Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Knives Out
By
Shawn S. Lealos
Published 23 minutes ago
Shawn S. Lealos is an entertainment writer who is a voting member of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. He has written for Screen Rant, CBR, ComicBook, The Direct, The Sportster, Chud, 411mania, Renegade Cinema, Yahoo Movies, and many more.
Shawn has a bachelor's degree in professional writing and a minor in film studies from the University of Oklahoma. He also has won numerous awards, including several Columbia Gold Circle Awards and an SPJ honor. He also wrote Dollar Deal: The Story of the Stephen King Dollar Baby Filmmakers, the first official book about the Dollar Baby film program. Shawn is also currently writing his first fiction novel under a pen name, based in the fantasy genre.
To learn more, visit his website at shawnlealos.net.
Sign in to your ScreenRant account Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recapThe best murder mystery movies are the ones where the viewers can't figure out who the killer is before the detective reveals all the clues. Of course, whether this is a locked-room murder mystery, a film noir, or a pulp detective flick, the films need to play fair and make the clues recognizable. That makes the best films immensely rewatchable.
The new Knives Out movie, dropping on Netflix in 2025, offers up another chance for a fun, well-plotted murder mystery, where the viewers are guessing who the killer is until the final reveal. This offers murder mystery fans another opportunity to try to outwit the killers and one-up the great detective, but this is not always easy to do in movies.
Knives Out (2019)
Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Knives Out
Before Netflix struck a deal with Rian Johnson for his Knives Out movies, the first film was a theatrical release and was a monster success, delivering an old-school Agatha Christie-style murder mystery. Much of the charm came from Daniel Craig's performance as the eccentric Benoit Blanc, a brilliant detective called in to solve the mystery.
The first movie is also a strong story about a dysfunctional family, the idea of classism among the extremely wealthy, and just the right touch of menace. The mystery surrounds the death of a famous author by apparent suicide, but Benoit Blanc believes there was a murder, and in the end, he was right.
The cast was full of recognizable faces, from Jamie Lee Curtis and Don Johnson to Chris Evans, Michael Shannon, and Toni Collette. In the end, Blanc figures out who the killer was, and when all is said and done, it was a great movie to rewatch to see how all the clues fell into place for that final twist.
Clue (1985)
Madeline Kahn as Mrs White threatens Tim Curry as Wadsworth in Clue
Clue is a murder mystery that is hard to solve for one big reason. Based on the board game of the same name, there is no one ending with one killer. Instead, Clue has three different endings, and each one of these endings has a different killer, or in one case, a different group of killers.
The movie, when released, had a different ending in different locations, so someone who saw the film at a theater in Dallas might see one ending, and someone in New York City might see a different ending. This caused many fans to show confusion since Clue's final scene changed for different screenings.
What made the movie brilliant is that all the endings work based on the clues and the scenes leading up to the finish. Whether it was one killer or everyone working together to commit the murders, they all played out right based on the story, making this a perfect movie to rewatch several times over.
Memories of Murder (2003)
Song Kang-ho as Park Doo-man and Kim Sang-kyung as Seo Tae-yoon show a photo in Memories of Murder
Years before Bong Joon Ho won an Oscar for his brilliant dark comedy Parasite, he directed a neo-noir crime thriller called Memories of Murder. The movie features two detectives looking into a series of rapes and murders in Hwaseong in the 1980s, and the story is based on a real-life case from that era.
The interesting thing about this murder mystery is that it was the first confirmed serial murders in South Korea, and the film's format was inspired by classic detective fiction. What really makes this murder mystery such a sobering exercise is that the detectives never solved the case and found the killer.
There is even a scene at the end that takes place in the future where one of the detectives learns the killer might have returned to the scene of the crime, but the evidence is still inconclusive. In a turn of events, 16 years after the movie's release, the real killer was finally identified.
The Big Sleep (1946)
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as Philip and Vivian in The Big Sleep
If anyone wants to know how to tell a mystery story right after reading Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there might not be a better place to start than the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Chandler's masterpiece was made into a 1946 movie with Humphrey Bogart called The Big Sleep.
Bogart is Philip Marlowe, a Los Angeles Private Investigator hired by a father to look into an issue with his daughter. However, as with most film noirs of the time, nothing is as it seems, and everyone is using each other to their own advantage, with Philip Marlowe caught in the middle.
By the end, Marlowe simply realizes the entire family he is investigating needs help, which is the best place to land by that point. The movie was a huge success, and it has since been added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
Murder by Decree (1979)
James Mason and Christopher Plummer in Murder by Decree
Bob Clark (A Christmas Story, Black Friday) directed the Sherlock Holmes mystery movie Murder by Decree in 1979. The cast was incredible, with Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes and James Mason as Dr. Watson. It also has Susan Clark, David Hemmings, and Donald Sutherland in the cast.
