The best thriller movies of all time for a suspense-packed film night

The erotic thriller at its sweatiest, most stylised best, John McNaughton’s Wild Things presents the story of an elaborate, sex-filled long con with lurid abandon. The thrills here are exaggerated and while they may be trashy, they’re also shrewdly executed. Which is all by way of saying: don’t even think about missing the end credits.

The killer moment: Neve Campbell and Denise Richards make out in a swimming pool, in what must be one of cinema’s most rewound scenes. But which one of these high-school girls has the upper hand?

Nazis in America? No way! Coming off the grand ambitions of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles took his first shot at a pulpy noir, directing and starring as a Third Reicher hiding out in a Rockwellian Connecticut town. (Remember when fascists felt shame and fear?) More or less a personal test to see if he could bring a film in on time and under budget, it’s regarded as minor Welles, but that’s still better than most filmmakers’ best efforts. The climax at the clock tower, featuring some none-too-subtle symbolism, is especially awesome.

The killer moment: Edward G Robinson, as the agent tracking Welles’s fugitive war criminal Franz Kindler, shows Kindler’s shell-shocked new wife (Loretta Young) film of the atrocities he aided in – the first time actual Holocaust footage appeared in a Hollywood movie.

John Mackenzie’s Cockney crime-athon is packed with chances to unleash your best Bob ’oskins impression (‘The Mafia? I’ve shit ’em!’). But thanks to gutsy performances by Hoskins as ambitious gangland fixer Harold Shand and Helen Mirren as his icy moll, it never lapses into cliché, slowly cranking up from blood-splashed character study to strangely affecting tragedy. If Shakespeare grew up in post-war Stepney, Shand could have been his Macbeth.

The killer moment: A lingering tight shot on Hoskins, complex emotions playing across his face as he’s driven to a date with destiny, is some of the best wordless acting in movies.

You know the plot, because Martin Scorsese used it for his Oscar-winning remake, The Departed. As entertaining as that movie is, the Hong Kong original is even better. Tony Leung and Andy Lau play moles: the former, a cop infiltrating a vicious triad; the latter, a criminal rising through the police ranks. Blazing its way through gunplay and excruciating scenes of hazardous undercover work, Infernal Affairs is the thriller fan’s John Woo.

The killer moment: Inevitably, both men stand on a rooftop, sizing each other up, profile to profile. Leo and Matt were never this subtle.

Literature’s Tom Ripley, a con artist, gets captured in René Clément’s Purple Noon, but he murders his way to a grimmer finale in Anthony Minghella’s handsome spin on Patricia Highsmith’s novel. This sun-dappled thriller glimmers with a first-rate cast led by Matt Damon, enviable real estate and a complex gay protagonist (still a mainstream rarity) whose reflection on a polished piano splits apart in a mind-blowing shot. All hail cinematographer John Seale.

The killer moment: Suspicious of the title character, Freddie (Philip Seymour Hoffman, superbly obnoxious) repeatedly pounds on a high-pitched piano key, shredding away at Tom’s patience.

Michael Mann’s breakthrough noir stars James Caan as an expert safecracker dreaming of leaving the criminal business and going straight, while simultaneously aware that a dream is all it can ever be. Caan gives a tremendous, livewire performance, throwing on a heavy Chicago accent and coming across something like Joe Pesci channelling Ric Flair. Mann, meanwhile, shows off the stylistic trademarks that’d make him one of Hollywood’s coolest auteurs: moody, neon-lit cinematography, icy electronic score (courtesy of Tangerine Dream) and loads of tension that builds toward a violent climax.

The killer moment: on a coffee date with Tuesday Weld, the woman he hopes will drag him out of his life of crime, Caan bares his soul and reveals he left most of it behind in prison. It’s a scene with no big explosions or heisty action, but it’s gripping all the same.

Deliriously nuts and a treat for fans of the double cross, Gillian Flynn's 2012 bestseller found the ideal adapting filmmaker in David Fincher, whose doomy way with a thriller proved a ruse in itself. The noose tightens around Nick (Ben Affleck, impressively shifty), a bar owner and former hot-shot journalist whose wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike, revelatory), a minor celebrity, has disappeared from their Missouri home.

The killer moment: Fed up and vicious, Amy coos from the afterlife – or maybe it's much closer – about the ‘cool girl’ she was required to be.

Berlin makes an unforgiving industrial backdrop in Tom Tykwer’s techno-scored time twister. Lola (Franka Potente) needs to find a fortune in 20 minutes or her petty criminal boyfriend gets the chop. Cue three wildly different scenarios that play out like a cross between a video game, an infinitely more gonzo Sliding Doors and a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ story. There’s even a Simpsons homage to it, which you can’t say about many low-budget Euro-thrillers.

The killer moment: Lola’s first attempt at boyfriend-rescuing ends very badly.

There’s a reason why the concept of gaslighting is forever potent: The image of emotional abuse presented in this film is viscerally uncomfortable. Charles Boyer is the viciously manipulative husband; Ingrid Bergman plays his victimised wife; and the audience is left desperately hoping for the cycle of mind games to finally end.

The killer moment: ‘Are you trying to tell me I’m insane?’ Bergman asks Boyer, crawling out of her skin and lunging for a real answer. It’s the film’s dark psychological predicament in a single line.

Swinging London must be partying elsewhere than in this paranoid spy film, transplanted from the pages of Len Deighton’s novel with the help of a jazzy John Barry score. Behind it all was James Bond producer Harry Saltzman, who gave us Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer, the antithesis of 007. He’s an insubordinate trickster and womaniser (okay, so not completely different), but he wears glasses and – shocker of shockers – cooks. He’s also the deeply cool central cog in this magnificently calibrated espionage thriller.

The killer moment: The brainwashing sequence is a trippy foreshadow to a similar scene in The Parallax View.

Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut is a potent portrait of obsession. Characteristically cool, he plays Dave, a California DJ dealing with an increasingly unhinged fan-turned-hookup-turned-stalker (Jessica Walter). The dark impulses on display make for an intriguing contrast with the sun-dappled, ultra-’70s aesthetic; the device of the single-minded madwomen, pushing the thrills close to horror, would prove highly influential.

The killer moment: Hell-bent on getting closer to her lust object, Evelyn (Walter) breaks into Dave’s bachelor pad and vandalises his possessions – the aftermath is as bad as you’d expect.

