We’ve already presented a number of top ten crime movies. This is not surprising, as this genre of movies is always of interest to the audience. And for filmmakers, it’s a great opportunity to tickle the audience’s nerves, play with their emotions and often shock them with stories about serial killers.
Some movies are dominated by psychological tension, while others hypnotise the audience with images of blood and violence. The aim is to do everything possible to make the viewer feel the urge to leave the cinema or to switch the remote control.
Here are 10 more suspenseful crime movies that will engage you from the first shots.
10. “Trap” (2024)
Indian-born director M. Night Shyamalan became a sensation in 1999 with the release of the mystery thriller The Sixth Sense: its convoluted plot resembled a slow-motion spiral that unfolds so quickly in the finale that it turns the whole plot on its head.
The director continued with similar experiments in his next movie, The Unbreakable (2000), and a similar narrative approach again yielded a successful result. The young genius was expected to produce other masterpieces, but each new work often disappointed even the most loyal fans. Commercially, these movies were profitable enough, but the joy of discovery for the audience was diminishing.
So far, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, The Trap, was promised by our distributors in August, but it has never been released on the big screens. This is not a rare occurrence. The same happened with Wolves, which was not even rescued by the main stars Brad Pitt and George Clooney, who for a while were promoted by Acme as “Lone Wolves”.
There is no great tragedy here – we can watch both movies, and many others, on online platforms if we want to.
On the evening of the premiere of Trap, Night Shyamalan said that he and his daughter Saleka came up with the story after watching Albert Magnolia’s Purple Rain (1984) and being impressed by the pop star Prince in the lead role.
Although the two films have nothing in common – Purple Rain is a musical drama like a concert film, while The Trap is a mystical horror thriller about a maniac – Saleka played the singer Lady Raven and performed 16 (!) of her own songs. These songs comment on the action of the film in a peculiar (often abstract) way and often help to solve the riddles of the plot.
Cooper (Josh Hartnett), a middle-aged man who works as a firefighter, goes to a concert with his teenage daughter to see singer Lady Raven. A large force of armed policemen is brought in just in time for the star’s performance.
Security for pop stars at concerts is commonplace. But this time, the number of police officers is, at first glance, disproportionately high. It soon becomes clear that the stewards have received information that the audience includes a maniac nicknamed The Butcher, and the room full of teenagers has become a real trap.
In addition to the usual tricks, this time the director uses a method that Hitchcock has already validated, where the audience knows more than the characters in the film. Only this time, the premature revelation of the most important cards considerably dampens the amplitude of tension required for thrillers.
This is the sixteenth film by M. Night Shyamalan. We look forward to the seventeenth…
9. ”Night Hunter” (2018)
A special place in the array of crime cinema is occupied by films about serial killers.
Sometimes they become so famous in real life that they become popular personalities, such as Theodore Robert Bundy, one of the most brutal serial killers in the history of the United States, played to perfection by Zac Efron, formerly known for his melodramas, in the film “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” (2019, dir. Joe Berlinger), which we saw a few years ago.
At the other end of the criminal spectrum are movies about serial killers who have avoided deserved punishment for a long time, or remained unidentified and unpunished.
One of the first of these characters is the infamous Jack the Ripper, an unsolved serial killer who murdered women in the slums of London from 1888. Who this anonymous maniac really was remains unclear, though theories abound. Even Stephen King wrote a novel in 1976, “Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution”, which develops a conspiracy theory involving… the English royal family and the freemasons.
Closer to our own time, David Fincher’s thriller Zodiac (2007) featured a maniac who began a bloody crime spree in December 1968 by calling the police or sending encrypted cryptograms after each new crime, a case that has remained unsolved to this day.
Director David Raymond’s thriller “The Night Stalker” (2018) has a really interesting and quite original storyline. In this movie, Cooper, a former judge, frustrated by a legal system that often allows obvious criminals to leave the courtroom with their heads held high, catches and punishes pedophiles with the help of his girlfriend Lara.
