Thrillers never, ever, ever go out of fashion. No matter what else is happening in cinema, audiences always want films that get their hearts racing.
To be fair, we're never likely to get bored of chases, suspense and drama. But what's often forgotten is that thrillers are where a lot of the most innovative and distinctive writers and directors do their best stuff – after all, thrillers live or die by keeping audiences intrigued, so filmmakers are always exploring new ways to ratchet up the stress.
The best thrillers are all about that build-up and release of tension, which is, ultimately, the fundamental joy of cinema (and yes, some other activities too). With more than a century of thrillers to choose from, stretching back to pioneers like Harold Lloyd, you need a guide to the genre. You're very welcome.
The Long Good Friday (1980)
For a while it looked like this story of Bob Hoskins' reformed gangland kingpin going to war with the IRA would be too hot for any cinema to handle. ITV bought it to put on telly, but head honcho Lew Grade balked at it what he saw as glorification of the IRA when he saw it. It fell to George Harrison's Handmade Films to buy it and get it on the big screen, and we owe him many a Hare Krishna for it. This is one of the great thrillers of postwar British cinema, a hard-boiled, tightly-wound vision of Britain's ripped underbelly. Hoskins' Harold Shand is trying to go legit with a big business deal to buy up parts of London's decrepit docklands alongside an American mafioso. But then his properties become the targets of bomb attacks, and he and his associates set about finding out who's responsible without letting on to their American partner and frightening him off. Helen Mirren co-stars, and it's film debut of Pierce Brosnan too, though he's playing the part of 'First Irishman'. Still, gotta start somewhere.
Sightseers (2012)
You'll never see the National Tramway Museum at Crich the same way after watching Ben Wheatley's black comedy thriller. Chris and Tina are a deeply average couple who go caravanning around the north's very finest tourist hotspots – Keswick Pencil Museum, the Clue John Cavern at Castleton, Ribblehead Viaduct – and, along the way, get a taste for murdering people who annoy them. Soon, though, this latter-day Bonnie and Clyde find that they're killing for very different reasons, and the chaos they've left behind them begins to unravel them. Really funny, and arguably revived the trend for using Frankie Goes to Hollywood's 'The Power of Love' for big emotional bits.
It Always Rains on Sunday (1947)
This gem of post-war British noir paints a gloomy picture of a drab, rundown Bethnal Green and the austere lives of the people living there including young housewife Rose Sandigate. She's bored stiff – until, that is, her old flame Tommy escapes from prison where he'd been serving a seven-year stretch for armed robbery and sets up in the air raid shelter in the back garden. Soon Rose has to hide both Tommy and her latent feelings for him from her family, and the tension mounts on Rose's conscience.
The Red Shoes (1948)
One of the many British films Martin Scorsese has advocated for over the years, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's twisting, feverish, magic-laced dreamscape is the one Marty loves more than any other. "Every time I go back to look at it, about once a year, it’s new," he said in 2014. "It reveals another side, another level, and it goes deeper." When student composer Julian realises that his teacher has plagiarised one of his tunes, he's taken on by a sympathetic ballet impresario. Julian is paired up with young dancer Vicky, who's also keen to make her mark. They come up with The Ballet of the Red Shoes – its 17-minute performance is the centrepiece of the whole film – which turns into a runaway success. It's soon clear, though, that there are more powerful forces at play than either Vicky or Julian can control. It's not a pure thriller – it's far too innovative and vivid to stay in one genre – but it's a propulsive and horror-inflected story about art and the urge to create, and the obsessive, possessive way it can take over.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
The quantum leap between the extremely wiggy (if very fun) Mel Gibson era Mad Max movies and George Miller's electrifying, climate apocalypse-inspired reboot with Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron is still quite hard to fathom. It's not just a quantum leap for Mad Max either: it's still the gold standard for blockbusting, brain-busting cinema, packing in so many huge ideas while never letting the action stop. In a ruined, desert-like future, Max Rockatansky is captured by a gang of roving, near-human warlords who start bleeding him dry. But when Furiosa, one of the warlords' lieutenants, rebels to protect the women in her care, Max is pulled into a battle to protect the future of humanity.
Un Chien Andalou (1928)
Now, Un Chien Andalou isn't the kind of thriller you'll be able to idly Google an ending explainer for after the credits have rolled. It isn't a thriller in the Hitchcockian sense – or, indeed, in most other senses. It's not a tightly plotted cat-and-mouse game with one or another of Gene Hackman, Al Pacino or Harrison Ford in it. But it is one of the most viscerally, disorientatingly thrilling 21 minutes you're ever likely to spend in front of the TV; a stream of surreal, disturbing, prophetic, rich images and sensations which look like they might mean everything but which its makers always insisted meant nothing beyond what they made you feel. It all came together Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel had lunch one day and compared dreams: the moon appearing to be sliced open by a cloud; a hand reaching around a door, covered in ants. They had one rule, Buñuel said: "Do not dwell on what required purely rational, psychological or cultural explanations. Open the way to the irrational." You can imagine the David Lynch and David Cronenburg making notes.
