Whether it’s Black Bag or Babygirl, Flight Risk or Love Hurts, you simply cannot avoid thrillers. They fill the release schedules, week in, week out, and have defined the dominant mainstream film experience ever since a small French boy in Lyon stepped on an irritable gardener’s hose in the Lumière brothers 1895 short L’Arroseur Arrosé. That cinematic thrill, created for the first time in the pit of audience stomachs, was the tension between knowing that the gardener was about to be sprayed in the face, and waiting for it to come.
Since then we’ve had 130 years of non-stop thrillers, genre leaders, box office champions and award winners. These are the 20 best, ranked.
20. Cape Fear (1991)
One of those very rare occasions when a beloved Sixties thriller starring Hollywood legends in peak form (Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck) is bested by the glossy modern studio remake. Scorsese’s Cape Fear is a nerve-shredding joy, a film that takes the director’s personal obsessions with Catholic guilt, moral righteousness and toxic masculinity, then marries those obsessions to a truly outlandish performance from his muse, Robert De Niro. Peck and Mitchum also co-star, which is a lovely touch. Buy/rent
19. One False Move (1992)
This unassuming yet near-perfect crime flick got lost in the early Nineties noise surrounding louder, brasher genre entrants such as Reservoir Dogs and The Usual Suspects. But it’s better than those films, full of soul and compassion and heartfelt character portraits, as a small town police chief, Dale Dixon, (a nuanced Bill Paxton) faces the imminent arrival of some psychotic LA mobsters led by the demented Ray Malcolm (Billy Bob Thornton, also co-writer). The template, obviously, is High Noon. The execution is courtesy of the ace director Carl Franklin. BFI Player/Prime Video
18. Oldboy (2003)
It could have been any of the three standouts in the South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy (the others are Lady Vengeance and Sympathy for Mr Vengeance), but this one lands with the biggest cultural thud. It was remade by Spike Lee in 2013, and its core narrative has perennial psychological power as it tracks a school-age slight (our hero humiliates an incestuous classmate) that grows, festers and acquires mythic fury in the adult world (enforced imprisonment and torture ensues). BFI Player/ Prime Video
17. Memento (2000)
The beguiling lure of this whip-smart neo-noir is that it seems to unfold from within the mind of its vengeful amnesiac protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce). Playing simultaneously forwards (in black and white) and backwards (in colour), it is fractured, unnerving and relentlessly compelling. It is, perhaps inevitably, a Christopher Nolan film, which explains the obsession with time (see No 6). But its unresolved, open-ended narrative also allows a wry commentary on the genre and how morality here is irrelevant and thrills are all that matter. Buy/rent
16. Seven (1995)
It transformed Brad Pitt into a credible actor and made a virtue out of stunt-casting an uncredited Kevin Spacey as the serial killer, John Doe. But the lasting power of David Fincher’s Seven is in the gloomy stylings (copied by everything from the Saw franchise to the most recent Batman to TV’s True Detective), the incessant tonal nihilism and that brutally unforgiving ending. Don’t look in the box, Brad! Don’t! Prime Video
15. Marathon Man (1976)
“Is it safe? Is it safe?” The centrepiece torture scene, in which the Nazi dentist Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier) drills the truth out of Dustin Hoffman’s innocent history student, is famous. Yet everything else here — the gritty supporting players (Roy Scheider, William Devane), the conspiracy theories and the Central Park finale — represents the pinnacle of 1970s paranoia thrillers and the sharpest work of the Oscar-winning screenwriter and subsequent screenwriting guru (“Nobody knows anything!”) William Goldman. Paramount+
14. The Third Man (1949)
The filet mignon of spy thrillers: everything here is the finest of its elements, meticulously selected, arranged and, well, cooked. There’s the original Graham Greene screenplay, built upon weeks of on-the-ground research in postwar Vienna and telling the deceptively simple tale of a novelist (Joseph Cotten) whose old friend (Orson Welles) turns out to be a black-market racketeer. The location shooting is spectacular. The zither score by Anton Karas is stunning. And there’s Welles’s iconic contribution to Greene’s script with the “cuckoo clock” speech. Beyond tasty. ITVX
13. Basic Instinct (1992)
Because you can’t do thrillers without erotic thrillers, and despite some strong competition from Fatal Attraction, Eyes Wide Shut and the recent Deep Water, this is really the one ice pick to rule them all. It screams of time and place, and Michael Douglas rocking a V-neck jumper (sans undershirt) in a San Francisco nightclub. But it’s also strangely timeless and Hitchcockian, with Sharon Stone’s potentially homicidal author Catherine Tramell as the fearsome and unapologetic upgrade from Hitch’s classic and ultimately victim-coded “blondes”. Buy/rent
12. Get Out (2017)
Never has the “ting” sound of a spoon on a porcelain teacup seemed so terrifying. But the genius of Jordan Peele’s core-shaking feature debut is how he makes the humdrum appear profoundly threatening to the naive protagonist Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya). He’s on the date from hell with his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams), and quickly discovers that her cosy family home is a prison, her friendly neighbours are members of a brain-swapping torture club, and her mother’s teacup is a trigger for instant paralysis and a one-way trip to “the sunken place”. Buy/rent
11. The Departed (2006)