One day, the paths of this pair of fighters for justice cross with those of Aron Marshall, a battle-hardened policeman. This happens when Lara is kidnapped by an elusive criminal, long in Marshall’s sights.
The judge and the policeman soon join forces to catch Simon, a dangerous criminal who looks nothing like a sophisticated maniac. But Marshall’s colleague Rachel, a psychoanalyst, is convinced that the arrested man is a mentally unstable schizophrenic with multiple psychopathic personalities.
The situation is further complicated when several other similar crimes are committed, although Simon is now behind bars.
Even with the naked eye, it is clear that this modest collaboration between small US and Canadian studios has its roots in the legendary thriller “The Silence of the Lambs”. Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) looks like Clarissa Starling’s younger colleague, Brendan Fletcher, who plays Simon, tries to look like Hannibal Lecter, but clearly lacks Hopkins’ acting skills and charisma.
Henry Cavill, who plays Police Lieutenant Aron Marshall, despite his good looks (he has even played Batman and Superman), this time portrays a man who often doubts himself. Not to mention actors Ben Kingsley and Stanley Tucci, who will take any character from the background to the foreground…
8. “Strange Darling” (2023)
Exactly one year ago, the first people to see the horror-thriller “Strange Darling” at the “Fantastic Fest” film festival in Austin, Texas, were speechless. Asked by the filmmakers, the audience vowed not to reveal a single detail of the plot. It seems that the agreement has been kept: almost a year has passed and the film has not been talked about by either the general public or the critics who saw it. But everyone agrees that such plot twists have never been seen before in cinema, and that revealing the details would spoil the unparalleled impression and enjoyment.
The first trailers revealed few details, making do with the brief information that the film starts as a date between two people. As they talk, a pleasant one-night stand gradually turns into a creepy game of cat and mouse, and the story turns into an adult-only, maximum suspense tale of a day (and night) in the life of a serial killer.
Despite the well-managed informational intrigue, “Strange Darling” has only been released in most countries at the end of this summer.
As the opening credits announce, “Strange Darling” is a six-part thriller, but the content of the parts is not told sequentially. Part 3 is followed by part 5, followed by part 1 and so on, with each segment focusing on two characters. However, despite this “class play”, the content of the individual parts easily fits together into a coherent puzzle.
This chronology-breaking narrative approach allows new details to be thrown into a constantly suspenseful storyline, thus controlling the audience’s attention and emotions.
The backbone of the plot (if that’s the right way to put it) is the attempt of a scared-to-death girl (simply called “Ledi”) to escape from the armed maniac called “Demon” who is after her. Seeing a hut in the thick of the forest, the girl desperately knocks on the door and begs for help. Fortunately, the kind-hearted owners let her in, but with her comes terrible nightmares.
The director JT Mollner, who previously directed the western Outlaws and Angels (2016), and Giovanni Ribisi (whom we have known as a good actor in the past), are both to be commended for their excellent control of the film’s rhythm and camera skills.
The performances of the leads are also worthy of praise: Kyle Gallner, who plays “Demon”, portrays a wide range of emotions in the different novels, from an imposing-looking young man to a suspicious armed killer. And the deceptively named “Lady” also reveals an unexpected transformation of her character: she’s not just a victim…
P.S. In Part 6, Lady mentions Gary Gilmore, a real-life serial killer who received a lot of media attention in the 1970s because he called for his own execution during his trial. And the killer’s wish was granted…
7. “The Night Clerk” (2022)
American playwright Michael Cristofer has long been known in the US theatre world. His Broadway play The Shadow Box won him the Pulitzer Prize when he was just 30, and the play itself won a Tony Award.
Other plays by the playwright were also successful. But at some point, Cristofer was seduced by the tenth muse. He started by playing small roles in popular TV series, then made a bold entry into the world of films.
Eventually, he became a director.