One of the most important things about making a Sherlock Holmes movie is ensuring that the solution to the crime is a difficult one to solve. If Sherlock Holmes is supposed to be the most brilliant detective in the world, it can't be an easy case to solve. This is even more unique since it surrounds the unsolved Jack the Ripper case.
Unlike other Sherlock Holmes movies, which are based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, this is based on a Jack the Ripper book that supposes the killings were part of a Masonic plot. It allowed Holmes to work on a real-life case, but with a fictional basis, allowing him to deduce a solution.
Death on the Nile (1978)
Bette Davis and Maggie Smith look at something with intense interest in a scene from Death on the Nile
There was a great Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Death on the Nile in 2022, but the best version of the classic Agatha Christie novel came in 1978. While some people consider Sherlock Holmes the world's greatest fictional detective, Agatha Christie's protagonists give him a run for his money.
In Dead on the Nile, it is Hercule Poirot (played by Peter Ustinov) as he is aboard a boat where a murder takes place. Almost all of the passengers have a motive, and most of them also have alibis for how they couldn't have pulled this off. This remains one of Christie's greatest mysteries, with one of her best twist endings.
The cast was incredible, with names like Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, Jon Finch, Dame Maggie Smith, and Angela Lansbury, and they all delivered spectacular performances, making them all seem guilty and innocent at the same time. It was a masterful mystery movie.
Memento (2000)
Guy Pierce as Leonard holding a Polaroid in Memento
Memento is a mind-twisting movie by Christopher Nolan that was almost indecipherable until the ending. That is because Nolan played with time during the film and told the entire story in reverse order, with the last scene of his story first and the first scene of the story as the last in the movie.
It was incredibly well plotted because this also kept the truth from being revealed until that shocking final moment, which was actually the scene that started the story. The story follows Leonard, a man with short-term memory loss, who can't keep memories, investigating the murder of his wife.
By the time the movie ends, the viewer learns who the killer was, why the entire film was a red herring, and how things aren't going to stop, even with those shocking last reveals. Of all the murder mystery movies, this one earned its rewatches.
Gosford Park (2001)
Maggie Smith as Constance Trentham at a table with others in Gosford Park
Gosford Park was a brilliantly made murder mystery movie by Robert Altman, and with his masterful direction and a cast of all-stars, this remains one of the best historical mystery movies ever made. Influenced by the French classic, The Rules of the Game, this is a murder mystery where the suspect could be one of several people.
This is all about classism, similar to the Rian Johnson movie, Knives Out, but on a much grander scale. Here, the suspects are split between the wealthy and privileged on the main floor, and the servants, who are separated and live in their own parts of the house. The film follows the investigation from both points of view.
The cast included names like Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Richard E. Grant, Helen Mirren, Jeremy Northam, Clive Owen, Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emily Watson, and Ryan Phillippe. The screenplay won an Oscar, and the cast picked up two nominations. It was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Director.
Brick (2005)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Brennan looking intense with his face beaten up in The Pin's basement in Brick
Before he made his Knives Out movies, Rian Johnson showed his love for noir and hardboiled mysteries with his 2005 murder mystery Brick. The movie's setting is a local high school where a female student is found dead in a ditch. Her ex-boyfriend starts investigating, which leads him to some drug dealers within his school.
The twist with this movie is that the film takes place in the present day, but all the characters talk like they are straight out of a hardboiled detective novel. This works, thanks to a great cast that is led by Joseph Gordon Levitt. It is also a great mystery, with some great twists and turns.
Brick does what all great murder mysteries should do, and it has the hero slowly discover the truth through his investigation and then turn the tables on the people responsible. It is clever, fun, and shows why Knives Out would become such a sensation when it arrived over a decade later.
And Then There Were None (1945)
The cast of And Then There Were None
One of the best murder mystery movies ever made is based on the Agatha Christie novel. Ten Little Indians. And Then There Were None follows a group of 10 strangers invited to a dinner party on an isolated island in England. They are tended to by two hired servants, and then the host accuses all of them of murder.
Each of the guests has something to hide, and this leads to an event where each of the guests dies, one by one, and the others have to figure out who the killer is before it is too late. However, the final twist shows the truth, proves that no one was innocent of anything, and justice was finally served.
SO many mystery novels owe their plots to the Agatha Christie novel, and many murder mystery movies owe their structure to And Then There Were None. It is a seminal film in the genre, and one of the best of its kind.
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Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
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