This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene ...
John Huston was eager for a lightweight lark, and The List of Adrian Messenger was just the project he needed. Philip MacDonald's upper-crust British murder mystery allowed Huston to work close to his Irish estate, including fox hunting and quail shooting well suited to Huston's lord-of-the-manor lifestyle. The mystery itself is clever enough: As a former MI-5 agent, George C. Scott is ...
Based on the best-selling novel by award-winning writer, Minette Walters. The Ice House is an enthralling, tangled web of secrets and murder. When the gardener informs the ladies of the house, Phoebe Maybury (Penny Downie) and her two friends, that he has found a dead body in the ice house, Chief Inspector Walsh (Corin Redgrave) and Sergeant McLoughlin (Daniel Craig) are called to the ...
Rebecca is an ageless, timeless adult movie about a woman who marries a widower but fears she lives in the shadow of her predecessor. This was Hitchcock's first American feature, and it garnered the Best Picture statue at the 1941 Academy Awards. In today's films, most twists and surprises are ridiculous or just gratuitous, so it's sobering to look back on this film where every revelation ...
A suave tennis player (Ray Milland) plots the perfect murder, the dispatching of his wealthy wife (Grace Kelly), who is having an affair with a writer (Robert Cummings). Amazingly, the wife manages to stave off her attacker, a twist of fate that challenges the hubby's talent for improvisation. Alfred Hitchcock wisely stuck to the stage origins of Dial M for Murder, ignoring the temptation ...
When Samuel (Lukas Haas), a young Amish boy traveling with his mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis), witnesses the murder of a police officer in a public restroom, he and his mother become the temporary wards of John Book (Harrison Ford), a detective who's been assigned to solve the crime. After suspect lineups and mug-shot books yield nothing, Samuel, in the most memorable scene of the film, recognizes ...
Bergin poses as a photographer to seduce and sexually humiliate young women, until an angry Assistant D.A. decides to entrap him by becoming his next victim. But the secrets she discovers about herself could lead her astray in this shocking and sensual thriller.
Ah, there's nothing quite like settling in and getting cozy with a complicated British country-estate murder. In the BBC adaptation of Dorothy Sayers's detective novel, which also aired on PBS, the brilliant Lord Peter Wimsey brings his investigative talents to use close to home. His future brother-in-law is slain during a country retreat, and while there seems to be no shortage of possible ...