and controlled by an implanted chip, so the camera is locked to his body and rotates with him while his own limbs do things he is not doing.
Logan Marshall-Green plays the whole film in two registers at once, horrified passenger and efficient machine, and the physical comedy of a man watching his own arm break somebody is the film’s best idea. The kitchen fight is the sequence everybody cites. Whannell had written the Saw and Insidious films and directed this on a fraction of their budgets.
The ending is genuinely bleak and the film has been building to it quietly. STEM wanted a body, engineered the attack, and the last scene is Grey’s consciousness locked in a fantasy while the chip drives. The reveal is a slow pull-out and a smile that is not his.
9. Parasite (2019) [full review]
► Read the full review of Parasite (2019)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"An hour of comedy about competence, and then the doorbell rings."
Bong Joon-ho won four Academy Awards including Best Picture, the first for a non-English-language film, and the construction is why. The Kim family infiltrate a wealthy household one member at a time across forty-five minutes, and the mechanism is shown in full. Bong storyboarded the entire film before shooting and built the Park house from scratch.
The architecture does the argument. The Park house is uphill with a garden and windows. The Kim apartment is semi-basement with a window at street level. Every movement between them is a descent or a climb, and the flood sequence is the whole thesis rendered as water finding its level.
It is the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture in ninety-two years of the award, and it took Director, Original Screenplay and International Feature in the same night. Bong’s acceptance speech about the one-inch barrier of subtitles was the most quoted thing anybody said that year.
The turn at the midpoint is one of the best-executed in modern cinema. The plan has worked, the family are drinking in a house they have taken, and a doorbell rings. Bong has said he wanted the audience to believe they were watching a different genre until that moment.
The smell is the film’s cruelest device. It cannot be laundered, it cannot be hidden, and it is the one thing the Kims cannot perform their way past. Every time a Park mentions it the film tightens, and the final violence comes out of a gesture about exactly that.
John Wick delivers an entire underworld through gold coins and hotel rules with no exposition at all. Study the method in the World Builder’s Handbook.
10. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"A seventies conspiracy thriller wearing a superhero film’s costume."
The Russo brothers made a seventies paranoid thriller inside a superhero franchise and cast Robert Redford in it to make the reference explicit. The plot is about an intelligence agency that has been compromised from inside since before anybody now working there was born. The Russos had directed television comedy and Marvel hired them off a pitch about seventies paranoia films.
The elevator fight is the sequence that changed Marvel’s action. Confined space, no cutting away, a count of opponents the audience can track, and Steve Rogers asking the room whether anybody wants to get out first. It is staged like a thriller instead of spectacle.
The film’s argument is about pre-emptive surveillance and it is unusually direct for a studio picture. Three helicarriers designed to identify threats before they act, algorithmically, using data nobody consented to provide. Nick Fury presents it as security and the film disagrees. Robert Redford took the part and has said he did it for his grandchildren.
The Winter Soldier himself is barely a character and functions as a weapon with a face the protagonist recognizes. That works for one film and the franchise spent five more trying to convert him into a person afterward with mixed results. Scarlett Johansson and Anthony Mackie share most of the second act with Chris Evans.
11. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978, 1993, 2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978, 1993, 2007)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Four versions across fifty-one years, each carrying its own decade’s anxiety."
Four films across fifty-one years from the same Jack Finney novel, and each one carries the anxiety of its decade without changing a beat of the plot. The premise survives because the fear underneath it is about conformity and it never goes out of date.
Don Siegel’s 1956 version is the leanest and was released with a studio-imposed framing device he fought. Kevin McCarthy shouting at traffic is the ending Siegel wanted and it was restored decades later. The small-town setting does most of the work. Kevin McCarthy and Don Siegel both appear briefly in the 1978 version.
Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake is the best of them and moves the story to San Francisco, where nobody knows their neighbors anyway. The pod screaming is a sound invention, the dog with a human face is genuinely upsetting, and the final shot is the bleakest ending in seventies science fiction.
Abel Ferrara’s 1993 Body Snatchers puts it on a military base, the smartest setting anybody found for it, and the 2007 Nicole Kidman version is a studio disaster with reshoots by a second director and no argument anywhere in it. Jack Finney published The Body Snatchers as a magazine serial in 1954.
12. Klute (1971) [full review]
► Read the full review of Klute (1971)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"A thriller that abandons its own plot for the woman at the edge of it."
Alan Pakula made the first of his paranoia trilogy and gave Jane Fonda an Academy Award for a call girl who is being stalked and is more interested in her own therapy than in the investigation happening around her. Donald Sutherland’s detective is barely in it.
