Years before Clue, someone else had the idea to combine slapstick and the ensemble whodunit, all within the setting of a radio station making its grand debut. Murray Abraham (fresh off his Oscar win for Amadeus) bursts into the picture as the badass Dominican friar Bernardo Gui.
#Best agatha christie movies movie
The pedagogical thrills of the movie are sincere, like when a secret library is revealed on the other side of a literal labyrinth the movie only gets better when F. It might sound as fun as going to church in 1327, but the whodunit structure gives this story a lively energy, which allows this adaptation of Umberto Eco’s novel to engage what’s really on its mind: the questionable existence of God, the value of knowledge, and the preservation of humor. A monk has been murdered, and it’s now up to Connery’s William von Baskerville to investigate a shadowy group of suspects, which includes scraggly monks played by Helmut Qualtinger, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., William Hickey, and a hunchback played by Ron Perlman. In Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Name of the Rose, Sean Connery plays a monk detective who is summoned to an isolated, mysterious abbey for some old-fashioned crime-solving, with a young apprentice (Christian Slater) by his side.
Our criteria was to find worthwhile movies that used big ensembles (sorry, Deathtrap) to execute their twisty mysteries in a concentrated time and space bonus points if the film featured Angela Lansbury. To help satisfy that craving, we’ve made a list of 13 other ensemble whodunits, each with their own flavor across different subgenres and decades. Along with some of Christie’s best work, the history of the ensemble whodunit includes monk detectives, werewolf breaks, board-games adaptations, lots of murdered rich people, the sole screenwriting credit for Stephen Sondheim, and a whole lot of “Oh my God, look at that cast!”Ī good whodunit can inspire an insatiable appetite for star-studded suspects, surprising motives, and shocking reveals. Johnson’s Oscar-worthy original screenplay owes a lot to author Agatha Christie (especially as Johnson’s detective Benoit Blanc plays as a take on Agatha Christie’s goofy Belgian savant Hercule Poirot), but his mystery follows a long tradition of whodunit movies where storytellers have attempted a type of narrative engineering that can be bad (looking at you, 2017’s Crooked House) but never lazy.
But one of the greatest thrills is in seeing some of today’s best actors combine their charisma for what is essentially high-stakes character work it’s worth the ticket price alone to see the likes of Toni Collette, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, and Chris Evans play characters who look like they could kill each other, and could have all plausibly killed their family patriarch, played by Christopher Plummer. Rian Johnson’s Knives Out proves to audiences that there are still, in 2019, numerous joys to be found in the classic whodunit film - the salacious central crime, the storyteller’s crafty reveal of everyone’s motive, and all of the satisfying ways an investigation twists and turns the story’s events.
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