Suspense Thriller Movies Noble (2015)

Ravenous Year: 1. Director: Antonia Bird. As any zombie movie will tell you, when it comes to eating human flesh, no one is safe. So proceeds Ravenous, a hair- raising feat of horror absurdism that somehow manages to pack a madcap performance from Robert Carlyle, a meandering soundtrack by Damon Albarn, a perfectly cast David Arquette (as the simpleminded Private Cleaves), a sincerely creepy Jeremy Davies (who’s spine- tingling squeal, “He was licking me!” will haunt you for countless nights to come), and an unexpectedly psychedelic second act into a film that otherwise could have gotten by on the description “cannibal movie set during the Mexican- American War” alone. Ravenous drags viewers kicking and screaming down a rabbit hole of ever- mounting terror, but what’s more impressive is that the film itself is a rabbit hole of weird concepts that, despite all logic and good narrative sense, adds up to a breathless portrait of the American pioneering spirit as a less than noble truth: Eat, or be eaten.—Dom Sinacola. Funny Games Year: 1.

Director: Michael Haneke. A friend of mine once compared filmmaker Michael Haneke to a scientist: In his movies, Haneke locates a functioning system, introduces an external stimulus, and observes the results. Haneke’s task is to observe their telling response. But often the subject of his experiment isn’t the family on the screen but the people in the audience, and there may be no clearer example than Funny Games, both his own 2. Robert Davis. 13. Side Effects Year: 2.

Director: Steven Soderbergh. Every time Steven Soderbergh tackles a new genre—here the psychological thriller, the substance of that genre is again enriched with masterfully spare and confident directing. Side Effects’s first act actually unfolds as the heart- wrenching portrait of a young woman, Emily (a fantastic Rooney Mara), whose crippling depression is seemingly re- triggered upon the release of her husband Mark (Channing Tatum) from prison after four years. As Mark attempts to pick up the pieces of their interrupted marriage as well as his professional life, Emily’s condition worsens, prompting her doctor (a never better Jude Law) to try out new drug on her which is still in trials. He also happens to be on the payroll of this particular Big Pharma manufacturer, as a consultant for the new medicine. Of course, this is a Soderbergh movie, so the audience can’t know exactly what’s coming, even if they’ve read the prescribed studio plot summary in advance.—Scott Wold. Pi Year: 1. 99. 8 Director: Darren Aronofsky.

Darren Aronofsky’s debut—which was made for just over $6. M, plus some Sundance awards—is the kind of film over which burgeoning cinephiles obsess at a young age.

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In fact, like all of Aronofsky’s films to follow, from Requiem for a Dream to Noah, Pi is about obsession, a stark witness to mathematician Max Cohen’s (Sean Gullette) life unhinging the further he indulges his mind’s doomed goals. In retrospect, not much of the plot makes sense—and a lot of conflict is sort of just dropped in the end—but when The Fountain eventually proved that Aronofsky isn’t concerned with technical details so much as grand philosophical gestures, what’s left to admire about Pi is its overbearing pall of dread. In scratchy black and white, Aronofsky casts Cohen’s life as a mess of insanity and inevitable collapse, creating a world bound to crumple under the strain of existential mystery. With so little tools, Pi achieves so much, so that by the time we’re pushed over the edge into its final batshit minutes, we’re ready to believe that practically anything is possible.—Dom Sinacola. Croupier Year: 1.

Director: Mike Hodges Get Carter director Mike Hodges’s last great film was budding star Clive Owen’s first. In fact, even now more than 1. Croupier may be the best thing Owen has ever done, playing a struggling novelist who takes a job at a casino, looking for inspiration but finding mostly trouble. Watch this film now to be reminded where the actor first prompted speculation that he’d make a great James Bond: His character Jack Manfred isn’t a super- spy, but he’s got the jet- black suaveness, lady- killing panache and dry wit we associate with 0. Croupier is a movie attracted to the sleazier side of life, and Owen’s antihero was the perfect tour guide.—Tim Grierson. Dirty Pretty Things Year: 2. Director: Stephen Frears.

Avoiding familiar common postcard views of London, Stephen Frears makes Dirty Pretty Things a tour through shady dealings and sufferings that could be set in any big city on either side of the Atlantic. It’s a contemporary nightmare. We are drawn into the daily desperation of overworked immigrants—legal and otherwise—who survive by doing the world’s dirty work. Frears, who surprises us with something new every time, cleverly dodges the curse of social dilemma films. Weaving threads of classic thrillers through this gritty realistic context, he satisfies our desire for a good story—for intrigue, suspense, humor, big revelations and a tantalizing possibility of romance—even as he educates us about the evils occurring right under our noses.

Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor, stoic and slow- burning) is a Nigerian immigrant—a doctor in his home country—hiding from immigration police while he works several wearying jobs. His tour of hell begins with a David Lynch- ian discovery—a human heart clogging a hotel toilet. Ugly secrets lie at the heart of the matter—passports, blood, betrayal—and Okwe and his beautiful co- worker (Audrey Tatou) get in over their heads. In Frears’ bleak depiction of a compassionless society, no charitable agency rescues the persecuted.

No God hears their prayers; they can turn only to each other for fragments of kindness.—Jeffrey Overstreet. A Simple Plan Year: 1. Director: Sam Raimi. For his second go at mainstream recognition after the mixed reception of The Quick and the Dead, Sam Raimi stepped back into the stark clarity of his much pulpier early days to tell a straightforward fable about Bad things happening to Good people.

His unaffected touch is there in its first frame: a pitch- black raven cawing against a bleached- white background. From there, Raimi wastes no ground in subtlety, shaking up his black- and- white palette with ominous reds, repeatedly allowing his characters to desperately claim that the snow, in all of its snowy whiteness, will cover up past wrongdoing and let the Good people—if they’re sorry enough—start anew. In that sense, A Simple Plan is as traditional a morality play as a thriller can get, but Raimi has never been a director unwilling to splash about in the shallows; instead, the inevitability of the plot is his point—even the simplest of decisions carry whole worlds of consequence—and Raimi injects each emotional beat with unspeakable tragedy.

Carried by Billy Bob Thornton’s performance, one of boundless sympathy at a time when the actor seemed capable of anything, A Simple Plan serves as something of a companion piece to Fargo, another expertly crafted thriller from the . It treats its wintry landscape similarly: not as a metaphorical whiting out of sins, but as a tabula rasa upon which human nature—in big bright colors—will eventually paint its own selfish doom.—Dom Sinacola. Charade Year: 1. 96. Director: Stanley Donen.

Cary Grant is the most charming male lead ever. Audrey Hepburn is the most charming female lead ever. Everything else is just bonus in this romantic thriller about a woman pursued in Paris for her late husband’s stolen fortune: the Henry Mancini score, the Hitchcock- ian suspense, the plot twists and Walter Mathau as a CIA agent.—Michael Dunaway. Amores Perros Year: 2. Director: Alejandro Gonz.

Amores Perros was the first of his so- called “Death Trilogy” (alongside 2. Grams and Babel), and set the precedent for his time- bending, anthology- format brand of storytelling.