Gordon Willis shot it almost entirely in shadow, two years before The Godfather, and the visual grammar of American paranoia cinema starts here. Faces half-lit, rooms with one practical source, and long lenses that put something between the camera and the subject. Fonda spent weeks with sex workers in New York before shooting and rewrote several of her own scenes.
The therapy scenes were largely improvised and Fonda has said they are the reason the performance works. Bree explains why control matters to her, describes faking with clients, and checks her watch mid-sentence during a session she is paying for. Roy Scheider plays the pimp and Charles Cioffi the corporate executive.
The surveillance is the film’s real horror. Cable is listening, has been for a long time, and plays a recording of her own voice back to her in the last act. Pakula establishes the tapes in the first scene and lets them run underneath everything.
13. Coma (1978) [full review]
► Read the full review of Coma (1978)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"Healthy patients are going into comas deliberately, and the hospital is the antagonist."
Michael Crichton adapted Robin Cook and directed it himself, and the premise is that healthy patients are being deliberately put into comas during routine surgery so their organs can be sold. The institutional setting does all the work. Crichton had trained as a physician at Harvard and the surgical detail is accurate throughout.
Genevieve Bujold plays a surgical resident nobody believes, and the film is precise about why. She is junior, she is a woman in 1978, her boyfriend is her superior, and every senior man in the building has a reasonable-sounding explanation for her concern. Michael Douglas plays the boyfriend and Rip Torn and Richard Widmark appear as seniors.
The Jefferson Institute sequence is the image everybody remembers. A white room with bodies suspended on wires in rows, lit evenly, presented on a guided tour by a receptionist with a clipboard. Crichton shoots it as architecture instead of horror. Robin Cook published the novel in 1977 and was a practising ophthalmologist at the time.
Villanelle is established in four seconds with an ice cream, and The Terminator hides its monster for ninety minutes. Learn what to withhold in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
14. The China Syndrome (1979) [full review]
► Read the full review of The China Syndrome (1979)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Released twelve days before Three Mile Island."
James Bridges released it twelve days before Three Mile Island, and a line in the film about a meltdown rendering an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable became genuinely difficult to hear. The coincidence made it a hit and obscured how good the construction is.
The film has no score at all. Bridges removed music entirely so the control room sequences run on alarms, hydraulics and people talking over each other, and the absence makes the technical material tense in a way a cue would have flattened. Fonda produced it herself after failing to secure rights to a Karen Silkwood biography.
Jack Lemmon plays Godell as a company man who has spent his career trusting the procedures and cannot stop himself checking one reading. The performance is about somebody discovering that his own competence obliges him to do something he does not want to do. Michael Douglas produced it and plays the freelance cameraman.
Jane Fonda’s reporter is being blocked by her own network instead of by the power company, the smarter half of the plot. The station will not run the footage because of legal exposure, and the film is clearer about media incentives than about nuclear engineering.
15. Body Heat (1981) [full review]
► Read the full review of Body Heat (1981)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Double Indemnity in a Florida heatwave, and Kathleen Turner’s debut."
Lawrence Kasdan’s first film as director is Double Indemnity moved to Florida in a heat wave, and it does not hide the debt. A weak lawyer, a married woman, a murdered husband and an insurance problem, all of it in the open by the second reel.
The heat is the production design. Nobody has air conditioning, everybody is damp, wind chimes and cicadas run under every exterior, and Kasdan uses the temperature to explain why people in this town make bad decisions in the afternoon. Kathleen Turner was making her first film and had been working in daytime television.
William Hurt plays Ned Racine as genuinely not very good at his job, the departure from the model. Walter Neff is competent. Racine is a lawyer other lawyers joke about, and the film establishes his incompetence before Matty ever appears. Mickey Rourke appears early as an arsonist Racine once represented.
The last twenty minutes reframe everything and the film has played fair throughout. The will, the glasses, the name on the high school yearbook. Every piece is visible and the audience dismissed all of it because Racine did. Kasdan had written The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark before this.
16. Deathtrap (1982) [full review]
► Read the full review of Deathtrap (1982)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Reeve’s best work outside the cape, and Caine kills it as usual."
Sidney Lumet adapted Ira Levin’s stage play with Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, and the film is about a playwright plotting a murder to steal a better play. The theatrical origin is visible and Lumet does not apologize for it. Levin had written Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives and knew exactly what he was doing here.
