The Mean Season (1985)

Based on a book by John Katzenbach called In The Heat of The Summer, the dull The Mean Season should have capitalised on Florida's oppressive Summer, but everyone in it — Kurt Russell's journalist, a camera-toting colleague, his boss, and a detective played by a very young Andy Garcia — remains fresh despite running around after a serial killer - and Mariel Hemingway's love interest at one point even leaves Kurt a message written in a fogged up car window - and in the same way, the serial killer himself, a taunter of the public via the phone on Malcolm's news desk and a presence that really should sweep through with menace and ravage the community, never actually takes a compelling shape.

★★☆☆☆

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Enigma (2018)

When a television show approaches the mother of a murdered woman proposing a 90-minute true-crime special that might help reveal the truth of the daughter's death, the mother is torn because first her husband, sisters, and large number of daughters must address some matters that until now have been dealt with as deeply private, and although this is an important and very well-acted film, there is something infuriating about watching all the extended family members and friends whispering and gossiping for an hour over something that, outside of conservative Chile at least, shouldn't stand in the way of a murder investigation.

★★☆☆☆

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Insomnia (2002)

Because there is so much to cover - the Alaskan environment, its community and way-of-life, the effect the extended daylight hours of the region has on Al Pacino's cop and his investigation into a girl's murder, not to mention his tense relationship with his partner and his burgeoning one with an eager young Alaskan cop-in-training played by Hilary Swank - Christopher Nolan's exceptionally well-acted thriller, with its fine production values, ends up feeling thin as ice where it really demands to be grand and sweeping.

★★★☆☆

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Midnight Lace (1960)

Filled with Hitchcock alumni - Doris Day from The Man Who Knew Too Much and John Williams from Dial M For Murder, but alongside Rex Harrison, not James Stewart or Cary Grant - and about an American woman (Day), newly married and in London, in distress after she starts being stalked by a disembodied voice - first in a pea soup London fog, atmospherically, and then over a series of phone calls - this thriller directed by David Miller really feels like a classic Hitchcock: London, too, with its double deckers, phone boxes, opera performances, and pubs, and while thriller fans will know where it's heading, there are a few well-handled surprises in the end.

★★★★☆

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The Day Of The Jackal (1973)

There is so much detail in Fred Zinnemann's riveting adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal - European filming locations; real people on the street unaware they are being filmed, an audacious plot that sweeps through multiple countries yet also manages to detail the minutiae of the characters' day-to-day - that at times the political thriller starts to feel like a documentary, lending real-time urgency as we follow Edward Fox's Jackal, an assassin for hire meticulously plotting the assassination of Charles de Gaulle while the Parisian police struggle to track him, a faceless, nameless master of disguise.

★★★★★

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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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Murder By Numbers (2002)

Hitchcock's Rope, based on a play, was a chamber thriller focused with icy precision on its chilling pair of Leopold-and-Loeb intellectual killers, whereas Barbet Schroeder's Murder By Numbers might be its dopey cousin 'Fray': it starts strong, in a Hitchcockian world that extends out the window to the horizon - more Rear Window than Rope - but descends into mess as its two killers (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) turn on each other, with the film asking us to care about too many extraneous things - the cop's sex life, her traumatic past, one killer's love interest, and even a monkey - until the murdering pair, in the end plodding here and there in plastic body suits and swim goggles, look less icy and more and more like the bungling burglars from Home Alone.

★★★☆☆

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Delirium (Óráð) (2023)

I had to turn this Icelandic horror movie off at the mandolin finger-slicing scene, despite my interest in the first half, which is effectively creepy and made me deeply uneasy.  

RATING: NO RATING (I can't finish it!)

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Long Dark Hall (1951)

We know from the outset Rex Harrison's Arthur Groome, a married man, didn't kill his 'bit on the side' - one of those disorganised serial killers, a starey laneway night dweller, did - so this isn't a mystery and instead thrills are supposed to come from the court case that makes up most of the movie (filmed in London's Old Bailey) where everything is stacked against our "wrong man", but the movie also wants to be a character study of Groome's spurned but devoted wife - interesting, well-acted, but hardly thrilling - and the movie ends quite abruptly, almost as if everyone involved - the serial killer, the judge, the journalists, the actors,the audience - all simply got fed up with the dreary situation and suddenly wants it over.

★★☆☆☆

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Cold Sweat (1971)

In this adaptation of a Richard Mathieson novella, (also the basis of an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents) Charles Bronson's Joe Martin must protect his wife and daughter from a criminal gang he used to drive for - they've come back into Joe's life seeking redress for a wrong they feel Joe committed against them.