This Melbourne-set crime thriller packs all the energy of an early Scorsese picture, while bringing something fresh and distinctively Aussie to the genre. David Michôd’s feature debut has its roots in the real-life slaying of two cops in the late ’80s, and those incidents’ recreation is just one of the bursts of violence in a movie that carefully picks its moments for maximum shock. Caught in the middle is wide-eyed innocent Joshua (James Frecheville), wondering who he can trust in the clan of criminals he’s been adopted into. The answer? No one, least of all Jacki Weaver’s Smurf, a matriarch of real menace.

The killer moment: The odious but oddly charismatic Pope (Ben Mendelsohn, before he became Hollywood’s go-to villain) seethes in his living-room chair plotting evil, while Air Supply’s ‘All Out of Love’ makes an ironic counterpoint.

Over five decades, the James Bond franchise has morphed from Cold War thrills to globe-trotting action, via whatever the heck Moonraker was. This instalment, the best of the Roger Moore days, is a fantastically entertaining breakwater between those two phases: escapist fun before the gadget-drenched silliness to come. Special props go to Ken Adam, the production designer charged with creating an oceanic evil lair on a Pinewood backlot.

The killer moment: 007 and man-mountain Jaws (Richard Kiel) face off in Egypt’s ancient Temple of Karnak.

In some key way the crux of Christopher Walken's spooky, stilted persona, Abel Ferrara's louche gangster picture has come to occupy a central piece of NYC iconography. Walken plays Frank White, a vacant-eyed coke lord who, immediately upon release from prison, resumes his high-flying lifestyle – and idle mayoral aspirations – from a headquarters at the swank Plaza Hotel.

The killer moment: We all know Walken can dance, but you haven't seen how weirdly electric and menacing he can be until you've seen his flapping bird.

Believe it or not, kids, but in the days before social media, if you wanted to lob an unsolicited critique at an artist, you had to hope their car would overturn outside your house, and that they’d be too injured to run away. Kathy Bates is frightening, funny and sad as Annie Wilkes, a lonely woman who pulls her favourite romance writer (James Caan) from a snowy wreck and ‘nurses him back to health’, with the slight caveat that he write his next book her way. Rob Reiner’s Stephen King adaptation edges up to camp at points, only to get smashed by sudden, shocking violence. 

The killer moment: Sledgehammer, meet James Caan’s ankle – there are kills in Terrifier that are easier to stomach.

Meg Ryan is cast intriguingly against type in director Jane Campion’s dark spin on the erotic thriller. As Frannie, a teacher who becomes entangled with a detective investigating a series of murders, Ryan is basically the opposite of a cute rom-com heroine, and Campion creates a world of sexual menace, thick with violence yet never played for exploitation.

The killer moment: Early on, Frannie witnesses a woman going down on a man in the back room of a bar. This startling, surprisingly graphic moment sets the voyeuristic plot in motion.

Hounded out of the U.S. by the ‘reds-under-the-bed’ brigade, filmmaker Jules Dassin plied his trade on the other side of the Atlantic in the ’50s. Hollywood’s loss was Europe’s gain as he made his two greatest movies there: the seminal heist flick Rififi and this London noir featuring a career-best turn from the perennially underrated Richard Widmark. Sheened in sweaty desperation, Widmark’s hustler Harry Fabian is an antihero for the ages as he weaves a web in the criminal underworld so tangled, he eventually becomes caught in it.

The killer moment: A climactic foot chase along the Thames shows off Hammersmith in way that’s never looked cooler.

Ben Wheatley’s DIY debut Down Terrace was a blast, but nothing could have prepared us for his second feature. Like a DVD-bin thriller given a massive jolt of quality, Kill List takes the basic elements of low-rent Britcrime-bickering hit men, a shady aristo crime boss, dreary suburban locations – and transforms them into art. With its improvised dialogue, pin-drop sound design and shocking violence, the result is terrifying, occasionally frustrating and utterly compelling.

The killer moment: If you can watch the hammer scene without wincing, you’re made of stone.

Funny Games director Michael Haneke understands the hidden guilt of the blissful bourgeois, tormented by outside forces – in this case, an unknown stalker with a camera. Among the auteur’s masterpieces, this Juliette Binoche-starrer agitates through its meticulously concealed anxiety, culminating in a political statement on the contemporary residues of historical violence and racism.

The killer moment: Husband Daniel Auteuil doesn’t see it coming (neither do we) when a gruesome splash of blood slits open a heretofore sterile film.

A brutal outlier within director Shane Meadows’ warm, humanist filmography, this revenge thriller is a British exploitation flick with real emotional weight. Paddy Considine plays ex-soldier Richard, bringing a touch of Travis Bickle to the Peak District; Toby Kebbell is his abused, vulnerable brother, Anthony, preyed upon by drug dealers who don’t know what’s coming. Watch this one with Kill List for a rural England double-bill that’ll have you sticking close to the city.

The killer moment: A spooky raid in which Richard wears a nightmare-inducing gas mask is straight out of an Otto Dix painting.

Wim Wenders isn’t exactly synonymous with the genre, but he spins out Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game into an winningly off-kilter thriller. It has Dennis Hopper in the Ripley role as a rich American drifter who latches onto Bruno Ganz’s dying German picture framer and persuades him to start doing hits for a criminal gang. The plotting is not what you’d call Hitchcockian but Wenders is more interested in the existential fog that envelops his characters – and their conspiratorial bond – than the motives behind their crimes. It’s film noir as murky buddy movie.

The killer moment: Ganz’s unlikely assassin carries out his first hit on the Parisian Métro.

Tokyo, 1949. A heat wave rips through the city, and a rookie policeman has his gun stolen by a pickpocket on a crowded trolley. Shamed into action, he pursues the weapon across the city, uncovering a major gun-running ring. Just four years after the end of World War II, Akira Kurosawa’s second major film (following 1948’s yakuza picture Drunken Angel) focuses as much on place and social context as plot and character, utilising documentary footage of the bombed-out city and exploring how ordinary Japanese citizens were coming to terms with their shock defeat.

The killer moment: In a grungy, mud-caked showdown in the woods, who’s more desperate, cop or crook?