We have seen his first major work, “Original Sin” (2001), starring Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie. Banderas played Luis Vargas, a wealthy coffee merchant who meets his other half in America through correspondence and invites her to his home. And the sexy Angelina played a bride, which the man who came to meet at the port in Cuba was surprised for the first time, and he continued to be surprised.
Nineteen years separate “Original Sin” and “The Night Clerk”, which the playwright devoted to his first love – the theater, although he did occasionally act in films.
The main character Bart Bromley (played by up-and-coming actor Tye Sheridan) is autistic.
Film makers love such characters. Immediately, the vivid characters of Dustin Hoffman (“Rain Man”), Russell Crowe (“Dangerous Minds”), Sean Penn (“I Am Sam”) and others. We know from such movies that people with a similar syndrome are usually, if not geniuses, then at least people with extraordinary abilities.
What is special about a young man with Asperger’s working as a night porter in a hotel is not immediately clear. At the beginning, we learn that he chose this profession because he finds it difficult to communicate with people. But this is precisely the quality that is needed when dealing with hotel customers. It is a good thing that at night they usually sleep or dine in their rooms.
In order to get to know the behavior of different people, Bart observes the hotel’s inhabitants through secretly installed video cameras, each time taking important notes on the gestures and intonations of those he observes.
Such nightly observations are becoming a regular occurrence for the man. Bart does not think about the ethical and moral problem of his occupation. But one day he witnesses the murder of a girl in a hotel room. And soon he becomes the prime suspect.
Avoiding the increased police attention (John Leguizamo plays the particularly suspicious Detective Espada), Bart’s immediate boss transfers him to another hotel, where he meets Andrea Rivera (Ana de Armas), a mysterious beauty (the kind of femme fatales usually referred to as femme fatales in crime thrillers), who is somehow possibly connected to the previous murder.
I wouldn’t say that the plot of “The Night Clerk” is particularly original. But the movie will certainly find its audience. Some will be more interested in the criminal intrigue, others in the unexpected love story.
6. “In the Valley of Elah” (2007)
“Why are we in Iraq?”
More than five decades ago, when Americans were up to their ears in the adventure of the Vietnam War, Norman Mailer, the famous US writer, published an article that deeply clouded the minds of his compatriots, “Why are we in Vietnam?”. In this passionate indictment of American militarism, it was not only the generals who were the “architects” of that war who were most affected, but also the then US President Richard Nixon.
Director Paul Haggis, whose drama “Crash” was named Best Film of 2006 and won the Oscar, wants to do something similar. Only this time, the authors of ”In the Valley of Elah” are taking the Mailer issue to a time closer to home and are making no secret of their intention to nail the White House chief of staff, George W. Bush (who was then still President of the United States of America), to the post of shame for his reluctance to bring a decisive end to the unnecessary and pointless war on Iraq.
However, there are almost no war scenes in the film itself, except for documentary images taken from the internet. This seems to have become a fashion at one point. More recently, in “Redacted” (2007), director Brian De Palma also found all the images of military operations on the virtual information network.
In “In the Valley of Elah”, Vietnam veteran Hank Dyrfield (Tommy Lee Jones) is reunited with his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), who has returned home alive and well after serving in Iraq. But without even warming his feet at home, the boy disappears somewhere.
As soon as the investigation begins, the sad news comes – a young man has been murdered. His distraught father is determined to find out what happened that fateful night. Ambitious army detective Emily Sanders (played by Charlize Theron) helps Hank to unravel the tragedy. And the film’s title draws parallels to the biblical site of the duel between David and Goliath.
Although the main message of the film is to condemn all war (and could it be otherwise?) and to reiterate the oft-repeated truth that war inevitably affects people’s psyche, the filmmakers (who are not Americans!) do not miss the opportunity to emphasize patriotism and pride in one’s own country, in addition to the pain of the losses of war.