★★★☆☆

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Still of the Night (1982)

Roy Schneider is a psychiatrist - the sort role Cary Grant plays in a Hitchcock thriller - and Meryl Streep is the blonde femme fatale who comes to him for help when her lover (his patient) is found murdered, in this enjoyable but dopey tv-grade mystery thriller full of attempts at classic Hitchcock thriller moments - a dream sequence, psychobabble, auction-house hijinx - but all delivered in a laughable threadbare plot.

★★★☆☆

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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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Serenity (2019)

Interstellar, another movie starring Matthew McConaughey as a father separated by vast stretches of time and space from his child, was released five years earlier than Serenity, which is surprising because Serenity feels like the retro, 8-bit, pixelated version, playing with similar themes but in a story that awkwardly melds '40s film noir with family drama and a tuna-fishing adventure, all steeped in odd moments of reality-bending fantasy that may signal McConaughey's character's post-war trauma playing havoc with his head - or else something else delivered in not very stellar fashion.

★★☆☆☆ 

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The Mask of Dimitros (1944)

What many say is Eric Ambler's best book is adapted faithfully here to the big screen with Peter Lorre in the lead role as the detective writer Leyden who becomes obsessed with chronicling the life of a murder victim washed up on a beach in Istanbul - Dimitrios Makropoulos, whom Leyden discovers, as he journeys across Europe and Asia talking with the dead man's victims, was a swindler, a spy, assassin, forger, drug dealer,  blackmailer, grifter, thief, and, in the book, even a human trafficker!

★★★★☆

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Lara (2019)

All sorts of ideas about what is going on will run through your head watching this intense and drily funny character study of Lara (Lara Jenkins, the ubermother of a concert pianist) who, on her sixtieth birthday, buys up the remaining tickets for her son's premiere concert recital and spends the hours leading up to the event handing them out to her acquaintances, and exactly who she is and what she is doing and what drives her, and how and why she drives so many around her away, not just old coworkers who hate her but also her son who appears not to welcome her to his concert, isn't perfectly clear until the film ends with the formidable lead Corianne Harfouch's casting one last long deliciously ice-blue stare down the camera...and then you'll know.

★★★★★

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The Teacher's Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) (2023)

I love movies about school - school is such a perfect hotbed of issues - and this German film is a ripper with Leonie Benesch perfect as the fresh-faced and idealistic teacher who sees all her hard work creating a harmonious classroom environment undone when speculation runs rife through the school campus that one of their own is a thief.

★★★★☆

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Last Suspect (2023)

A laughable cliche of a high-powered, ultra-successful criminal lawyer - she never loses a case - and a laughable cliche of a loose-wire cop - the sort who shoots first and shows no respect to the station chief - team up in a watchable but patently absurd thriller that grows increasingly ridiculous as it goes on - the lawyer's daughter is kidnapped for an unusual ransom, with the lawyer coerced into reinvestigating and solving a murder before the young man found guilty of the crime is sentenced.

★★☆☆☆

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Sudden Fear (1952)

It's not a patch on Hitchcock's Suspicion from 1941  - that movie tells the same story but with humour, a grisly connection to true crimes, as well as the electric pairing of Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine - but this lesser Sudden Fear is still a gripping noir with a young Jack Palance starring as Crawford's playwright's new murderous man.

★★★☆☆

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Coup de Chance (2023)

Woody Allen's so prolific, all his new movies just seem like his old movies again, or blends of them, or gender-reversed versions, or simply retold (wasn't Blue Jasmine just Allen trying again, more successfully as it turns out, to tell again the underwhelming Melinda and Melinda) - he's done this one before, too, you find yourself thinking, and so it is with his fiftieth movie, a charming comedy suspense and kind of Irrational Man repeat or Scoop revisitation that plays with the themes of chaos and chance again, but the one big difference here is this is a good one, because that's something Allen doesn't always do - this is sharp, extremely (but subtly) funny, and beautiful to look at in terms of the costume, scenery, and actors.

★★★★☆

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Shock (1946)

A woman witnesses murder and suffers such a shock, she is admitted to a psychiatric facility in a catatonic state and of course the doctor-in-charge turns out to be Vincent Price's Dr Richard Cross, the murderer, but luckily for our catatonic patient, the dastardly doctor dispenses with the hefty candlestick he used on his wife's head (beside an open apartment window) and in the hospital decides  far more cautious methods are needed to overcome obstacles to his securing a wife-free future: he does things like rap on the beside table rhythmically as he whispers in the woman's ear, trying to confuse her. 

★★☆☆☆

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