No man has ever looked better on screen than Alain Delon in this French adaptation of author Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. That’s not just a shallow observation – his hotness is crucial to this take on Tom Ripley. He’s a smokeshow using his absurd good looks as a smokescreen, hiding an icy duplicitousness beneath a veneer of tan-and-chiselled beauty. It only makes his psychopathy more disturbing when it gradually comes into view under the blazing Mediterranean sun. In comparison to Anthony Minghella’s take years later, director René Clément takes more liberties with Highsmith’s novel, churning out a suave stolen-identity thriller. But for all its handsomeness, it still manages to leave viewers feeling vaguely icky by the end.   

The killer moment: Ripley’s first kill – further proof that you should never go yachting with a mysterious stranger, no matter how handsome they are.

Ah, the ’70s: when men had faces as rumpled as their suits and women were ‘broads’ invading their workspaces. Joseph Sargent’s great subway-train robbery, starring Walter Matthau as a hangdog New York transit cop negotiating with Robert Shaw’s smooth criminal, is a lean, gritty, surprisingly funny heist procedural, but it’s an even better time capsule. Shot in the actual tunnels beneath NYC, it captures not just the look of the era but the prevailing mood – a sense of perpetual annoyance, with a hostage situation being just another irritant.

The killer moment: Matthau’s final frame, a ‘gotcha’ expression only someone with his face could make.

Set in French West Africa in the 1930, Bertrand Tavernier’s story of a bumbling, humiliated police chief (Philippe Noiret) who turns murderous offers a caustic look at colonialism and masculinity. The thrills here leave a high body count, but are tempered by a sizable dose of existentialism, and the reliably great Isabelle Huppert brings welcome mischief to the role of a young mistress.

The killer moment: Huppert practices shooting a gun while saying, ‘I’ll never use it.’ We know she will – it’s only a matter of when.

Two men meet, entirely by chance. Both have someone they want to get rid of, but they’re terrified of getting caught. Why don’t they swap murders? Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s most celebrated novel may play fast and loose with the book but it does retain one of her key themes, offering a subtextual portrait of closeted homosexuality in an era of McCarthyite conformity. The result is witty, strange and endlessly fascinating.

The killer moment: After a movie’s worth of circling, the climactic struggle on an out-of-control carousel is dizzying.

A central piece of Watergate-era thrill-mongering, The Parallax View joins director Alan Pakula's earlier Klute and later All the President's Men in a trilogy with no equal for state-of-the-nation gloominess. Warren Beatty plays a crusading reporter who takes a deep dive into a secret organisation of political assassins; unwittingly, he has no idea how much they'd like to welcome him among their ranks.

The killer moment: Beatty's Joe Frady goes for an interview: He's led to a screening room where, Ludovico-style, he's subjected to one of the most radical silent montages ever presented by a Hollywood film.

This classic boy’s-own thriller features the cool-as-fuck double act of Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood – the dialogue mostly involves growling – giving Hitler a headache by rescuing a captured general held in a Bavarian mountaintop schloss. At least, that’s the plan: even the twists have twists here. It’s one of those rare war films that keeps getting better with age (even if we still don’t know who’s ‘Broadsword’ and who’s ‘Danny Boy’).

The killer moment: A cable-car fight is an exercise in white-knuckle excitement, despite looking like it was rear-projected in the MGM parking lot.

Just when we thought of erotic thrillers as forbidden fruit of a bygone era, along came Park Chan-wook’s gothic stunner set in 1930s Korea. The luxuriant visual pleasures of The Handmaiden aren’t exactly male-gaze-proof, but the film’s juicy payoff is a devious slap in the face of any self-appointed abusers.

The killer moment: Bodily fluids flow freely during an ‘educational’ multi-position sexual rendezvous between female bedfellows.

With its Rashomon-esque structure of shifting perspectives, Costa-Gavras’s Z (based on the true story of a liberal Greek official’s assassination) revolutionised political thrillers with its maximalist punch: both entertaining and incessantly suspenseful. Its essential theme – the need to seek the truth – exemplifies the chaotic, activism-defined moment in which it was released, and rings urgently true in our era of fake news and government corruption.

The killer moment: Right-wing thugs in a truck speed toward a circle of protestors and beat a peaceful politician with a club.

The third Dr Mabuse film came nearly 30 years after The Testament of Dr Mabuse and more than four decades after the malevolent medic unleashed his first foul scheme in Dr Mabuse: The Gambler. Director Fritz Lang dispenses with his anti-Nazi allegories to craft a byzantine story in which the not-so-good doctor (Wolfgang Preiss) has every room in a hotel under surveillance. With gadgets aplenty and paranoia rife, it feels like a forebear to a whole generation of techno-thrillers: Enemy of the State and even, dare we say it, Sliver.

The killer moment: A sniper takes out a TV reporter who’s behind the wheel of his car. A high-angle shot isolates the suddenly motionless car.

A cultural depth charge of vigilante-cop brutality, neo-High Noon cynicism and an extra long .44 Magnum (‘You’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?’), Don Siegel's crime thriller didn't play by the rules of police procedurals, infusing them instead with the dead-end desperation of the unsolved Zodiac murders. It also made a huge star out of Clint Eastwood, hardened into iconic fury.–

The killer moment: Chased down in an empty football stadium, the perp squeals like a pig – ‘I have the right to a lawyer!’ – as Harry steps on his leg wound and the camera helicopters up to a foggy, nightmarish stalemate.

Ultimately a breaker of one of the most central tenets of the home-invasion thriller (no telling), Michael Haneke's sickening landmark of pure nihilism remains the hardest of his films to squirm through – and this is the guy who made The Piano Teacher. Advice: If a pair of preppy strangers appears at your door asking to borrow some eggs, turn them away. Haneke truly believes in indicting our bloodlust; he remade this film, shot for shot, with Naomi Watts in 2007.

The killer moment: Already a winking Ferris Bueller who talks directly to the lens, ruthless Paul (Arno Frisch) reveals himself to be nothing less than an evil god when his plan goes awry and he grabs the TV's remote control, ‘rewinding’ the scene we just watched and starting over.

Blending the beautiful expansiveness of the sea with the claustrophobia of a ship’s cabin overtaken by a madman, Dead Calm creates a tense setting for a twisty two-hander between Nicole Kidman and Billy Zane. With her husband (Sam Neill) stranded on a distant sinking boat, our flame-haired heroine gets resourceful, with plenty of shocks along the way. 

The killer moment: Husband and wife, each in an unstable vessel, attempt to communicate by radio and every word, barely heard, could be their last.