5. “Love Lies Bleeding” (2024)
It is a crime movie, the tragic story of one family, intertwined with brutality, eroticism, addiction, crime, beautiful bodies, testosterone and coups. The screen is often flooded with red light, symbolizing passion and danger, and the love (or rather addiction?) of two girls unfolds, leading to unexpected twists and turns in the plot.
This film is first and foremost an aesthetic film. It is not only adorned with beautiful people, but also with beautiful shots, whether it is sex scenes, people’s bodies in sport or just a starry night. The cameraman’s close-ups give us a closer look inside the subjects: cigarette smoke wafts slowly from a woman’s gossamer mouth, teeth that have fallen out of her jaw bulge like the parts of a disassembled anatomy mannequin, droplets of sweat glisten on her firm skin.
In a nutshell, Lu lives in a small New Mexico town in the 1990s. She works as a manager in a seedy gym where the biggest event is a clogged toilet. Lu is trying to kick her addiction to nicotine and a pesky fan. She tries to help her sister survive with an abusive husband.
Then one day, Jackie appears on the horizon – a homeless, athletic woman who dreams of a better life: she’s going to the bodybuilding championships in a month, and this town, where Lu lives, is just a stopover. But the girls are caught up in… love.
Of course, their love is revealed unexpectedly quickly – in just a month. After their first meeting, they are already living together and planning their future. It can only happen in the movies…
To keep the film intriguing, it is soon revealed that Lu’s father is a criminal who cannot be caught by law enforcement. Lu hates her father, she hates her sister’s husband, who beats her all the time, and all this leads to a tragic end…
Although the film may seem overly criminal – domestic violence, murder, FBI interference, the trauma of the past, the desire for revenge – its main theme is addiction.
In the first shots, Lu takes a drag on a cigarette and listens to a stop smoking video. In this recording, the narrator talks about how nicotine seeps into our subconscious without us even knowing it. And then we see that this storyline continues: Lu’s sister is addicted to her abusive husband, Lu is addicted to her sister, this is the narrative of the film, and the roots of evil begin to emerge, and then Jackie shows up… Will it be another addiction again? (Dora Žibaitė)
4. ”Sun Don’t Shine” (2012)
Amy Seimetz (who has over 90 roles in films and TV series) can be seen in Ridley Scott’s sequel to “Prometheus”, “Alien: Covenant” (2017), and Steven King’s adaptation of “Animal Graveyard” (2019).
And this time we look back at her first independently produced movie, the crime horror drama “Sun, Don’t Shine” (2012).
The movie tells a horrifying story. It focuses on a young woman with a volatile psyche, Christel (Kate Lyn Sheil). After a fight with her husband, Kristel kills him and her friend Leo (Kentucker Audley) offers to help her dispose of the corpse. With dangerous cargo in the boot of their car, the couple embark on a road trip through sun-baked Florida.
Leo came up with a simple, but what he thought was a good plan: go to his old friend Tere, borrow a boat, drown the corpse in the lake, and get an alibi.
As expected, the ideal plan is constantly compromised by unforeseen circumstances and the unpredictable behavior of the jealous Kristel. When Leo and Teri (Kit Gwin) are discovered together, Kristel freaks out and threatens the couple with a knife. Kristel’s out-of-control behavior seems to be more of a threat to everyone than external factors. But soon they too become involved in the plot.
When the contents of the trunk are accidentally discovered by the owner of a rented boat, another unforeseen act is added to the plan to hide the traces.
In a review in “The New York Times”, critic Zach Baron shares the content of his interview with the director. In it, Amy Seimetz said that in making this movie, she wanted to free herself from the nightmare of guilt and death that she had dreamt several times.
The low-budget movie received many positive reviews. “New York Post” praised the film’s acting and direction. “The Seattle Times” called it a “strangely sunny film” and compared it to Terrence Malick’s classic “Badlands” (1973).
And a ”New York Times” reviewer remarked that the film “unfolds like a Françoise Sagan novel: purposeful, enigmatic, and with raw emotional purity…”.
