A procedural earns its tension from method: the work, done properly, in order. This tag collects reviews of procedurals in film and television and what the form teaches about pacing an investigation.
1980sStripped to Kill (1987) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Katt Shea's first film as director, made for Concorde under a brief requiring a fixed number of dance sequences, and she used the constraint to build something…
2000sErin Brockovich (2000) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Soderbergh made a genuinely good film about a paralegal assembling six hundred plaintiffs against a utility company, and Julia Roberts won Best Actress over Ellen Burstyn in Requiem…
2000sDexter's pilot rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A blood spatter analyst who kills murderers in his spare time, narrating his own emptiness in voiceover, introduced in an hour that is considerably sharper than the eight seasons…
2000sThe Henry Darius crossover rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two episodes on two shows across two nights, bridged by a killer whose defining trait is that he moves. The premise is genuinely well engineered and the…
2010sHannibal's pilot rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Bryan Fuller made a network procedural about a man who reconstructs murders in his head and put it on NBC at ten o'clock, where it lasted three seasons and…
2010sMindhunter's pilot rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Fincher directs an hour about a hostage negotiation failing and a man discovering that the vocabulary he has been given is inadequate. Almost nothing happens, there is no killer…
2000sThe CSI Trilogy rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Three separately produced network shows ran one continuing investigation across three consecutive nights in 2009, with three production teams, three visual styles and one case. Nobody has attempted…
1990sThe X-Files' third episode rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A man who hibernates for thirty years, wakes, kills five people for their livers, and goes back to sleep. It invented the monster of the week and…
1960sJacques Becker's 1960 French prison drama. Five inmates plan escape from La Sante.
1960sJules Dassin's 1964 Istanbul museum jewel heist. Peter Ustinov, Maximilian Schell.
1960s
2010sThe 7.5 rating is honest evaluation. Taylor Kitsch as Lieutenant Alex Hopper.
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