As Hitchcockian as ultra-chic blondes come, the rough-edged murder suspect Catherine Tramell made Sharon Stone an ageless star overnight. It might not be the finest erotic thriller of the ’90s, but Paul Verhoeven’s sweltering, controversial whodunit is among the most legendary with its no-holds-barred sex scenes between Stone’s bisexual novelist and Michael Douglas’s understandably powerless detective.

The killer moment: No ice picks necessary: Stone’s tyrannical (and much-parodied) leg-cross in the iconic white dress shows her interrogators who’s on top.

Humphrey Bogart is a Dixon Steele, a tempestuous screenwriter who may have committed a murder in this Hollywood-set slice of noirish excellence. Dixon and his neighbour turned lover, Laurel (Gloria Grahame), make for a compelling and tricky pair, and the fog of moral ambiguity that surrounds them keeps us on our toes until a dramatic final twist.

The killer moment: Bogart recites a fatalistically romantic line he’s written for a script, and then has Grahame repeat it: ‘I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.’

Whenever Robert Mitchum’s revenge-thirsty ex-con Max Cady occupies the screen with his fedora, cigar and signature sleazy grin (accompanied by Bernard Hermann’s alarming orchestra score), we’re seeing a baddie for the ages. J. Lee Thompson’s incendiary adaptation of John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners avoids the word rape entirely, but Cady’s spine-chilling sexual offences can be detected in Mitchum’s terrifyingly dim stare.

The killer moment: In the film’s operatic conclusion by the river, Cady cracks an egg and suggestively smears it on his next potential victim.

Yes, the base thrills of John Boorman’s wilderness survival film are primal as two alphas (Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds) and a pair of betas (Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox) experience the canoe trip from hell. Want conflict? Take your pick between man vs nature, man vs hillbilly and man vs self. But for all the hicksploitation trappings and Bear Grylls set pieces, it’s the constant battle between man and his own masculinity that weighs the heroes down throughout the tragic, meditative survivalist yarn.

The killer moment: Following the infamous ‘squeal like a pig’ sequence, a post-traumatic canoe accident renders Reynolds’ grown boy scout incapacitated… completely shifting the group dynamic as things turn deadly.

Never discount our need to laugh, especially when thrillers are involved. Nick and Nora Charles – crime-busting couple, doting dog owners and constant drinkers – are two of the wittiest creations to ever grace the genre. William Powell and Myrna Loy were never better than they were in this film and its sequels. One might erroneously call The Thin Man a light entertainment but can you find a more romantic depiction of a working partnership, sass and all?

The killer moment: All the murder suspects are gathered at a dinner table, as Nick holds court in a big reveal that goes sideways.

Jane Fonda gives an iconic performance as Bree, a prostitute who finds herself involved in a missing-person case being investigated by the titular detective (Donald Sutherland). Bree is a fascinating mix of liberated yet vulnerable ’70s womanhood and the film is filled with paranoia and corruption. New York City’s streets make for a perfect moody backdrop.

The killer moment: Late at night, Bree lies in bed as her phone rings and rings, and the camera zooms out slowly. It’s an eloquent, ominous depiction of the threat she faces.

Where is Linda Fiorentino these days? Her Lauren Bacall-level cool in John Dahl’s erotic neo-noir (the Gone Girl of its year) is sorely missed. Watching her sleek seductress Bridget double-cross an abusive husband and manipulate her naive small-town boy toy with a playful shrug is a turn-on in itself. Her effortless villainy is just as steamy as the film’s sex.

The killer moment: A nosy private eye falls for Bridget’s cunning ways and voluntarily unzips his pants during a drive – but guess who lives to tell the tale?

A treatise on the act of remembering, a study in loss and grief, and a story told both backward and forward, Memento ought to be impenetrable: a movie for the art house, not the multiplex. So it’s a testament to the craftsmanship of writer-director Christopher Nolan that the film wasn’t just a solid hit, but launched one of the most successful filmmaking careers in contemporary Hollywood. Huge respect is also due to leading man Guy Pearce, who at times seems to be holding the whole project together through sheer force of will.

The killer moment: Vicious Carrie-Anne Moss circles our hero, taunting him for his amnesia, knowing he’ll forget everything in a matter of minutes.

The Godfather and Goodfellas play more like studies in power than straight-up thrillers. No such quibbles, though, with Brian De Palma’s stylised, semi-fictional slice of Chicago crime-fighting lore, which ticks every box on the thriller checklist. With its brilliant, bloody set pieces, tons of quotable dialogue (‘You’re nothing but a lot of talk and a badge’) and a jittery Ennio Morricone score that amps up the tension, it’s De Palma knocking it out of the park.

The killer moment: The unbearably suspenseful Battleship Potemkin-homaging Union Station shootout still sends our systolic readings through the roof.

The dramatic world of ballet is fertile ground for an exploration of professional jealousy and obsession. Darren Aronofsky’s lurid psychological horror film delves into the compellingly creepy idea of doppelgangers, via committed performances from Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis, who push the backstage maneuvering to dizzying extremes.

The killer moment: Warring prima donnas grapple in an intense, shape-shifting fight scene. With such over-the-top delirium, who could ever think of ballet as prissy?

Brian De Palma burnishes his Hitchcock fixation to a high sheen in this supremely confident New York City-set thriller, which features something of a surrogate character for the director himself: a teenage tech whiz (Keith Gordon) obsessed with cameras and spying devices who's bent on avenging the unsolved murder of his glamorous mother (Angie Dickinson). Trans movies have come a long way since this one.

The killer moment: It's one of De Palma's purest sequences of total craft: a wordless flirtation between two strangers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (actually shot in Philly) that becomes a missed connection, a painful rejection, then a chase.

Denis Villeneuve’s devastating Incendies warned us what to expect from this chilly drug-war thriller: no moral certainties and no happy endings. Like Alice in a narco wonderland, Emily Blunt’s greenhorn FBI agent disappears down the rabbit hole and into a violent world of realpolitik on the Mexican border. Villeneuve mounts spectacular set pieces (the convoy sequence, shot by the great Roger Deakins, is a pulse-pounding standout), while also painting a bleaker picture of the lawless badlands than even Trump can muster.

The killer moment: Benicio del Toro’s avenging cartel man sits down to a very short dinner with a drug lord and his family.

An oblique allegory for England’s precariousness on the brink of World War II, Alfred Hitchcock’s breezy, chatty train thriller has its roaring locomotive echoing in almost every train movie since, from Silver Streak to The Girl on the Train. Plus, it introduced the world to the cricket-obsessed comedic characters Charters and Caldicott, who went on to many more films and even a TV series.