3. “The Little Things” (2021)
Denzel Washington is no stranger to suspense thrillers. He has played both brutal crime bosses (Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster”, 2007) and fanatical law enforcers (Antoine Fuqua’s “The Day of Judgement”, 2001).
The popular black actor also plays a former LAPD officer (returning to his old job to carry out a responsible mission) in the new film “Small Things” (2021).
Kern County Sheriff’s Deputy Joe Deacon, known as Dickey, is posted to Los Angeles. The purpose of the trip is trivial and even routine – to collect important clues. Once he’s on his feet in a new place, the task changes: Dicky is used by the local police to find a serial killer who is terrorising the city and who has already murdered five victims.
The Maniac’s search team is led by a young Los Angeles Police Department officer, Sergeant Jim Baxter (played by Rami Malek, who will continue to play Freddie Mercury’s reincarnation wherever he appears).
Jim is impressed by Dickie’s professional skills and intuition, and asks his more experienced colleague to help him with a confusing case (without making it official).
But, as more attentive viewers suspected before it was revealed, the new case brings the ghosts of Dicky’s past and secrets seemingly buried for ages out of oblivion.
Similar “little things” that come out of the square were beautifully described by the famous new age “noir” “L.A. Confidential” (1997, directed by Curtis Hanson). There, too, the action was set in the City of Angels, and the main intricate plot developments shone between the glittering secrets of the private lives of Hollywood stars and the brutal criminal intrigues of corrupt politicians.
We are familiar with the work of director John Lee Hancock. We’ve seen two sports dramas directed by him: 2002’s “The Rookie” (about baseball players) and 2009’s “The Blind Side” (about a homeless teenager adopted by a kind-hearted American woman, who later became a famous star of American football).
We’ve also seen the beautiful biographical comedy “Saving Mr. Banks”, with Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as the writer Pamela Travers, when they worked together on the famous fairy tale “Mary Poppins” (1964).
“Small Things” is set in the early 1990s, before mobile telephony and the internet. Even DNA research was not up to scratch then. And all these “small things” were a major setback for the police then.
The most interesting part of the film is not only (and not so much) the search for the killer (there is not much action, which is usual for crime thrillers), but also the development of the relationship between the two officers.
And Los Angeles doesn’t come alive in the glitzy way we’re used to seeing in the City of Angels movies. (G. J.)
2. “Decision to Leave” (2022)
South Korean cinema is now famous and trendy all over the world. Director Kim Ki-duk, who died in neighboring Latvia in 2020, became an acknowledged classic while he was still alive.
After “Parasite” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and went on to win four major Oscars in America, even people who are far from the cinema have taken note of director Bong Joon-ho’s name, and even remembered his highly original film “Okcha” (2017) from not so long ago.
And a little earlier, we were introduced to another talented South Korean filmmaker, Park Chan-wook.
A true cinematic sensation was his and our screen version of “Common Security Zone” (2000), in which the unbridgeable gulf between the two parts of Korea was symbolised by a bridge connecting the banks of a river – a kind of no-man’s land where border guards of neither of the two conflicting countries dare to venture. It is a place where the slightest misunderstanding can fan the flames of a new civil war.
The director’s film Oldboy (2003), which was best promoted by Quentin Tarantino, who lavished it with praise, was a high-profile and commercial success. The protagonist, a middle-aged man held for years in a private prison, takes terrible revenge on his abusers after his release.
We’ve already seen Park Chan-wook’s American horror thriller ”Stokers”, (2013) with Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska. We saw Thirst (2009), based on Émile Zola’s novel “Tereza Raken”.
We enjoyed the stunningly beautifully shot “The Handmaiden” (2016), which has been compared by critics to A. Kurosawa’s “Rasiomon” for its narrative style, and to L. Visconti’s “Leopard” for its aristocratic visual splendour.