If you’re going to remake a little-known but well-regarded Hong Kong thriller about undercover cops and robbers called Infernal Affairs, this is how you do it. Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson are aided and abetted by an Oscar-winning screenplay from William Monahan. This is 151 minutes of pure high-stakes ache and pleasure, with some of the most memorable lines in cop movie history, all of them delivered by Mark Wahlberg’s testy Staff Sergeant Dignam. Buy/rent
10. Chinatown (1974)
Yes, the Humphrey Bogart noirs deserve a mention. The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon are top tier thrillers. But their DNA, and the tropes and twists of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, are deftly incorporated into this Oscar-winning screenplay from Robert Towne. His plot, rooted in the early 20th-century Californian water wars, begins as a “simple” missing persons case for the clueless Los Angeles private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), but soon spirals outwards to include big business, the police department and a dark, dark family secret. Paramount+
9. No Way Out (1987)
The instantly compelling plot structure goes right back to Oedipus, where the unwitting investigator becomes the subject of his own investigation. But it has rarely been done better than it is here, with early-era Kevin Costner as the bright-spark navy commander charged with finding a Russian spy in the Pentagon. The tension ratcheting is sublime, the mid-movie chase propulsive, and the final twist ingenious. MGM+/Prime Video
8. The Conversation (1974)
Arguably Francis Ford Coppola’s greatest film (The Godfather is extraordinary but also conventional), this eerie surveillance thriller toys with Watergate era paranoia but is, at best, a harrowing character portrait. In his greatest performance, Gene Hackman is Harry Caul, a taciturn wiretapper and lonely jazz aficionado, a role originally intended for the Godfather lead Marlon Brando. Hackman plays him as a delicate beta male, painfully vulnerable but professionally committed, and slowly psychologically imploding. The ending is devastating. Paramount+
7. Double Indemnity (1944)
Barbara Stanwyck, as the black widow seductress Phyllis Dietrichson, is reason alone to see it. As is the fabulously convoluted plotting, involving the dumping of a body and the faking of a suicide leap. However, it is the rapid-fire dialogue, courtesy of the writers Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, that remains legendary. “Yes, I killed him,” Fred MacMurray’s patsy protagonist confesses. “I killed him for money and a woman and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?” Buy/rent
6. Tenet (2020)
There are twisty cerebral thrillers that hurt your head (from The Big Sleep to Black Swan). And then there is Tenet. It’s Christopher Nolan’s most ambitious film, and the distillation of his obsession with the malleability of time (see also Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk). The story of a CIA operative (John David Washington) trapped in an atemporal apocalypse narrative can withstand multiple viewings without ever fully landing on an intellectual level. But as they say in the first act, “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” Buy/rent
5. Rififi (1955)
There would be no Reservoir Dogs without Rififi. No Heat. No Ocean’s Eleven, Sexy Beast or Point Break. This Paris-set crime flick is that influential. The critic Roger Ebert called it the film that “invented” the heist movie, and certainly it invented a specific strain of heist movie — hardened criminals, not always likeable but highly professional, attempt a once-in-a-career score that will almost inevitably end in their demise. The near-silent centrepiece safe robbery sequence has been emulated countless times, most notably in the first Mission: Impossible. Arrow
4. Fargo (1996)
Thriller, morality tale, homespun drama, comedy: Fargo is all this and more. One of the Coen brothers’ smartest screenplays matches the avarice of the debt-laden would-be criminal William H Macy with the understated wisdom of the folksy police chief Frances McDormand (on Oscar-winning form). It ends, typically, in a sea of blood and regret and a memorable admonition from McDormand’s copper — “There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are. And it’s a beautiful day.” Prime Video
3. Promising Young Woman (2020)
The perfect expression of #MeToo rage delivered, both barrels, via a twisty and mordantly witty Emerald Fennell feature debut. Carey Mulligan, after playing a plethora of period martyrs, finally ignites as a merciless, deadpan avenger seeking retribution for the rape and subsequent suicide of her best friend and soulmate. Fennell directs with demon precision throughout, driving all events to a shock finale and a delicious closing-reel comeuppance. Sky/Now
2. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
One of only three films to win all “big five” Oscars (picture, director, actor, actress, screenplay), this groundbreaking serial killer procedural was constructed round career-high turns from Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. The latter, as the forensic psychiatrist turned cannibal killer Hannibal Lecter, seared his way into cinematic immortality via stillness, poise and sudden flashes of blood curdling venom. Chianti, anyone? MGM+/Prime Video
1. North by Northwest (1959)
Rear Window was more artful. Vertigo darker. Psycho more abrasive. But really, this is Hitchcock, the thriller king, at his most impactful. The mistaken identity plotting is wound tighter than a corkscrew. The character transformation of the mild-mannered ad man Cary Grant into an all-action spy-smasher is mesmerising. Plus there’s the music, the opening titles, the finale on Mount Rushmore and that ineffably smutty closing shot of the lovers’ train entering a tunnel. A peerless, timeless masterpiece. Buy/rent
What’s your favourite film thriller? Let us know in the comments below
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