The killer moment: Is Michael Redgrave the original Ethan Hunt or what? He fearlessly hangs out of his carriage’s window and faces a fast-approaching train.

An upright but rash cop (Glenn Ford) declares war on organised crime in Fritz Lang’s unrelenting noir of ‘vice, dice and corruption’. This brutal, rug-pulling revenge classic ushered the way for the likes of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, and still stings like a cigarette burn, with its string of victimised femmes and menacing final line, ‘Keep the coffee hot.’

The killer moment: Gloria Grahame’s angelic face becomes the target of a sinister attacker with a boiling pot of joe. Mercifully, it happens off-screen.

The allegedly Buddhist opening epigraph is fake (writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville simply made it up), but the sense of Zen purity that runs through this flawless French heist movie is wonderfully convincing. Melville’s stylish, crumpled leading man, Alain Delon (also of Le Samouraï), plays Corey, a career crook who is released from prison, drives back to Paris and immediately starts setting up his next job. As lean and meticulous as Japanese calligraphy, this is precision-tooled filmmaking.

The killer moment: The silent robbery sequence is a 30-minute master class in sustained tension.

Orson Welles’s tale of betrayal, lust and murder, in which he stars as a naive Irish sailor alongside Rita Hayworth as a captivating femme fatale, is filled with visual flourishes and hard-boiled twists. As one of cinema’s great masters, it’s no surprise that Welles made crime films that became so enduring.

The killer moment: The shootout in the hall of mirrors is a breathless achievement of cinematic illusion and mise-en-scène. Only Welles could pull off this literal fracturing of the image so confidently.

The average presidential tweet packs more controversy these days than anything in Kathryn Bigelow’s geopolitical thriller, so it’s strange to think that when it came out, it spawned a litany of think pieces and even threats of a congressional inquiry. The main accusation leveled at Bigelow – that she condoned the use of torture in her depiction of the hunt for Osama bin Laden – is hardly borne out in a deeply unmisty-eyed look at U.S. foreign policy. A smart thriller that doesn’t skimp on the pyrotechnics when the time comes, it’s basically The Bourne Ultimatum for people who read The Atlantic.

The killer moment: Overlooking a table model of Obama’s hideout, CIA agents believe their years of searching are about to pay off. ‘Who are you?’ asks the director of an operative (Jessica Chastain). ‘I’m the motherfucker that found this place,’ she replies, ‘sir.’

A decade before his class-warfare masterpiece Parasite struck a global nerve, South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho tapped his inner Hitchcock with this small-scale whodunit. A coldly calculating procedural punctuated with devastating tenderness, Bong’s film follows a fiercely protective back-alley herbalist (South Korean national treasure Hye-ja Kim) playing detective in an attempt to absolve her mentally vulnerable son of a heinous murder. Like its protagonist, the film is unafraid to explore the dark recesses of society, following Mother through a labyrinth of desperation, dead ends and, eventually, moral decay. It’s a heartbreaking, clenched-jaw mystery from front to back. But the greatest trick Bong pulls is forging an unquestioning empathy for the family at its center, even as things take an impossibly dark turn in the third act. 

The killer moment: Mom takes a well-earned bus tour to the countryside and samples her own medicine as the credits roll.

If there’s one film here that deserves wider exposure, it’s this. In his most honest and heartfelt performance, the late Bill Paxton plays Dale Dixon, a small-town sheriff who dreams of escaping to the city. When word comes that a gang of notorious killers are headed his way, Dale tools up for battle, High Noon-style. But playing the hero isn’t the same as actually being one. Balancing clear-eyed observations on race and class with nerve-shredding tension and a bottomless sense of empathy, ‘One False Move’ is a small, sharp masterpiece.

The killer moment: The opening home invasion is still shocking in its offhand brutality.

Pure panache and an admitted inspiration on such nobodies as Jim Jarmusch, Walter Hill and John Woo, Jean-Pierre Melville's cryptic thriller channels an almost abstract sense of fate and beauty. (If you liked Drive, you've got homework.) At its core is actor Alain Delon's hitman: trenchcoat-clad, chiseled, a dude of few words. He glides through the film as if doomed; there's not an inch of fat on this plot, which never get sentimental, only colder and more aggressively on target.

The killer moment: Delon's assassin cruises on and off several Metro lines, even jumping a moving walkway to shake several different pursuers. The guy is smooth.

Brian De Palma’s reworking of the ’60s thinker Blow-Up is a superbly stylised tale of paranoia, featuring John Travolta as a movie sound-effects technician who believes he’s captured a political assassination in his recordings. The film is bolstered by a number of high-strung set pieces; its combination of slasher-flick imagery, political intrigue and tragedy is intoxicating.

The killer moment: De Palma’s camera lurks through a tawdry B-movie women’s dorm, until a showering co-ed screams unconvincingly: cut to the men mixing the movie.

Taking cues from Italian neorealism and the French new wave, director William Friedkin’s punchy police procedural follows ‘Popeye’ Doyle (Gene Hackman) and his partner ‘Cloudy’ Russo (Roy Scheider), two NYC detectives attempting to bust up a heroin-smuggling ring. Based loosely on actual events, the film brought a bracing verisimilitude to the cop flick, as Popeye bellows and brutalises his way through a criminal fraternity. The sequel is every bit as good.

The killer moment: Eat it, Bullitt – this one’s got the best car chase in movies, largely shot from a bumper-level perspective.

Roman Polanski’s subtle thriller takes a sail through the waterlogged cracks of a marriage rocked by a handsome vagabond (Zygmunt Malanowicz). An allegory for upper-crust privilege and masculine arrogance – intensified by a hypnotizing score by Krzysztof Komeda –‘Knife in the Water landed on the cover of Time magazine (‘Cinema as an International Art’) and scored an Oscar nomination, launching Polanski’s career in earnest.

The killer moment: The film’s title clues us into the fate of the drifter’s precious pocket knife, but there’s even more that goes overboard.

Novelist Jim Thompson was a genius of hardboiled crime fiction: his books are lean and gripping, generally following a rugged, amoral, none-too-bright hero as he’s messed with by a sharp-witted woman with a lust for cash. This Martin Scorsese-produced, Stephen Frears-directed black comedy is one of the strongest adaptations of his work. John Cusack plays the lunk in question, a con-man who thinks he can get one over on his own mother, played with delicious savagery by Anjelica Huston. Needless to say, it doesn’t quite pan out.