The structure is a sequence of reversals, each one presented as the final truth, and Levin’s trick is that every reversal is telegraphed by the play the characters keep discussing. They describe the twist that is about to happen to them and nobody notices. Dyan Cannon plays the wife and was nominated for a Golden Globe for it.
Reeve took the part directly after Superman II to break the association, and the performance is the best evidence that he could have had a different career. He plays helpful and ingratiating for a full act before the film reveals what that was. Jay Presson Allen adapted the play and had written Cabaret a decade earlier.
17. The Terminator (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Terminator (1984)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Structured as a slasher and sold as an action film for forty years."
Cameron made it for six and a half million dollars and the constraint shaped everything. The Terminator is mostly Schwarzenegger in a leather jacket because the stop-motion endoskeleton was too expensive to use for more than a few minutes. Cameron has said the idea came from a fever dream in Rome while he was being fired from Piranha II.
The structure is a horror film with a science fiction premise. Sarah Connor is a waitress being hunted, the police do not believe her, and the antagonist cannot be reasoned with, stopped or outrun. Cameron has acknowledged the debt to Halloween directly. Lance Henriksen was originally considered for the title part before Schwarzenegger.
The time loop is closed and the film says so without making a point of it. Kyle Reese is John Connor’s father, the chip from the first machine causes Cyberdyne, and nothing that happens prevents anything. The characters never work this out. Stan Winston built the endoskeleton and the practical head effects.
Linda Hamilton’s arc is the reason the sequel had anywhere to go. Sarah is frightened and useless for an hour, and the last twenty minutes are her assembling competence out of necessity. The final line into a tape recorder is delivered by a completely different person.
Coma blocks its protagonist with polite hierarchy and The China Syndrome removes the score entirely. Find where pressure lives in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
18. King of New York (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of King of New York (1990)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"A drug kingpin out of prison who wants to fund a hospital."
Abel Ferrara gave Christopher Walken a character who returns from prison intending to fund a hospital in the South Bronx with drug money, and plays it completely straight. Frank White believes the plan and the film neither mocks him nor endorses him. Ferrara shot it in New York in the winter of 1989 with a crew that mostly worked for scale.
Ferrara shoots New York in permanent blue-black and the film has an unreal quality several critics mistook for incompetence. Frank moves through a city that never looks occupied, and the Plaza suite he lives in is lit like a mausoleum. Laurence Fishburne, David Caruso and Wesley Snipes are all in it early in their careers.
Walken’s performance is built on stillness and sudden movement. He dances alone in a club, executes a man mid-sentence, and delivers a speech about being away a long time in a register somewhere between menace and genuine grievance. Nobody else could have held it together.
The subway sequence is the film’s best scene and almost silent. Frank, wounded, riding a car full of ordinary passengers, pursued by a detective, and Ferrara plays it on faces and fluorescent light. The film ends in a cab in traffic, the correct ending. Ferrara has called it the best film he made in that decade.
19. Die Hard 2 (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Die Hard 2 (1990)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"The second-best Die Hard, and being not the original is the whole problem."
Renny Harlin took over and moved McClane to an airport at Christmas, the structurally correct sequel decision: same principle, different enclosed system. Dulles in a snowstorm with planes circling and no fuel is a legitimate pressure cooker. Harlin had made A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and was hired after Renny Harlin’s Prison caught the studio’s attention.
The film is considerably more violent than the original and less interested in why. McClane kills more people, the tone is harder, and the reflexive humor from the first picture has been replaced by exasperation. Willis is playing tired from the first scene. Walter Wager’s novel 58 Minutes supplied the premise and was substantially rewritten.
The plane crash is the sequence that lands. Harlin gives the audience the cockpit, the false glide slope, the landing lights in the wrong place, and then a full impact from outside on a runway, and the film has the sense to hold on McClane watching it.
The problem is a second betrayal the audience is asked to be surprised by twice. Colonel Stuart’s team, then the reinforcements who are also the team, and the film explains the double-cross carefully because it does not hold. William Sadler plays Colonel Stuart and performs the opening scene naked in an airport hotel.
20. Killing Eve – “Nice Face” (2018) [full review]
► Read the full review of Killing Eve – “Nice Face” (2018)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"Real violence in a comic register, and the comedy is never at the violence’s expense."
Phoebe Waller-Bridge adapted Luke Jennings and the pilot establishes a structure most series would take a season to reach. Two women, neither of whom has met the other, each becoming the most interesting thing in the other’s working life. Comer was twenty-five and had done almost nothing anybody outside Britain had seen.