Touch of Evil (1958)
For decades this was one of the great lost Hollywood classics. Welles signed on to direct and star alongside Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh in the story of a special prosecutor who's trying to enjoy his honeymoon when an assassination by time bomb brings him back to the day job. Welles ended up helping with the script too, and wanted to make a thriller which didn't let up for a second: a taut, riveting thing which melded his visionary instincts with pop clout. Welles' vision was hacked about by four different editors, and reshoots and extra scenes were forced upon him by the studio. But the version which finally saw the light of day in 1998 – reworked by The Godfather and Apocalypse Now editor Walter Murch – sticks to what Welles wanted, and turned it into the movie it could have been. It's extraordinarily rich and visually intoxicating; see the opening one-shot sequence where the killer sets the time bomb, and the camera sweeps around town, letting the tension gradually tick and tock up and up.
The Fugitive (1993)
Harrison Ford's second act as a put-upon everyman trying to shake off, variously, the police, his CIA colleagues and Gary Oldman shouting at top volume, started in earnest here. He's Dr Richard Kimble, a heart surgeon turned classic Hitchcockian wrongly convicted man on the run after his wife is found murdered. Tommy Lee Jones is the marshal on his trail, relentlessly pursuing Kimble across the country as Kimble attempts to find the man who really killed his wife. It's bombastic and brilliantly so, but with more than enough character work to keep things grounded and gritty.
Prevenge (2016)
Alice Lowe's debut as writer and director wraps a psychological thriller up in a slasher and adds a load of the kind of mordant, dry comedy which she brought to Ben Wheatley's Sightseers. She also plays Ruth, a heavily pregnant widow whose husband died in a recent climbing accident. Everyone means well for Ruth, but there's something nobody seems to understand: her unborn baby keeps telling her to murder people. Made on a shoestring budget, it's one of the most original, disturbing and subversive British thrillers of the last decade.
The Prestige (2006)
We're gonna say it: this is Christopher Nolan's most satisfying film, and one which reveals more and more of itself the more you watch it. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale are warring magicians in Victorian London, Michael Caine is the assistant trying to help Jackman out-magic Bale and Scarlett Johansson is the ingénue in the middle of all of them. Plus, there's a brief but magnetic turn from David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. "Tesla was this other-worldly, ahead-of-his-time figure," Nolan later remembered, "and at some point it occurred to me he was the original Man Who Fell to Earth." You might notice that Jackman and Caine do a lot of sparring in a room where film negatives are developing: as much as it's about two warring conjurors, The Prestige is about the work of the filmmaker as magician.
Double Indemnity (1944)
Billy Wilder's fleet-footed adaptation of James M Cain's novel takes a perfectly paced potboiler about a woman's plan to seduce an insurance agent and bump off her husband to rake in the policy she's just taken out on his life, and turns it into a racy, sleazy homage to the underside of Los Angeles with real bite. The murder goes off without a hitch – but then the insurance company start poking around, and the whole thing starts to crumble. It's as close to perfect as noir thrillers ever got.
The Towering Inferno (1974)
Disaster movies are their own particular strain of thriller weaved together from their own particular taut threads. You need an ensemble cast, ideally stuffed with A-listers. You need some whizzy special effects to bring the necessary 'bloody hell' sensation. You need a character who tells everybody that the ship/skyscraper/airport/spaceship they're in isn't safe, and another character to ignore them and go ahead anyway. The Towering Inferno is the starriest and disaster-iest of the Seventies golden age of disaster movies, with Paul Newman and Steve McQueen fighting both to get people out of a burning building and for their names to be top billing on the poster. Eventually a compromise put McQueen furthest left, but Newman's higher. Silly.
The Parallax View (1974)
The United States of the paranoiac early Seventies – freshly burned by Watergate and ready to believe that they still didn't know the full truth of JFK's murder – was very, very fertile ground for conspiracy thrillers, and Alan J Pakula's propulsive Kennedy-adjacent story hit a nerve. Journalist Lee Carter watches as presidential candidate Charles Carroll is murdered in Seattle. Slowly, everyone else who was witness to Carroll's death is bumped off, and Carter has to go to her old boyfriend and fellow journo Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) for help. Unfortunately it's too late – she's soon dead too. Now Frady has to put the pieces together and find out who's responsible, and why. The Parallax Corporation seems to hold the answers.
Laura (1944)
If you like your film noir gnarly and gritty, try Laura. She's a young ad exec who, it's no spoiler to tell you, is murdered very early doors. Quite who wanted her dead is the central question, and one likely suspect appears in her rotten fiancé. Detective Mark McPherson, the man on the hunt for Laura's killer, finds himself falling into an obsession with both the case and its victim. Twist after twist follows, each one slightly less probable than the last. But the verve and style with which director Otto Preminger carries the story's turns raises Laura well above your average noir potboiler. A good one to have in your back pocket after everyone's gagging for something a bit like Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery this Christmas.