The killer moment: A dagger-eyed hospital showdown between Huston and Annette Bening (as Cusack’s outrageously oversexed partner in crime) supplies enough fireworks for a shelf of thrillers.

The Coen brothers arrived with this bruised-black noir, a tale of brutality and betrayal in the American Southwest the pair wouldn’t quite duplicate until No Country for Old Men. Frances McDormand, also making her movie debut, is dynamite as a small-town woman whose survival instincts are significantly underestimated by the many gross men out to get her. Speaking of, veteran character actor M Emmet Walsh gets his close-up as a scummy private eye turned hitman, and it’s a performance you can practically smell, from his sweat-soaked cowboy hat to the ratty ’66 Beetle he drives.

The killer moment: Walsh gets stuck (literally) between a window and some drywall.

Hitchcock rated this blackly comic suburban thriller as one of his very best, and who are we to argue? He embroiders it with little details: blink-and-you’ll-miss-it evidence that builds up to a portrait of breathtaking sociopathy in the lady-killing Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten). To his teenage niece – the young, bored, yearning-to-be-elsewhere Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Newton (Teresa Wright) – his visit is a welcome diversion. At least until she realises that he’s actually a cold-blooded murderer.

The killer moment: In his first unguarded moment (a terrifying camera creep), Uncle Charlie shares his real feelings about elderly widows: ‘fat, wheezing animals’.

Louis Malle’s narrative-feature debut is a gorgeously atmospheric crime tale, featuring a score by Miles Davis. Taking place over the course of a single night, this grim story of a murder plan gone awry holds us rapt, thanks in large part to the glamorous yet weary visage of screen legend Jeanne Moreau.

The killer moment: Moreau makes wandering aimlessly thrilling, as she walks the Paris streets at night, calling her lover’s name in a moody, doomed funk.

Italy’s tradition of the giallo thriller – so-called for deriving from yellow-covered pulp novels – is as significant as film noir was to Hollywood: a major evolution of onscreen style linked to a cultural malaise of ennui and free-floating amorality. Inspired director Dario Argento perfected the form with Deep Red, a diabolical killing machine marked by leather-gloved hands (often Argento’s), shiny objects, lavish spurts of blood and the prog-rock tinklings of Goblin.

The killer moment: Oh, so the puppet in Saw scared you? Poor thing. Wait until you see this guy, wheeling out of a dark corner with a canned laugh.

Director John Boorman, had only made one feature – a breezy vehicle for the Dave Clark Five. Actor Lee Marvin, meanwhile, had just won an Oscar for Cat Ballou. The latter believed in the former’s talent, using his star power to support Boorman’s vision: a radical departure for the double-cross thriller in both form and content. Along with Bonnie and Clyde (released only two weeks earlier), Point Blank signals the moment at which Hollywood boldly leapt into sex, violence and a new kind of radically disjointed storytelling.

The killer moment: The granddaddy of hallway scenes has Marvin striding through a nondescript office. His heels echo hypnotically and Boorman takes off, cutting away from the action but never losing that forward momentum.

The simplest of thriller conceits – cops and robbers as two sides of the same coin – is elevated to a showstopping new level in Michael Mann’s loose remake of his own TV pilot, LA Takedown. Helmed by masterful, winningly showy, performances by Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, Mann’s crime epic combines philosophical rumination with OTT machismo (think Pacino’s ‘great ass’ moment) to paint a compelling but bleak picture of life outside the law. This winning combination slings us through each intricate, explosive set-piece to create a crime opus that’s still revered nearly three decades on.

Killing moment: It can only be the quiet, yet loaded diner confrontation between Pacino and De Niro. In contrast to the rest of the movie – a violent game of cat and mouse – this is two lone wolves – and two Corleones – marking their territory over coffee.

A genius orchestrator of meandering conversations, Robert Altman left behind a string of classics, from Nashville and 3 Women to The Player and Gosford Park. But can this shaggy-dog private-eye movie – a delicious perversion of Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel – be Altman’s most lasting achievement? You can see its influence in everything from The Big Lebowski to Inherent Vice, and any L.A. thriller that wends its way into a haze of pot-scented trouble. Elliott Gould’s scuzzy Philip Marlowe, buying cat food in the middle of the night in between solving crimes, is an iconic ’70s creation.

The killer moment: Neurotic gangster Marty Augustine (played by future On Golden Pond director Mark Rydell) brings his beautiful mistress into the room to make a savage point to Marlowe with the help of a Coke bottle: ‘Now that's someone I love! You, I don't even like.’

British acting legend Charles Laughton’s sole film as a director is part grim fairy tale, part adventure and part serial-killer thriller, long before that last term was even invented. Working with cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who shot The Magnificent Ambersons for Orson Welles, Laughton crafted a story of fear and flight steeped in Southern Gothic and Bible allegory, as Robert Mitchum’s murderous preacher – a killer of women (‘Perfume-smellin' things, lacy things, things with curly hair’)–attempts to hunt down two children who hold the secret to a hidden treasure.

The killer moment: Mitchum’s reverend tells us about the story of ‘right hand, left hand, good and evil.’ The monologue was so good, Spike Lee used it for Do the Right Thing.

Alfred Hitchcock plays twisted games with the very concept of decency, as Ingrid Bergman’s desperate daughter of a Nazi scientist is prostituted to the enemy by Cary Grant’s smooth, unflappable government agent – and ends up falling for him anyway. Set in Rio right after the war, ‘Notorious’ is all glamour on the surface, as Bergman and Grant swan through a selection of spectacular aristocratic mansions. But the undertones are grotesque and still challenging: a story of sexual exploitation, murder, manipulation and state-sanctioned cruelty.

The killer moment: People don’t think of ol’ Hitch as a purveyor of erotic work, but this could be the single greatest screen kiss of all time: lusty, lingering, loaded with the unspoken.

On top of a list of brilliantly twisted European thrillers that got really bad Hollywood remakes (Diabolique, Open Your Eyes, etc.), you’d find George Sluizer’s tar-black study of obsession and evil most ordinary. It follows Dutchman Rex (Gene Bervoets) as he tries to uncover the fate of his girlfriend, Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), who disappeared from a rest-stop service station years earlier. The ending is a jaw-dropper.