Jodie Comer’s Villanelle is introduced eating ice cream and then pushing a bowl into a child’s lap, the character stated in one gesture. She is bored, she is playful, and the violence is an extension of the playfulness instead of a departure from it. The gesture was Comer’s own idea and Waller-Bridge kept it.
Sandra Oh’s Eve is the harder part and the pilot is careful with it. She is a desk officer who is right, ignored, and visibly excited by the case in a way that makes her colleagues uncomfortable. The film establishes that the fascination is mutual before either character knows it.
The Waller-Bridge voice is all over the dialogue and the series never sustained it. She wrote the first season and handed over, and each subsequent showrunner produced something flatter. The pilot is the best hour the show ever made. Fiona Shaw plays Carolyn Martens and stayed with the series for its full run.
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.
Odd Man Out (1947)
Carol Reed sent a wounded gunman through one Belfast night and let the city decide what to do with him. James Mason spends most of it barely conscious while strangers argue about whether to help.
Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
Melville built a heist around a twenty-five minute silent sequence and cast Yves Montand as an alcoholic marksman who has to steady his hands on command. Nobody in it explains anything.
The Big Heat (1953)
Fritz Lang made the meanest police film of the decade, with Glenn Ford burning through a department that will not move and Gloria Grahame taking the consequences. The coffee scene is still shocking.
In a Lonely Place (1950)
Nicholas Ray gave Humphrey Bogart a screenwriter suspected of murder and made the film about whether he is capable of it instead of whether he did it. The ending is the bleakest in classic Hollywood.
Ace in the Hole (1951)
Billy Wilder put a reporter in charge of a rescue and had him slow it down for the story. It was a commercial disaster in 1951 and reads now as the most accurate film ever made about media incentives.
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in a New York where a gossip columnist can end a career with a paragraph. Clifford Odets wrote dialogue nobody has matched since and James Wong Howe shot the city as a trap.
Seven Days in May (1964)
Frankenheimer built a military coup thriller with no action at all, just officers in rooms working out what a colleague is planning. Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas play the two sides of the same institution.
Fail Safe (1964)
Lumet made the serious version of Dr. Strangelove in the same year and it was buried by the comedy. No score, no exteriors, and an ending that commits to its premise more fully than any studio picture since.
The Ipcress File (1965)
Michael Caine plays a spy with an expense account, a grocery habit and glasses, built deliberately as the opposite of Bond. The tradecraft is bureaucratic and the interrogation sequence is genuinely disturbing.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)
Richard Burton plays a burnt-out officer on a last operation and le Carre’s point is that nobody involved is better than anybody else. Shot in black and white and entirely without glamour.
The Odessa File (1974)
Jon Voight investigates a network of former SS officers using a dead man’s diary as his only lead. Forsyth again, and the procedural half is as careful as The Day of the Jackal.
The Boys from Brazil (1978)
Gregory Peck plays Mengele and Laurence Olivier hunts him, with a premise about ninety identical boys placed with matched families. The concept should not work and the two leads carry it.
Dishonorable Mentions: Thrillers That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had a premise worth the budget and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
Deep Water (2022)
Adrian Lyne returned after twenty years with a Patricia Highsmith adaptation whose central couple has no discernible reason to remain together. The murders happen and nobody in the film reacts to them.
Solace (2015)
Anthony Hopkins as a psychic assisting the FBI, with a killer who has the same ability. The premise removes every investigative obstacle and the film has to keep inventing reasons the visions fail.
Regression (2015)
Alejandro Amenabar built a satanic panic thriller and resolved it by announcing that nothing supernatural occurred. The explanation is correct historically and leaves the preceding ninety minutes with nothing to have been about.
In the Cut (2003)
Jane Campion adapted Susanna Moore and the film has real ideas about desire and risk attached to a murder plot that resolves through coincidence. Meg Ryan was cast against type and the marketing sold it as something else entirely.
Secret Window (2004)
Another Stephen King adaptation with a twist visible from the first reel, and the film spends ninety minutes waiting for the audience to catch up. Depp is entertaining and the structure gives him nothing to play against.
Stonehearst Asylum (2014)
A Poe adaptation whose twist arrives in the first thirty minutes and is then treated as a third act revelation. Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine are both in it and neither can do anything with the structure.
What Do You Think?
This tier runs from a 9 down to an 8 and the spread is wider than the numbers suggest. A Marvel film, a Body Snatchers omnibus and a Killing Eve pilot on the same page as Parasite will irritate people. Tell me which one you would move and where.
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