And in Cannes 2022, Park Chan-wook was awarded Best Director for “The Decision to Leave”.
Even before its premiere, the short synopsis of the film intrigued, promising that it would be a story about a policeman investigating a murder and the murder victim’s wife, who became the main suspect.
There are nine dozen similar plot threads in cinema. But we already know that Park Chan-wook can turn even a seemingly banal story into a suspenseful thriller and make the viewer wander through its labyrinth of plot twists. Moreover, his films always have a strong crime and redemption motif.
Jan Che Zhuon, a criminal investigator, is not at all like the usual Superman of such films. Quite the opposite. He has a reputation as a loser among his co-workers, having made serious mistakes on more than one occasion. The man has serious health problems, which cause him to suffer from chronic insomnia. And his family life is dull and monotonous: He can only see his wife at weekends because he works in Busan and his wife is far away on the coast where there is a nuclear power plant.
A tragic accident in the mountains, when a high-ranking immigration official is killed after falling from a peak, gives a new impetus to the monotonous routine. The accident raises many questions. The strangest link in the sequence of incomprehensible events is the deceased’s wife, a Chinese woman who once entered the country illegally but managed to obtain citizenship by exception.
Both the widow’s past and her current behaviour are full of oddities (she adores old Japanese pop songs, keeps her grandmother’s and mother’s ashes in the house as well as a lethal dose of sleeping pills, and speaks to a cat that has a special way of ingratiating itself with her!), and this leads Jan to follow the woman at night.
The film’s emotional timeline resembles a cardiogram of the heart, where sudden emotional surges are followed by ebb and flow. All of them in a mesmerising rhythm (hypnosis has a special significance in the film) gradually bring the emotionally overwhelmed viewer closer to the unpredictable finale – the decision to leave…
1. ”Master Gardener”, (2022)
Writer-director Paul Schrader’s latest film, “Master Gardener”, was screened in the non-competitive programme of the Venice Film Festival in early autumn last year, and the 75-year-old was awarded the Golden Lion, an honorable mention.
On this occasion, Festival Director Alberto Barbera said: “Paul Schrader is a key figure in New Hollywood. The movement revolutionised the American film industry, aesthetics and language in the late 1960s.
This director has been greatly influenced by European cinema and culture. Although he is an independent screenwriter, he knows how to work within the Hollywood system. All his films are characterised by bold visual solutions. Schrader is an uncompromising filmmaker, but he is also an artist who subtly explores the issues of today.
Paul Schrader made a name for himself as a screenwriter, working with Martin Scorsese on ”Taxi Driver”, (1976), “Raging Bull” (1979), “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988) and “Running from Death” (1999). Since 1978, he has been directing on his own and has made over two dozen feature films.
According to the director himself, “Master Gardener” is the final film of an unofficial trilogy (after “The First Reformed Church”, 2017 and last year’s “The Card Counter”), logically ending the theme of the “lonely man” or “man in the room”. The screenwriter, by the way, has been developing this theme since the legendary “Taxi Driver”. The director describes the protagonists of all these films as “characters who have distanced themselves from reality and emotions and are just waiting for something to happen. All of them are influenced by the European philosophy of existentialism, which is the philosophy of F. Dostoyevsky, A. Camus and J.P. Sartre”.
“Master Gardener” is the story of Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), a gardener who faithfully carries out his duties on the Louisiana estate of a wealthy widow, Mrs Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). But the man’s Spartan calm comes to an end the day the landlady demands that Mr Gardener teach his trade to her troubled niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell). This time, the director chose the profession of gardening for his protagonist because it “can be a metaphor for both good and evil”. “On the one hand, white supremacists might say: We are gardeners and we pull weeds. On the other hand, humanists can say: We are gardeners and we try to make different cultures grow. Both use the same gardening metaphor, but give it the opposite meaning,” is how Paul Schrader explained the basic idea of his film to the film industry magazine “Variety”.