The killer moment: A psychopath practices his abduction techniques, even going so far as to chloroform an imaginary victim in his passenger seat.

Yes, it’s harder to watch in the wake of recent news regarding both director Bryan Singer and leading man Kevin Spacey, but let’s focus on the film itself. Taking its title from a Casablanca quote, The Usual Suspects blends old-school Hollywood style with a modern playfulness and unpredictability, weaving a web of crime, coincidence and flat-out lies. The cast is phenomenal, from mumbling Benicio del Toro to smooth Gabriel Byrne, spiky Kevin Pollak to ominous Pete Postlethwaite.

The killer moment: ‘Man, you’re a slob,’ one detective tells another, looking over the detritus of a junky office. The shoe is just about to drop.

Moving with the ominous velocity of a freight train, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy stands as an epochal contribution to the genre. A tragedy fuelled by adrenaline – like Shakespeare on steroids – it follows stoic salaryman Oh Dae-su, played by the brilliant Choi Min-sik, as he seeks to uncover the reasons (and people) behind the inexplicable 15-year imprisonment he’s just suffered. Cue a wreaking of terrible vengeance on those that stole his life. Bloody hammers, thug-filled hallways and at least one wriggling octopus spearhead a revenge tale with a body count that goes up … and up. The film’s ending lands like a punch in the solar plexus.

Killer moment: Clutching only a hammer, Dae-su’s brutal beatdown of a horde of thugs in an equally beaten-up hallway is a high-water mark for both movie fight scenes and DIY equipment. 

It’s one of the most perfect plot concepts in action cinema: Four desperate men are hired to drive a pair trucks of highly explosive nitroglycerin across the Amazon rainforest to the site of a raging oil fire. If they make it, they get big money. If they don’t, they’re dust. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s bruising masterpiece takes its time – there’s an awful lot of grim, sweaty negotiation before the trucks start rolling. But as the jungle closes in around them, the clammy hand of fear exerts its grip.

The killer moment: In the blink of an eye, half the cast is wiped out. The rest press on regardless.

The premise itself is a thrill: A jaded photographer (David Hemmings) may have captured a murder in the background. Michelangelo Antonioni’s reality-altering ‘Swinging London’ yarn is a scrupulously composed slow-burn of eye-popping mod fashions, mischievous nudity and a smashing Yardbirds cameo. Bonus: The art-house sensation helped instigate an era of serious stateside moviemaking with European sensibilities, prompting today’s ratings system.

The killer moment: Come for the murder, stay for the greatest mime scene in film history: a tennis game with an imaginary ball.

Many thrillers are beloved; some have become classics. But only one can claim to have kicked off a five-decade-and-counting spy franchise grossing billions of dollars worldwide. Ground Zero for the James Bond phenomenon, Dr No explodes out of the chamber with casual Rat Pack insouciance, brutal action and Ursula Andress in a bikini. Sean Connery holds it all together with scowling attitude; his future installments would perfect the formula but there’s simply no devaluing the first outing, a culture-changing effort.

The killer moment: So hard to pick. Is it our first sight of those gun-barrel opening credits? The first use of the twangy guitar theme? We like Connery’s lazy line delivery at the baccarat table: ‘Bond, James Bond.’

Sidney Lumet’s NYC crime thriller was revolutionary in its day for its matter-of-fact representation of marriage equality and a supportive stance on trans rights. It follows the true account of an attempted bank robbery on a red-hot summer day. With uncompromising tension and flashes of humour, it also examines the ever-exploitative American media that loves a good circus.

The killer moment: ‘Attica! Attica!’ In the infamous scene, Al Pacino leads a riot outside of the bank, delivering one of his fiercest onscreen outbursts.

Alfred Hitchcock’s housebound thriller took on fresh relatability at the height of the pandemic: after all, few of us had anything better to do than stare out the window and get a little too invested in the lives of our neighbours. James Stewart is a New York photojournalist laid up in his Greenwich Village apartment with a leg injury. As he spends his days peering across the courtyard, he becomes convinced one of his fellow residents has committed a horrific crime, and enlists his girlfriend, Grace Kelly, to help investigate. Big mistake. Hitchcock had staged claustrophobic mysteries before – see 1948’s Rope – but pound for pound, this might be his greatest achievement as cinema’s ‘master of suspense’: a movie that manages to induce stomach-knotting levels of tension while staying in essentially one place. You’ll recognise the feeling.

The killer moment: Grace Kelly gets caught snooping around the suspected killer’s apartment – and all James Stewart can do is watch.

Calling Blue Velvet a thriller is like calling the Mona Lisa a portrait: It’s 100 percent true but hardly the whole story. Fueled by coffee, hamburgers and transcendental meditation, David Lynch crafted one of the 1980’s true masterpieces, a haunted cruise into a netherworld of desperate damsels, corrupt cops, underworld crooners and well-dressed fuckin’ men. Impossible to describe, harder still to fully comprehend, it’s more nightmare than film.

The killer moment: Dean Stockwell leans into the light and brings the Roy Orbison-scored menace: ‘A candy-colored clown they call the sandman tiptoes to my room every night…’

This Raymond Chandler adaptation may be best known for being almost impossible to follow, but that doesn’t make it any less potent. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall bring their legendary charisma to a convoluted tale of criminality filled with noir intrigue. Co-written by William Faulkner and featuring much pervy evasion of contemporary production codes, Howard Hawks’s classic is truly the kind of thriller they don’t make anymore.

The killer moment: A sexually charged bookstore encounter between Bogart and a bespectacled clerk (the unforgettable Dorothy Malone) is just as invigorating as any of the wider mysteries presented elsewhere.

Film noir comes to France (the country that first invented the term for a specific kind of Hollywood thriller), as blacklisted American director Jules Dassin turns out a flawless Paris-shot thriller on a budget of about ten centimes. Rififi laid out the ground rules for the heist movie: a mismatched gang, an intricate plan, a grindingly tense break-in and, of course, a disastrous final act in which it all falls apart.

The killer moment: It’s the single best heist sequence in movie history – so convincing, it actually inspired a series of copycat crimes.

Stanley Kubrick’s racetrack heist movie helped inspire a swathe of crime flicks – not least Reservoir Dogs – and it still stands up as a sharp-edged morality tale elevated by unorthodox structure, amoral characters and a third act that twists like a drunk blackjack player. Sterling Hayden, ever the embodiment of the stand-up guy gone to seed, is the meticulous robber who has thought of everything, except for the one variable that’s going to bring the whole scheme crashing down.