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Sergei Eisenstein's opus is one of the cornerstones of cinema, but for many years you couldn't see it in the UK. It was considered so inflammatory and socialist it was banned by the BBFC in 1926, and only granted an 'X' rating in 1954 after Stalin's death. Nina Agadzhanova's original screenplay was, to be fair, commissioned as a piece of propaganda to celebrate the 1905 uprising on said battleship which spilled out into wider Russian society. But in its 75 minutes the film started a revolution of its own within cinema and Eisenstein's quick, expressive editing and eye for montage still feel fresh. As it's out of copyright now you've got a few different versions available too, with different soundtracks – Pet Shop Boys' electronic score is a particularly good match for an appropriately future-shock feel. Watch Adam Curtis's TraumaZone as a companion piece, an affecting documentary-collage showing how it felt to watch first communism and then democracy collapse in Russia.
Les Diaboliques (1955)
If you've not seen Les Diaboliques, you've definitely seen all the films that nicked bits from it. It's got perhaps the first gigantic twist ending which totally rewrites what you think you've been watching, forcing you to see everyone and everything which happens afresh. The Wages of Fear director Henri-Georges Clouzot's film is fiendishly clever, and the rug-pull is no less shocking for knowing that it's coming. Michel is the cruel headmaster of a faintly rubbish boarding school in Hauts-de-Seine, and he's cheating on his wife with another teacher at the school (comment c'est très francais). Instead of hating each other, they hate Michel – and swear to do away with him. The brutality of the bathroom murder scene was one-upped by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho five years later, and you definitely get the sense that Hitchcock's films hardened after the release of Les Diaboliques.
Where Eagles Dare (1968)
If your main image of Where Eagles Dare is of Clint Eastwood gunning down hundreds of Nazis with a machine gun then yes, you'd be right in thinking that Where Eagles Dare is a very, very, very daft film with a honking script. Eastwood and Richard Burton are tasked with liberating an American general from captivity in a mountaintop schloss; in the heist to get him out, chaos ensues. Broadsword calling Danny Boy, etc.
But on the other hand, it's the connoisseur's choice of World War Two adventure flicks. this tale of derring-do up in the German Alps did shove the war movie on from the stern-browed likes of In Which We Serve that had dominated during and immediately after the war. How? Blood. Buckets of it. Like the New Hollywood upstarts around it like Bonnie and Clyde, Where Eagles Dare makes its killings extravagantly, almost preposterously painful. Watch Inglourious Basterds and tell me Quentin Tarantino isn't a huge fan.
For another thing, it looks absolutely gorgeous – shot on location in Bavaria and Austria, at an actual proper castle – and the growling Eastwood and the magnificently taciturn Burton make for the kind of grim, actually not that likeable or noble double-act which you believe could, probably, blast their way into the heart of Nazi-dom and get out again.
The Invitation (2015)
Will and Kira drive over to Will's ex-wife's house for a nice evening of chat, food, and sharp intakes of breath. More guests arrive, the door gets locked, fishy conversations and sneakily hidden barbiturates abound, and it turns out some of the party have joined a full-on cult. If you like your thrillers dark and intense with a side-order of unease at quite how weird dinner parties can get, The Invitation is for you. This teasing slow-burner is the work of Karyn Kasuma, who went on to direct the excellent Destroyer a few years ago.
A Prophet (2009)
Malik El Djebena is a French-Algerian lad sent to prison who learns about life in jail at its most savage: it’s kill, or be killed. It was the breakthrough role for Tahar Rahim – who later went on to portray the serial killer Charles Sobhraj in The Serpent – and he captivates as Malik, a young man who’s clearly out of his depth but needs to front so the sharking gang members who surround him don’t smell his fear. Touching upon the rough ride immigrants face in many European countries, as well as the gang culture and dangerous hierarchies within the prison industrial complex, this enthralling yet brutal film – directed by Jacques Audiard – was well deserving of its many awards, including a Bafta, London Film Festival and 9 Césars awards.
Air Force One (1993)
Right, let's get it out of the way straight off the runway: yes, Donald Trump loves Air Force One. "My favourite was Harrison Ford on the plane," Trump told the New York Times when he was asked about his favourite film. "I love Harrison Ford, and not just because he rents my properties. He stood up for America."
Yes, this is moronic. No, this does not mean we can't all love Air Force One. Yes, it's basically Die Hard but John McClane is the leader of the free world and Hans Gruber is Gary Oldman during the shrieky years. All that said, Air Force One is stonking. When Oldman's Soviet loyalist hijacks the president's plane, it's down to Ford's President James Marshall to one man army his way back to his family and make sure no renegade communists get to bounce home free as a bird. Ridiculous, stupid, excellent.
Face/Off (1997)
If you're ever at a loss for what to watch, watch Face/Off. It's never not a good time to watch Face/Off. Feeling sad? Face/Off will remind you that not everything is quite so terrible as you think it is. You could, after all, have your face stolen by techno-bandits led by your worst enemy. Feeling good? Face/Off will push you over the edge into pure joy. John Woo is rarely more John Woo than he is here, with gunplay and slow mo to burn, and Nic Cage has never been more gonzo. You know he improvised the whole bit where he just repeats the name of this film – "I want to take his face... off!" – for ages? The boy's a genius.
