Top 10 Thriller Movies of All Time
We live in a fast-paced world and science has taken our imagination to another era where we don't get surprised by normal things. But despite all that there are some filmmakers who still manage to take our breath away. Thanks to their extraordinary plots and direction, all of a sudden we're bound to our sofas for next two to three hours.
10. The Best Offer (2013)
The story revolves around the director of an esteemed auction house who falls in love with a reclusive young heiress.
The movie won the David di Donatello Award for the best film. It was released in 2013 but the hype still remains the same.
9. Zodiac (2007)
The Zodiac killer never had a satisfying end, but in the hands of David Fincher, it makes the story hypnotic and captivating.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays cartoonist Robert Graysmith, Robert Downey Jr. plays crime reporter Paul Avery and Mark Ruffalo plays detective Dave Toschi. Each dedicated their lives to solving the mysterious murders and decoding the killer's cat-and-mouse letters to the newspaper and finding only obsession and possibly ruin as their rewards.
The Zodiac is everything a thriller could be. It is a harrowing catalogue of the killer's murders, it's an insightful drama about obsession, it's a detail-oriented story of a riveting investigation and in the end although the film never comes out and says they solve the puzzle, it leads to an absolutely terrifying sequence as one of our heroes find themselves closer than ever to a resolution.
8. Get Out (2017)
The acting is as outstanding as the premise and the realisation. A pretty wild and fun ride not without humour but also pretty gory final act.
Get out is one of the freshest horror thrillers of recent years and deserving of all the praise. The movie revolves around a young photographer Chris, who decides to visit his girlfriend's parents. But it wasn't that simple as he thought.
The movie is directed by Jordan Peele and it was released in 2017.
7. Rear Window (1954)
The gorgeous Grace Kelly and terrifying Raymond Burr help round out this slow-burning classic.
6. Seven (1995)
Fincher put himself on the map as a next-level director with his brilliant handling of this disturbing thrill ride.
5. Vertigo (1958)
The always great James Stewart is a retired San Francisco detective who has an extreme fear of heights and becomes obsessed with a woman he's been hired to follow.
Vertigo is also noteworthy for being the first film to use the dolly zoom which pretty much gives one a feeling of where to go by itself.
4. Memento (2000)
Guy Pearce is excellent as a man who must use notes and tattoos to search for the man he thinks killed his wife. But the true takeaway from the film is its daring backwards narrative.
3. The Gift (2015)
But this is not a happy reunion and Simon has infinitely less respect for Gordo than Gordo seems to have in return and when Gordo starts leaving gifts for the family, it's up to Simon to put a stop to this or is that really what's happening?
Edgerton isn't interested in telling a simplistic story about innocent victims falling prey to a potentially dangerous interloper. Instead he uses the gift to examine the ways that young trauma permeates throughout our adult lives, changing everyone it touches and leaving nobody unscarred. There are reversals upon reversals.
2. A Simple Favor (2018)
The film stars Anna Kendrick as Stephanie Smothers, a wholesome mommy blogger who befriends Emily Nelson, a well-dressed socialite played by Blake Lively.
When Emily asks Stephanie for a simple favor, an emergency babysitting job for her son, Stephanie is eager to please. But when Emily vanishes without a trace, all Stephanie's got is an extra kid, Emily's hunky husband and a mystery that desperately needs solving.
A Simple Favor is a wickedly clever mystery with funny, smart suburban thrills and if all the film had was it's brilliant, self-aware dialogue, it would make any thriller fan goof on. It would be one of the most entertaining thrillers of the century.
But hidden just behind its masterfully comic performances and clever story is an exceptionally subversive tale of jealousy, possessiveness and unexpected sexual kink. The humour is just a way to deliver a disturbing message about the ugly underpinnings of the most seemingly benign aspects of our society, the internet, parenthood, etc. It all comes out the way the best revelations do in a graveyard with martinis.
1. Nightcrawler (2014)
What's a sure-fire way to get a crime scene before anybody else? The moral devastation at the heart of Nightcrawler evokes the classic cinema of the 70s. Everything from taxi driver to Network but writer- director Dan Gilroy's film feels uncomfortably contemporary.
The news industry has always had dark corners and they have always been people willing to do terrible things for money but Gyllenhaal's anti hero Louis Bloom represents an increasingly ugly generation of young Americans who are eager to take what they think is rightfully theirs and as though their shocking inhumanity isn't an obvious deal-breaker.
Gyllenhaal is horrifyingly hypnotic in one of the most distinctive and piercing thrillers of its kind.
