Graduation Day (1981)

Except for the fact Jamie Lee Curtis doesn't appear, this 1981 slasher follows the 80s teen slasher formula exactly — it could even be Scream -1 — opening on an initial tragedy at Woodsboro, I mean, Midvale High School that sets into motion a grisly series of killings of the members of the school's track-and-field team, and about the only thing that sets Graduation Day apart from the long line of identical others is a rocking film clip at the one-hour mark — Felony's Gangster Rock — which injects new energy — not a lot, but new — into the final thirty-minute lead-up to the clumsy reveal of The Fisherman, I mean, Ghostface, I mean...

★★☆☆☆

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Birth (2004)

Jonathan Glazer's beautifully acted and beautiful-to-look-at Birth, about an affluent Upper East Side New York family intruded upon by a boy who claims to be a reincarnated dead husband, wants to be taken seriously - and some people oblige, calling it a mystery and treatise on profound things like belief and loss, but it plays out more like a deadly earnest fairytale - that is to say, it plays out ridiculously - and while the final scene does a good job, finally, of grounding the first-world problems of these toffs in some real emotion, getting there is far too long a road - an absurd and monotonous one - with an especially icky bath scene and kiss scene along the way.

★★★☆☆

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The Woman In Cabin 10 (2025)

On a superyacht off the coast of Norway, a journalist (Keira Knightley) sees a woman go overboard one night, but none of the other guests – a who's who of the business and entertainment worlds gathered for a charity event – believes her, in this Ruth Ware book adaptation that is first third run-of-the-mill murder mystery set-up (assorted characters gather on board a yacht), second third effective thriller that borrows liberally from Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, full of shocks and surprises as the journalist finds herself increasingly isolated, labelled mad, and drawn deeper and deeper into paranoia, and final third messy denouement – a terribly cliched gala event showdown – that makes no logistical sense; the middle third makes it worth watching the whole.

★★★☆☆

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Agatha Christie's Seven Dials (2026)

Agatha Christie wasn't called the Queen of Mystery for her occasional attempts at the espionage thriller, as any reader of The Big Four, They Came to Baghdad, and Passenger to Frankfurt can attest, and so, except for a ridiculously embellished final reveal, we can't entirely blame the makers of this three-part series for the ludicrous plotting of their adaptation of The Seven Dials Mystery, a comic adventure after Nancy Drew rather than a traditional murder mystery, about British government agents, scientists, spies, absurd secret societies, and, when you dissect it, a circular story of unlikely coincidence rather than sensible clues.

★★★☆☆

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Majboor ('Convulsed') (1974)

Ravi has a mother, sister, young brother, and a love interest we get to know, first, watching their jolly good times at home and at the beach; time is also spent establishing the kidnap and murder case Ravi is involved in as a witness; he then develops and is diagnosed with a brain tumor; dying, he concocts a plan to falsely confess to a kidnap-murder and claim the reward money for his family; then comes an operation - miraculously - that cures him; and it is only after all this convoluted set-up - a perfunctory first hour and a half (perfunctory despite brightly coloured Bollywood music-and-dance set-pieces) - that the mystery thriller can start: poor helpless and alone ("majboor"), Ravi's only way out of the death penalty is to go on the run and find the real murderer.

★★★☆☆

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Not Me That Went Viral (俺ではない炎上) (2025)

This book adaptation with a terribly translated English title starts promisingly with a social-media-age update of the Hitchcockian 'wrong man' plot, with Taisuke Yamagata, a fifty-something real estate sales manager, falsely accused of murder by well-meaning but misguided online amateur sleuths, but by the end, the tone has lurched awkwardly between comedy, thriller, and social commentary (isn't online amateur crime reporting terrible?), and the plot has required audiences to at once sympathise with Yamagata as the wronged hero while also regarding him with disdain and pity as a problematic antihero - a difficult balancing act given his portrayal by the likeable Hiroshi Abe.