The Third Man (1949)
Though war in Europe had ended four years before Carol Reed's The Third Man came out, the spectre of conflict stalks this twisting, playful masterpiece of post-war British cinema. The rubble-strewn cityscape of Vienna through which western pulp novelist Holly Martins picks his way in search of old friend Harry Lime is split into British, American, French and Soviet zones. Profiteers and veterans damaged by the war haunt the city. And Harry Lime, who tempted Martins to Europe with a job offer, has suddenly died – but apparently nobody can be bothered to try and find out why. Martins tries to work out what happened to his friend, and discovers far more about him than he'd hoped. It's just so, so good.
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
What begins as a kitchen-sink drama about an immigrant mum trying to pay her taxes suddenly ends up with a rip in the time-space continuum, propelling viewers through a rocket ship trip of parallel universes and ending with a philosophical dissection of not just who we are, but who we could have been. The Daniels directors – Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – weren’t kidding around with the title, and you barely get a chance to catch your breath in a hyperloop speed film that seems to switch direction and genre by the second. Think The Matrix meets Sliding Doors meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind via a superhero movie, and you’ll still not have covered even a fiftieth of this wild film. Starring Michelle Yeoh in a career-best role, captivating newcomer Stephanie Hsu as the villain Jobu Topaki and with another iconic performance from Jamie Lee-Curtis, despite the bonkers nature of the (multiple) storylines, it still packs a hefty emotional punch, with twists and turns right through to the closing seconds. Just me crying over a scene of two rocks sitting next to each other? Bet I’m not the only one.
Jaws (1975)
The original blockbuster, and a turning point in cinema history. Before Jaws, a hit movie came out around Christmas and opened in a few cinemas before going bigger. After Jaws – and ever since – big movies opened in the summer, as wide as possible, and could make it bigger than anyone thought possible. Depending on who you listen to, the shark that terrorises the beaches of Amity Island stands for communism, or Watergate, or sexual liberation, or American disillusionment, or the knowledge of death itself, or terrorism, or a hundred other things. Or it might be a film about a shark that keeps eating people. The mechanical shark Steven Spielberg was hoping to shoot eating those people kept conking out, so by necessity he had to start shooting from the shark's point of view. "The film went from a Japanese Saturday matinee horror flick to more of a Hitchcock," he reflected later. It worked. In the first 38 days of release, Jaws sold 25 million tickets, and changed everything.
The Lighthouse (2019)
The absolute peak of Robert Pattinson's artsy middle period between the Twilight zone and the Bat-cave is this psychological horror-thriller from The Witch director Robert Eggers. Pattinson's rookie lighthouse keeper Ephraim Winslow washes up at the lighthouse of veteran 'wickie' Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) on the coast of 1890s New England. Wake puts Winslow through the mill, and it turns out that the last assistant wickie lost his mind. Slowly, the two men start to drive each other to madness as the weather and the walls close in. If you're into creeping dread, deep weirdness and spitting salty phrases like "Yer fond of me lobster ain't ye?" at friends and relatives, The Lighthouse is for you.
Blood Feud (1978)
Or, to give it its full title: Un fatto di sangue nel comune di Siculiana fra due uomini per causa di una vedova. Si sospettano moventi politici. Amore-Morte-Shimmy. Lugano belle. Tarantelle. Tarallucci e vino. Sophie Loren stars in Lina Wertmüller's pre-war love triangle set in Sicily, where the fascists have just come to power. Widower Titina (Loren), whose old husband has been murdered by the Mafia, can't make up her mind between a gritty attorney and a scumbag criminal. Naturally, it gets harder and harder to keep the two from finding out about each other.
Atlantics (2019)
Mati Diop's film is a lot of things at the same time. It's a ghost story about post-imperial West Africa, and a dewey-eyed love story about the power of the sea and a relationship which surges and rushes with the Atlantic's power, and a gritty social realist document of the migrant experience. It's also unbelievably beautiful to look at. In Dakar, Senegal, a futuristic new tower block is going up. A worker, Souleiman, who hasn't been paid in weeks, tries to escape to Spain and his love, Ada. She's betrothed to the wealthy Omar – but a tragedy strikes on their wedding day. Meanwhile Souleiman's disappeared. But not for long.
Crossfire (1947)
When two men beat a Jewish man to death, Captain Finlay (Robert Young) investigates and narrows the suspects down to a group of off-duty soldiers. Alarmed that his friend might be the prime suspect, Sergeant Keeley (Robert Mitchum) wades in. As the net closes around the real killers, things start to get even more ugly. This is a gritty look at antisemitism at a time when the world was still coming to terms with the Holocaust, and a stark reminder that that atrocity didn't start with people being marched into camps – it started with the indifference of ordinary people. It got a five Oscar nominations, and became the first B movie to get any nods from the Academy to boot.
Payroll (1961)
This heist movie set on Tyneside deserves to be seen more widely. Four crims get together to rob a payroll van but, as you might expect, not everything goes according to plan. There's a shootout, a love triangle, blackmail, inter-gang squabbling and a finale set in Norfolk: all the good stuff. Filmed on location around Newcastle, Gateshead and Whitley Bay, there's a noirish vibe to the blunt, brutal violence which stalks the streets of the north-east and a jazzy score by bandleader Reg Owen. It's Get Carter's even less glossy big brother.
