What thriller do you like most? And why? "Silence of the Lambs" is certainly one of my favourite thrillers. Anthony Hopkins was brilliant as Lecter. Scary as hell. And the last part, were Starling hunts down Buffalo Bill was creepy too. I recently watched "Michael Clayton" and even though the movie wasn't really scary, I liked it a lot because of the characters. They were great. How about you? Any favourite thrillers?
Blue Velvet is my favorite thriller, and one of my favorite films. I also have a lot of admiration for Rear Window. Both movies explore similar themes. Voyeurism is something that interests me greatly. I think everyone has a sick fascination with criminals and sexual perversions, and these films explore that curiousity in a very exciting way. In both films, the characters aren't acting out of a sense of justice. Jimmy Stewart is dying of boredom in his home after a injury, so is largely just amusing himself by watching others. The murder itself doesn't seem to affect his emotions much, it excites him. Jeffrey is interested because he's a nosy pervert, unsure of who he is and curious about the dark underbelly of his town. Jeffrey is a complex character. He's becoming a man, and Blue Velvet is really about him growing up, losing his innocence, and discovering that evil not only exists in the world but within himself. He has to learn the hard way that just because Frank Booth is evil, it doesn't mean that he is good by default. It's just thematically rich, and every scene is layered with muliple meanings. Rear Window never struck me as being as complex, but it certainly has depth beyond the surface story and is exciting. Having Stewart in a wheelchair the whole film was a great move. It made every scene more tense because you knew when things went wrong, he couldn't help out or escape, or in the end, fight the killer.
Watchers was one of the best I ever read, thriller-wise. Not much into thrillers, I tend to read scif/fantasy as a first choice, with history a close second. ed.-I need more sleep. Completely misunderstood the post. 3 Days of the Condor.
^ Oh, I think Rear Window is very complex. It's not just the main story (which is damn good, as you pointed out) that makes this film so special, it's all the OTHER stories going on at the same time. You have the photographer and the socialite plot, the murderer and his wife, but you also have Miss Lonely Hearts and her unhappy life, the dancer and her many boyfriends, the honeymooners, and the childless couple and their beloved little dog----all conveyed without a single word of dialogue. It's just brilliant. I just can't help but gush about this film. I love Hitchcock. For me, he's the master of suspense. Just look at the scene in "The Birds," where all crows silently gather on the playground. That is fantastic.
You win, I forgot about the subplots. They were all great. Not only is everything done without words, but the entire story takes place in Stewart's apartment, and the areas that he can see from his window. That's quite unique and adds to the experience.
Two of my favorites would be North By Northwest and The Game. I just got so invested in The Game while I was watching it the first time that it will always be a favorite, and it is still a great movie to watch again even when you know what is going on. North By Northwest is my favorite Hitchcock. It is enjoyable and unique and Cary Grant just makes the whole thing a blast.
My second favorite Hitchcock film. It's a lot of fun, and features one of my favorite James Mason roles.
The Game is pretty awesome. Haven't seen it for years, though. The Hunt for Red October is another of my personal favourites.
The Prestige, Memento, The Sixth Sense and Crimson Tide are up there for me. I disagree. The Game is one of my favourite thrillers also, but it only works once. The pacing is interminable on subsequent viewings. I like The Silence of the Lambs, but that's almost entirely down to the incredible performances offered by both Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster. I'm not sure the film is particularly notable outside that.
Witness is my all-time favorite thiller. That is, unless we include The Dark Knight as a thiller, and not just a superhero movie. If we do, the The Dark Knight wins. Some recent ones I've seen that were pretty good were Valkyrie, Angels and Demons, and Orphan (for the life of me, I don't understand why this movie was advertised as a horror movie).