★★☆☆☆

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The Housemaid (2025)

A plot synopsis of this "thriller" on Wikipedia would reveal the twists just as artfully and thrillingly as director Paul Feig's movie - an adaptation of the hit book by Freida McFadden and hark-back to the throwaway domestic thrillers of the 90s - a monotonous, personality-free drear with no redeemable characters and nothing to care about, and when I genuinely ask family and friends who profess to have loved it what exactly they liked, the answer is frequently Sydney Sweeney's boobs.

★★☆☆☆

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Tightrope (1984)

Of course it is hard for New Orleans police detective Wes Block (Clint Eastwood) to catch the serial killer on the loose in the city - he is one of those badly drawn 80s-movie serial killers with an everchanging modus operandi, neither disorganised nor organised, at times a random targetter of women on the streets and at other times a player of diabolical games of cat-and-mouse who ends up a balaclava-ed home invader - and it is the macho 80s, so every single woman in this movie is coquettish and aching for it, and it doesn't matter how crotchetty and old and wrinkled the men are or how revolting their come-on lines are, the women are desperate to please - wait to hear Block's attempts at wooing the rape prevention instructor, Beryl Thibodeaux (the only woman in it who isn't a street walker) when they lunch together by the New Orleans' harbour, and wait and baulk when she becomes interested! - and keep in mind Block knows by this stage a serial killer is targeting the women he beds, but I guess Thibodeaux wants it so bad, Block simply has no choice, despite the obvious danger, to scratch her itch like a hero.

★★★☆☆

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All the Kind Strangers (aka 'Evil In The Swamp') (1974)

A group of scowling kids inhabit a farmhouse and scout potential new fill-in 'parents' using a murderous recruitment process, in this made-for-American tv movie starring Stacy Keach as the latest mark to fall into the kids' trap, but the movie never really makes the most of its well-ahead-of-its-time 'Speak no evil' plot - there's no apparent reason for Martha to be mute, for example. 

★★☆☆☆

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The Night of the Twelfth (2022)

It isn't very remarkable at the outset and could be an episode of any grey and dour television police procedural - a young woman dies horribly, and police look for the killer amongst her male friends - but The Night of the Twelfth starts with a placecard that connects the story to true crimes in France and has said something loudly by the end, rather than settling for the usual murder mystery denouement.

★★★★☆

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Missing (2023)

This doesn't quite succeed in sustaining, like "Searching" did, its wholly tech-window-delivered thrills in which everything that happens happens on a phone- and/or computer screen, about halfway through losing momentum and starting to rely on increasingly unlikely sources of video footage, but the mystery of an American teen's mother contains some clever developments.

★★★☆☆

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Only the Animals (Seules les bêtes) (2019)

The way this sober, bleak Colin Niels book adaptation unfolds across chapters titled "Alice", "Joseph" and "Marion", etc - individual stories that intersect and overlap in surprising ways - and the way the movie's initial mystery of a missing woman ends up being the repercussion of events surprisingly global, means Only The Animals recalls those sombre movies of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, 21 Grams, etc..), but when Only the Animals ends, you feel like you have been bogged down in the sordid criminality of several individuals, not swept across the world as in Iñárritu's movies where individual lives are mere threads of a global human experience.

★★★☆☆

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The Big Sleep (1946)

Even Humphrey Bogart said he didn't know what was happening scene-to-scene in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's hardboiled private eye crime story, and having just read the book, I can attest that the film is faithful to its sprawling mess of a plot - sprawling because Chandler in fact wrote it by fusing two previously published short stories, merging characters, renaming others, caring less about resolving plot threads and more about building not so much a mystery as a noir character study of criminal California circa 1940, delivered in hilarious deadpan and steeped in worldweary immorality.

★★★★☆

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Agatha Christie "Marple": The Sittaford Mystery (2006)

Despite not really fitting the image I have in my head of the character, Geraldine McEwan is a good Miss Marple - shrew and mischevious, her eyes positively twinkle as she contemplates twisted human psychology and murder, so much that you can forgive her spritely frame and impish energy - and even though she has been thrust into this adaptation of a book she didn't even appear in, she adds good value to the story, quietly solving a murder that takes place in a snowed-in inn populated with a star-studded array of likely suspects (Carey Mulligan, Timothy Dalton, Mel Smith, James Murray, and more, in a scenario very reminiscent to the one in The Mousetrap).