The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)
Is there a more perfect tale of the pickle that is possible from putting on another man’s jacket than Anthony Minghella’s sumptuous adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel? Tom Ripley (Matt Damon, reportedly stepping in for Leonardo DiCaprio) borrows some Princeton duds for a piano-playing gig at a fancy party, only to find that the Ivy League crest alone buys him entry into a world of festering privilege when shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf mistakes Tom for a classmate of his wastrel son, Dickie (Jude Law). Herbert sends Tom to Italy to persuade Dickie – who’s having a lovely, sun-kissed time with his girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) – to come home. Tom soon finds out that borrowing another man’s jacket is very much a gateway high...
Get Out (2017)
Was Jordan Peele’s electrifying directorial debut unexpectedly shocking? Well, that very much depends on who you ask. Daniel Kaluuya stars as Chris, a young black photographer going to meet his white girlfriend’s parents (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) in their country house in “liberal” Upstate New York. But all in the Armitage residence is very much not as it seems, and Chris soon finds that he has been summoned to the house for monstrous reasons. Peele’s film was a huge cultural talking point upon release, and was rightly lauded as an exploration of the insidiousness of racism that was both nuanced, stark and, depending on your own life experience, either startlingly eye-opening or all too familiar.
Parasite (2019)
Never has a film illustrated the upstairs-downstairs dynamic that undergirds modern society quite so literally and metaphorically as Bong Joon-ho’s clever, funny and not-a-little violent drama, famously the first non-English language film to win the “best picture” Oscar. Nor is it a surprise to discover that the Korean director first conceived the idea – about a poor family, the Kims, who infiltrate the life and house of a rich one, the Parks – as a play, given that it has the intensity and claustrophobia of a Greek tragedy, albeit with a few more laughs. But who is the parasite here? The wily Kims, or the lazy, exploitative Parks? Bong provides no quick answers, but plenty to think/wince about.
Zodiac (2007)
When he was a boy, David Fincher noticed that the police had been tailing his school bus. "Oh yeah," said Fincher's dad when young Dave got home. "There's a serial killer who has killed four or five people, who calls himself Zodiac, who's threatened to take a high-powered rifle and shoot out the tires of a school bus, and then shoot the children as they come off the bus."
So started his fascination with the Zodiac killer, and eventually this starry and masterful retelling of the manhunt which followed a string of still unsolved murders across California and Nevada – Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr and Mark Ruffalo lead it.
Shallow Grave (1994)
Right, hold onto your hats, another big opinion coming through: this is Danny Boyle's best film. It's got all the ingredients that would make Trainspotting so huge in 1996 – a stylish look, a belting soundtrack from techno duo Leftfield, Ewan McGregor delivering every line of John Hodge's script with arch topspin – but here it's bolted onto a thriller engine which Hitchcock would have been proud of.
Three Edinburgh flatmates (McGregor, Christopher Eccleston and Kerry Fox) interview for someone to take their spare bedroom, eventually landing on the mysterious Hugo. But Hugo suddenly dies, and leaves behind a suitcase with a gigantic stack of cash in it. What do the flatmates do with a corpse and a fortune on their hands? They get rid of the former and keep the latter, obviously. And, just as obviously, their choice means the walls start to close in around them. It's a brilliantly claustrophobic and taut watch.
Deep Cover (1992)
Bill Duke's noirish tale of a drugs cop who goes undercover in Los Angeles to get inside a cocaine ring is built around a brooding performance from Laurence Fishburne as officer Russell Stevens Jr and a lugubrious but flinty turn by Jeff Goldblum as David Jason. (That's the man who becomes Stevens' self-appointed attorney when he gets deep into the cartel, not the beloved elder statesman of British sitcoms.) It's all about split loyalties and shifting identities, and the theme song, by Dr Dre and an extremely young Snoop Dogg, is a banger.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
A bungled bank robbery turns into a fiasco of a hostage-taking in Sidney Lumet's classic heist-without-the-heist film. In an attempt to get money for his trans partner's gender affirmation surgery, Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) and Sal Naturale (John Cazale, in his third collab with Pacino following the first two Godfather films) try to hold up a bank. Unfortunately, their third man runs off, and they turn up after all the money's been picked up. In a panic, they try to rustle up an on-the-hoof hostage situation.
As things get more and more out of hand, Sonny turns into an unlikely countercultural folk hero. This might be the definitive Pacino performance: his Sonny is desperate and wild and out of his depth, but his deeply decent and caring nature is always close to the surface. In Lumet's hands, Dog Day Afternoon as much a character piece as it is a thriller, as Sonny and Sal's incompetent attempts to make it big quickly fall apart.
LA Confidential (1997)
There are many pitfalls that come with shooting a mid-century film noir in the here and now. The genre – if you see it as such – relies on well-trodden conventions and tropes, and the directors who abide by them can too often veer into pastiche. Ruben Fleischer’s 2013 shoot-em-up Gangster Squad is a good example of that. The late, great Curtis Hanson’s 1997 hit L.A. Confidential is the opposite.