The Silence of the Lambs is probably my favorite thriller, even though categorically I consider it a horror film. It might pretend to be a thriller, but at its core stripped of all its nuances and details, it's definitively a horror film. Michael Clayton is probably the best traditional thriller to come along in years. It's a fantastic "slow burn" type of modernistic thriller that builds progressively with character and story development. It's dense, almost elegiac in its interweaving of complexities. Incredibly stylish and well-written, acted, and directed to boot. I'm a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock, who pioneered the thriller genre in my opinion, so obviously I love Shadow of a Doubt, Vertigo and Rear Window. Hitchcock often explores the fragility of sex and death and a big running theme in most of his films rests between the relationship between the main character and his mother (Psycho, North By Northwest, The Birds, Frenzy, Strangers on a Train). Roman Polanski is also an expert at crafting thrillers, and you get the sense in his films that his main characters are going through some type of paranoia provoked by external circumstances. His characters are usually folk who have no idea what's going on, but think they do (like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown). His most recent thriller, The Ghost Writer, is a great example of this. Ewan McGregor's character is an outsider who gets lured into something that quickly becomes bigger than he ever realized, and he becomes tangled in a web of deception, mystique, and treachery. Martin Scorsese also has a knack for creating thrillers where he puts you in the mind of a character who doesn't have all of his nuts and bolts, like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver or in Cape Fear. He enjoys creating hyper-realistic scenarios involving usually normal people in extraordinary lives, like in either Casino or more prominently Goodfellas. However, Scorsese's films aren't traditional thrillers, but are more character analysis's that evolve gradually over time. Christopher Nolan has perfected the psychological thriller, with his brainy Memento and The Prestige (as well as his modern Batman films). However, I have to give credit to two of his more underrated films, Following and Insomnia. Following has Nolan's signature non-linear style of storytelling but utilizes a slow burn effect to create characters and scenarios and then manipulate you into thinking something entirely else, before it all comes crashing down. Insomnia is a very effectual character drama/thriller where he literally brings you into the sleep deprived mind of Detective Dormer, thusly creating a very sympathetic and ultimately somewhat redeemable character haunted by his inner demons. Paul Greengrass's style of thriller has been most (unsuccessfully) mimicked in modern action films but regardless of people's complaints over his adherence to "shaky cam" and fast-paced storytelling, Greengrass is probably the master of creating suspense not only through story but through character as well. His two Bourne films work because we see the resourcefulness of the Bourne character as well as his constantly haunted persona, as seen through flashbacks and fragments of memories. However, his best work is the docu-drama United 93, where he slowly and gradually builds tension by taking into account the perceived knowledge of 9/11 and creating a taut, tense thriller out of the established scenario.
My inclination is to vote for something creative like The Prestige or The Sixth Sense (or even Signs, which I felt was under-rated) but in the end I would have to choose The Silence of the Lambs because of it's amazing performances. I've never seen Michael Clayton. <adds to Netflix queue>
I have to say that In The Line of Fire is propably my all time favorite thriller. Its well made, written and acted..plus the music is great I also like The Fugitive, Red Corner and The Outbreak a lot
Well, I guess I was never clear on what the definition of a "thriller" was, so after looking at the IMDb's Top 50 list, I looked it up on Wikipedia and, apparently, a whole lot of great Sci-Fi meets the criteria! Impossible for me to narrow it down to just one favorite, though. Film • A L I E N • The Matrix • Ronin • The Usual Suspects • The Bourne Trilogy TV • LOST • Day Break • Burn Notice
To me IMDB and Wikipedia's definitions of thrillers seem overly broad, at least when it comes to movies (nothing against you, Chris Johnson). From IMDB's Top 50 Thrillers: Terminator 2, The Matrix, Star Wars. These to me are not thrillers. Maybe they could be in book form (excepting that they would more likely be simply sci-fi). In books you don't really have an "action book" genre; thriller swallows up action-y movies and makes them into "political thrillers", "techno-thrillers", "military-thrillers", etc. In movies, I think thrillers are better limited to the psychological, suspenseful, and mystery types - like The Usual Suspects, or Hitchcock. Then again, I also dislike it when bookstores mix fantasy and science fiction and call it simply "Science Fiction". If they want to call the section something other than that ("fantastical fiction" or something else), I am good with that, but they are not the same thing.