★★★☆☆

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The Inugami Family (犬神家の一族) (1976)

Seishi Yokomizo's murder mystery is set in motion by the death of a rich patriarch whose unusual will plummets his extended Inugami family into conflict, and when the bodies start turning up in grisly giallo fashion, Kindaichi Kousuke,  Yokomizo's recurring detective, a vagabond with dandruff (!), must race to unmask a murderer in a plot that, as always with Yokomizo, involves a thousand similarly named characters, centuries of buried family history, and complicated - and here, really, frankly, impossible - characters' comings and goings from busy murder scenes.

★★★☆☆

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Poison Pen (1939)

Tension ratchets up as more and more poison pen letters are received by inhabitants of a small village, with things ending up a murder mystery of sorts given death result from the villagers turning on each other, and we get a surprise in the gleefully grisly end, not so much from the "who" - though this is handled cleverly - but from the "why".

★★★☆☆

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八っ墓村 (Yatsuhaka-mura) (Eight Tomb Village)(1996)

Seishi Yokomizo's mystery novel, encompassing 1577 civl war events, a spree killing in the 1930s (inspired by a horrible true event), and then a more contemporary village murder mystery, is a convoluted mess (on top of these occasions of mass murder spread over 400 years, there's portentous lightning strikes, identical twins, hidden treasure, mummified bodies, a labyrinth, madness, a curse, and village unrest) and while director Ichikawa Kon's 1996 remake sticks more closely to the plot of the book than the 1977 adaptation, it still makes the sensible choice to cut some fat off the book's bones, presenting an enjoyable mystery less convoluted than the book, downplaying the horror of the 1977 version and up-playing the English mystery elements, injecting into the mystery much more of Kindaichi Kousuke, the private detective, who is trying to discover who is poisoning the residents of "Eight Tomb Village" while also investigating how the murders are related to the arrival in town of handsome Tatsuya Tajimi, a young man just told he is heir to the enormous Tajimi fortune.

★★★★☆

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Stage Fright (1950)

It's not lauded as a masterpiece like other Hitchcock thrillers, but I think this one about an acting school student (Wyman) who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery when her friend Freddie goes on the run from police, is, from the get-go, fun, romantic, thrilling, and star-studded with Pat Hitchcock, the director's daughter debuting as an adult in her father's films (in 1936's Sabotage, she was a very young extra) and Marlene Dietrich features as a sinister rival for Freddie's affections.

★★★★☆

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Ten to sen (aka 'Points and Lines' or 'Point and Line') (点と線) (1958)

Seiichi Matsumoto's mystery, a mere slip of a book written in the spare style of Simenon, is in some ways the counter to Hitchcock's A Lady Vanishes - instead of disappearing from a train, here one character steadfastly appears on one while detectives suspect he was elsewhere - but to say more would ruin the surprise of both the book and this faithful 1958 adaptation that opens with a Vertigo-style animated journey across the points and lines of a train map set to a jaunty discordant thriller score, barrels like an express train through its mystery, and ends with a solution to an impossible crime as ingenious as it is simple, hinging on a trick that is uniquely Japanese - there'll never be a Western adaptation! 

★★★★★

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Ten Little Indians (1965)

Agatha Christie's grisly plot is so good, movie adaptations just can not mess it up, and even this prosaic 1965 version, filmed in large and austere, airy sets that undo the plot's claustrophobia, manages to be thrilling - keeping things fresh is the setting of a snowed-in mansion (not an island off the Devon coast), some deaths from great mountain heights, and a hilarious but oddly effective "Whodunnit break" (a one-minute pause with a voice-over that prompts audience members to turn to their neighbour and hazard a guess at whodunnit!)

★★★☆☆

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