Based on the novel of the same name by James Ellroy, the greatest (and by extension, most nihilistic) crime scribe of our age, L.A. Confidential digs into the deep-seated corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department of the early 1950s. It’s a beautiful, fast-paced piece of cinema that fulfils all of your film noir expectations while still providing rich, nuanced characters and an intricately woven storyline. It was beaten to a few Oscars by Titanic but its popularity has endured. Ellroy is still approached by fans declaring their fondness for the film. His response? “'Listen, Granny: You love the movie. Did you go out and buy the book?' And Granny invariably says, 'Well, no, I didn't.' And I say to Granny, 'Then what the fuck good are you to me?'"
Fight Club (1999)
It’s very easy to shit on Fight Club nowadays. The legacy of David Fincher’s film, over twenty years since it was adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's novel, is equal parts prophetic and pathetic; it recognised the male rage simmering underneath an increasingly disenfranchised, consumerist, gender-progressive society, but failed to reckon with the true impact of that anger spilling over. Instead, sometimes despite its best intentions, violence is glorified, collective backlash is endorsed, and Brad Pitt is topless, providing toxic masculinity with a timelessly cool mascot. But however you think its messages have aged over the years, Fight Club is still one of the most important and impactful films of the past century. It also features one of the best twists in cinema history (and if you’ve somehow managed to avoid that spoiler, then we salute you).
Inside Man (2006)
Probably the most straightforward Spike Lee joint of all Spike Lee's joints, this heist thriller is still more tricksy and witty than most. A New York bank is held up by a gang of men all calling themselves variants on 'Steve', who set about dressing their hostages as painters and decorators, exactly like them. They set about smashing through the floor – but what are they really after? The would-be thieves' motives turn out to be a lot more upstanding than your average cash-grab, and the cast – Denzel Washington, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe – is top notch.
Widows (2018)
Steve McQueen's update of the 1983 Lynda La Plante TV drama transplants the action over to Chicago, but keeps the central spine of the plot: four widows find out their husbands died in the process of ripping off a mob boss, and decide to step in to complete their $5 million heist. The trouble is, they'll need to pinch it from inside the boss's own house. This is a slower burn than some other thrillers here, and one that will reward your patience. Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki and Carrie Coon star, with Liam Neeson, Daniel Kaluuya and Robert Duvall among the support.
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
John Carpenter's second film, a low-budget exploitation flick which followed gangland rioters in Los Angeles who attack a police station in the hope of taking out some officers, was an R-rated flop on release. But it gradually became a cult hit thanks to the things which would become Carpenter's trademarks: the invasion of an apparently unstoppable force; splenetic violence with an undercurrent of sly wit; and an absolutely belting soundtrack from Carpenter himself.
Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Less a straightforward thriller than a feverish, hallucinatory 94-minute trip into the subconscious. Engineer and sound effects expert Gilderoy travels to Italy to work on a film about horses, but instead finds it's a giallo horror being made by an overbearing producer and an unnervingly exuberant director. We never see this apparently horrifying film, but director Peter Strickland lovingly catalogues the mechanics behind the camera. Don't go into it expecting to be guided by the hand – in fact, try not to expect a conventional plot at all – and just let it absorb you.
Uncut Gems (2020)
The Safdie Brothers – Josh and Benny – showed that they had the vision and unique tone to make an all-time great crime thriller with 2017's brilliant Good Time. Its follow-up, Uncut Gems, is that movie. Adam Sandler – yes, that Adam Sandler – is staggeringly good as Howard Ratner, a high-rolling, motormouth, diamond-dealing New Yorker who's deep in debt with all the wrong people and just about keeps the wolves from his door by making bigger and bigger bets. Until he gets his hands on an extraordinarily rare black opal, at which point the powder keg ignites. You're best off going in with no idea what's going to happen, but we'll just give you some key phrases: NBA star Kevin Garnett; mystical powers; naked kidnap; bum tattoo; diamond-encrusted Furby. Enjoy.
Gaslight (1944)
Like the husbands in Hitchcock's Rebecca, Suspicion and Shadow of a Doubt from the same period, Gregory Anton isn't exactly the ideal spouse. You can't trust him as far as you could throw him. His new wife Paula (Ingrid Bergman, on absolutely sparkling, Best-Actress-Oscar-winning form) shacked up with him after a fortnight-long whirlwind romance. She's got no friends having just arrived in London, and when odd things start happening around her, she starts to feel like she's losing it. But why do the gaslamps keep dimming? It's full of Edwardian froideur and noirish style, as well as being such an effective portrait of psychological abuse that it's where the term 'gaslighting' comes from in the first place.
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Requiem For A Dream (2000)
If you’re looking for a feel-good thriller, this is very much not it. However this Darren Aronofsky adaptation of a 1978 Hubert Selby Jr. novel is a desperate, frantic depiction of drug abuse and how it slowly kills the souls of four people entrapped in its grasp. Sara (Ellen Burstyn) dreams of appearing on a TV game show, while her heroin-addicted son Harry (Jared Leto), his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) and girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) want to escape their reality to open a fashion boutique and lift themselves out of their current situations. By god, you’re willing that at least one person succeeds in their goals, but then, that’s not how life works, is it? The rapid cut montages of the film went on to become synonymous with movies of this era, and helped depict the frenetic drive of the tweakers, as the audience join them on a chase towards an etched-on-your-retina-forever dark ending.
Utøya: July 22 (2018)
The 2011 terrorist attack at a Norwegian Labour Party youth camp which left 69 people dead formed the basis of two films that came out at about the same time in 2018. By contrast with Paul Greengrass's more sprawling July 22, which also follows the events of the day, Utøya doesn't give right-wing extremist Anders Breivik any screen time aside from a couple of brief glimpses of his frame. Instead, Erik Poppe's film follows a teenager, Kaja, in a single take as the horror unfolds in real time around her. It's not exactly an entertaining romp – Utøya is less a thriller than an act of witness – but it is incredibly well made and gripping in the most chilling way possible, while centring the experiences of the victims and survivors rather than Breivik.
Rear Window (1954)
Yes, we've got a fair few Hitchcocks on here, but he's pretty indisputably the master. Get hold of Strangers on a Train, The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps and The Lodger, but watch Rear Window first. It follows LB 'Jeff' Jefferies, a magazine photographer cooped up in his New York apartment during a swelteringly hot summer. Jeff becomes obsessed with watching his neighbours through their open windows, and seeing their lives play out as a series of cute vignettes – until he witnesses a murder, and takes justice into his own hands. But is his mind playing tricks on him? Grace Kelly is magnetic as Jeff's girlfriend Lisa, as is the Fifties soundtrack of Nat King Cole and Dean Martin.
North by Northwest (1959)
Cary Grant at the peak of his game – wearing one of cinema's greatest suits, no less – joins Hitchcock at the peak of his in this classic crime caper. A New York ad executive is mistaken for a government agent and pursued across the country by a (real) spy, as Grant's ineffable charm and Hitchcock's flair for producing an iconic action sequence (the crop duster scene is one of the most influential in movie history) culminate in a thriller many have copied but few have equalled.
Funny Games (1997)
This terrifying Austrian thriller by Michael Haneke starts with a simple enough situation: what would you do if a neighbour’s friends dropped by your holiday home and asked to borrow some eggs, before deliberately smashing them on the floor and refusing to leave? It’s a slow descent from a polite aggravation that then leads the middle class family to be taken hostage by the two young men and tortured, for no real discernible reason or motives other than their own sadistic pleasure. It’s an excruciating watch, as it flips Hollywood thriller tropes on their head – including the clever use of breaking the fourth wall – and 25 years on is still a film that’s as shocking and horrific as when it premiered at Cannes. Steer clear of the pointless 2007 American remake with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth – stick to the original instead.
Misery (1990)
Parasocial relationships existed long before social media reared its impeccably Facetuned head – there have always been obsessed fans and stalkers hell bent on the idea that a certain celebrity owes them attention and, in some cases, love. The object of the warped affection for Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) is her favourite author, Paul Sheldon (James Caan) who she just happens to rescue when he has a car crash in a blizzard in the middle of nowhere. But rather than get help, she’s holding him hostage, attacking him in a rage when she discovers he’s killed off her favourite character, Misery, in his latest manuscript. Was this a deep-seated nightmare of Misery’s writer, Stephen King, about his fans? Quite possibly. As the deranged nature of Annie becomes apparent – Bates rightly won the best actress Oscar for this role – the intensity of her behaviour means we’re all held hostage as to guessing what her next twisted move will be. Can Paul write his way out of this predicament?
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Suspicion and paranoia are quite big these days, as you might have noticed, so it's perhaps a good time to revisit The Manchurian Candidate. It's about the son of a prominent right-wing political family who becomes an unknowing assassin in a communist conspiracy, with Frank Sinatra playing a tortured platoon commander.
Blood Simple (1984)
Blood Simple is a noir thriller about a bartender who starts an affair with his boss's wife only for it to end in gunshot and bloodshed – quite literally a tense affair from start to finish. Frances McDormand's terrified facial expressions and whispered scenes make the directorial debut of the Coen Brothers one that stands the test of time – even if it was grossly underrated when it was first released.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The film that launched the Nineties cinema obsession with psychopathic killers (Se7en, Scream, etc) as well as one of the most memorable bad guys ever committed to celluloid, it's easy to forget that the second Hannibal Lecter film was a taut-as-hell thriller that also featured brilliant performances from Jodie Foster, as the cop playing psychological tennis with Anthony Hopkins's cannibal, and Ted Levine as 'Buffalo Bill'. A clean sweep of the major Oscars (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress) made it one of the most successful films of the decade and it stands up just as well today.
Se7en (1995)
David Fincher's dark, seedy worlds are unrivalled in cinema and Se7en is up there with the best. A pair of detectives played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman investigate a series of gruesome murders, each one symbolic of one of the seven sins: pride, lust, gluttony, wrath, sloth, greed and envy. Brutal, brilliant and with a final twist that 12 years later will still drop your heart to your stomach.
No Country For Old Men (2007)
For our money the best film the Coen Brothers have ever produced, this majestically shot, thrillingly acted and unbelievably tense cat and mouse story sees Josh Brolin's chancer making off with some stolen money, pursued by a mercenary played by an utterly chilling Javier Bardem. The set pieces are mini masterpieces in their own right, including a dog chase at dawn that they'll be showing at film schools for decades to come.
Prisoners (2013)
Denis Villeneuve (the mastermind behind Incendies, Sicario and Arrival) creates a gritty and guilt-ridden world in Prisoners, the story of a father whose six-year-old daughter and friends go missing only for the police to release the primary suspect. Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Paul Dano are a formidable trio in their portrayal of desperation and revenge.
Vertigo (1958)
Many of Hitchcock’s films pit a man against forces beyond his control, and Vertigo is no different. It’s just that in this case, it’s his own mind which entraps him. James Stewart’s traumatised detective, John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson, must track a friend’s wife who is in danger – but then she vanishes, leaving him chasing shadows and questioning his sanity. The action winds and loops back on itself, each twist shifting the ground beneath the audience just as the disorientating camerawork shows Scottie’s terror and psychosis. In 2012 it was named the greatest film of all time in Sight and Sound’s critics’ poll – it’s The Master’s masterpiece.
Peeping Tom (1960)
Martin Scorsese once said that the only two films anyone needed to see to understand directing were Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 and Peeping Tom. When Michael Powell's tale of an obsessive photographer came out, though, it was savaged, and pretty much stopped Powell's career dead. It was too perverse, too sadistic, too strange. Critics hated it: Tribune magazine said that "the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer".
But Scorsese's advocacy led to a reappraisal of it as a dark masterpiece. Mark Lewis, damaged by being experimented on by his psychologist dad, starts killing women and documenting everything he does on film. As he continues killing, the net starts to close around him. It's not your usual slasher, though there's a kinship between Peeping Tom and Psycho, which came out the same year. It's about how cinema is inherently voyeuristic, and digs into post-war Britain's sexually repressed psyche. If you like your thrillers cerebral and ambiguous, start here.
Locke (2013)
Way before Alfie Solomons wished his first mazel tov to Birmingham's underworld in Peaky Blinders, Tom Hardy and writer Steven Knight had already worked together on this rock-solid thriller with a difference. It all takes place over the course of a car ride from Birmingham to London, with only Hardy's Ivan Locke ever on screen and other characters heard through the speakerphone.
He's trying to do right by a woman he had a one-night stand with and who's now having his child, by trying to be with her at the birth. But he's also trying to supervise a gigantic pour of concrete in Birmingham at the same time. No, it doesn't sound like a high stakes game of life and death. It is utterly gripping though, with Hardy on extraordinary form and every one of its 85 minutes made to count.
Sorcerer (1977)
The Exorcist director William Friedkin's South American odyssey tanked on release – partially thanks to Star Wars coming out at the same time – but it's since enjoyed a renaissance. Four men escape to a tiny village after various separate nefarious deeds, and live in absolute destitution. But then they get a chance to escape: a driving job, taking some dynamite to an oil well to stop a fire. The only catch is that the nitroglycerine is old, and is 'sweating'. Any knock, nudge or jostle could set it off. And they've got 200 miles to go. Gulp. If you can get through the scene where a truck has to inch its way across a splintering rope bridge without gnawing on something, you're stronger than most. The soundtrack by Tangerine Dream is a belter too.
The Night of the Hunter (1954)
Robert Mitchum's besuited sinister minister Harry Powell is one of cinema's most unsettling villains, a black widower who drifts around West Virginia marrying for money and then killing his wives. He gets wind of a $10,000 bank robbery haul, but the man who stole it won't tell him where it is. When he dies, the only people who know are the dead man's children. So, he sets about wooing their mum and earning the good opinion of the town while winding up to strike again and find that money.
Director Charles Laughton once described Powell as "a diabolical shit," and Mitchum's ability to flip between the placid, godly, charming preacher and the hell-bent, brimstone-spewing misogynist who would happily murder some kids for a few quid is mesmerising. The Night of the Hunter is about all the good stuff – sin, redemption, desire and greed – and beautifully shot by Laughton to nod at German Expressionism and the silent film era. It doesn't look or feel much like many other films from the era, and it's ended up feeling timelessness.
Duel (1971)
The French Connection (1971)
William Friedkin’s bruising tale of drug smuggling and murky morality in Seventies New York packs a knuckleduster-punch and swept up at the 1972 Oscars. The uncompromising ‘Popeye’ Doyle (a thunderous, perpetually enraged Gene Hackman) and his partner ‘Cloudy’ Russo (Roy Scheider) are on the tail of a huge heroin deal and are happy to take liberties with the rules if it keeps the streets clean. The chase sequence, in which Popeye nicks a car and hares through New York’s traffic on the tail of a hitman on the L-train above him, is the film in a nutshell: taut, stripped down, and all the more gripping for completely avoiding OTT spectacle. Finally, a word on Popeye’s pork pie hat and navy wool overcoat combo. Magnifique.
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