Killer moment: What’s that tiny dog doing on the tarmac? An accident results in the most expensive baggage-check fee ever levied.

Released between the twin giants of The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, Francis Ford Coppola’s relatively small and quiet character study remains largely overlooked, but it is a highlight not just of Coppola’s career, but the entire era. That’s due in large part to Gene Hackman’s emotionally walled-off yet deeply compelling lead performance as Harry Caul, a private surveillance expert who knows better than anyone that the concept of privacy in the modern world is illusory. Plagued by guilt over his chosen profession, he’s driven to paranoid self-destruction after capturing what he believes to be a murder confession on tape. While it scanned as a Watergate allegory at the time, it’s just as relevant in the modern era of doorbell cameras, smart devices and targeted advertising.

The killer moment: After tearing his apartment apart in search of a bug, Caul sits alone in the wreckage, playing a mournful saxophone.

Staple anxieties of classic ’50s noir often get rebooted for contemporary audiences. But Curtis Hanson’s genre homage dared something even grander by going back to the source and recreating the bloody era itself, in an immaculately shot saga of knee-deep Tinseltown corruption. It’s a deceptive labyrinth of self-serving cops, movie-star wannabes and one priceless Lana Turner cameo; Hanson does the films that came before him proud.

The killer moment: Guy Pearce’s straight-laced sergeant earns his nickname, Shotgun Ed, at a cost while pursuing a murder suspect.

Fear of Soviet domination may have engulfed America in the early 1950s but in Hollywood, things weren’t so simple. In the wake of the Joseph McCarthy hearings, filmmakers knew they had just as much to fear from their own government as they did from some shady foreign power. The Manchurian Candidate is the clearest expression of that anxiety, a razor-sharp study in manipulation filmed in stark monochrome, a paradox for a movie in which nothing is black and white.

The killer moment: Suddenly we realise that lovely Angela Lansbury isn’t just playing a domineering mom, but a ruthless monster.

Here's the pivot point for David Fincher – the inflection at which he transitioned from being a maker of super-stylish Madonna videos into something more substantial. Seven certainly delivers a signature gloom, from those powerhouse opening credits to its rainy urban hellscape. But beyond the gloss, the movie feels as subversive as a Fritz Lang thriller, indicting the police as thoroughly as it does its moralising serial killer. Andrew Kevin Walker's script contrasts theoretical bookishness with impulsive action, but Fincher's genius is to show those modes for what they really are: survival strategies that only get you so far. 

The killer moment: The sloth victim traumatised us, but the movie's small piece of immortality happens in the desert, where the tables are turned: ‘What's in the box?’

An agitated sociopath gains access to a firearm and decides to make America great again. Sound familiar? Nearly 50 years later, Martin Scorsese’s masterful portrait of alienation and male delusion still manages to shock and disturb – in fact, it’s probably more shocking and disturbing now than it was then. It’s certainly just as relevant: you could be sure that if Robert De Niro’s Vietnam vet-turned-vigilante antihero Travis Bickle existed today, he would definitely have turned up inside the Capitol Building on January 6.

The killer moment: while preparing for a rampage, Bickle confronts his own reflection in a mirror and asks the immortal question: ‘You talkin’ to me?’

David Lynch’s uncrackable masterpiece meets at the intersection of Hollywood dreams and dream logic. In Lynch’s crazy-quilt Tinsel Town, anything can be lurking around the corner, be it a grime-caked urban ghoul, mysterious puppetmasters in cowboy hats, splintered realities, hapless gangsters or a cuckolding Billy Ray Cyrus. Mulholland Drive’s legacy will always be its lucidity, but in all the conversations about what the hell it means, people tend to lose track of the fact that it thrills from beginning to end: it’s a puzzle box with no answers that still functions as a masterful noir, a compelling mystery and an ethereal horror yarn.

The killer moment: Winkie’s Diner hides the film’s most jarring moment, but the Club Silencio sequence is an uncut bump of pure Lynch so deliriously callibrated you can practically feel the director yanking at the rug beneath your feet.

Often regarded as cinema’s greatest achievement, Vertigo presents the peak of Hitchcock’s psychosexual fixations in gloriously shot Technicolor. Playing Judy Barton – or is it Madeleine Elster? – Kim Novak personifies twisty femininity. Jimmy Stewart’s ‘Scottie’ Ferguson, an ex-detective increasingly consumed by her, is a perfect subversion of the actor’s wholesome image.

The killer moment: Writhing in his sheets, Scottie plunges into a wordless, psychedelic nightmare: an unforgettable jolt of creepy graveyard shots, wild colours, Bernard Herrmann’s seesawing score and Stewart’s disembodied head.

When people say ‘they don’t make ‘em like they used to’, they’re mainly talking about The Fugitive, a blockbuster murder-mystery set on a big canvas that boasts sophisticated character work, complex motivations and action-movie thrills. Headlining it all, of course, is Harrison Ford as Dr Richard Kimble, who is framed for the murder of his own wife, only to escape while in transit to prison. Ford brings a stewing rage to this ’80s reprise of the Wrong Man archetype, while a perfectly cast and Oscar-winning Tommy Lee Jones plays the unblinking, relentless cop on his trail – and delivers that much-imitated ‘hen house’ monologue). Nowadays, its more outlandish turns would be delivered with a knowing wink (and Kimble’s protests that ‘a one-armed man’ killed his wife would launch a thousand memes), but it works so well because of its sincerity. It’s Hitchcock with a straight face. 

The killer moment: Gerard finally has Kimble cornered, where his choices are to either surrender or take his chances plunging into the raging water flowing off a massive dam. If you don’t know what happens next, you didn’t grow up in the ’90s.

Film noir's most unsettling nightmare ends in a flaming nuclear disaster – and if that anxiety weren't enough, there's also off-screen torture, ferocious desk-clerk slapping and the casual destruction of a beloved opera record. Robert Aldrich's perverse masterpiece brings Mickey Spillane's vicious Mike Hammer (a grinning Ralph Meeker) to life: a vain bottom feeder prone to using his fists. He's the sourest of antiheroes. Los Angeles has made him that way.

The killer moment: ‘I want half,’ Lily Carver demands, wielding a gun. Soon enough, she's hovering over the most influential suitcase in movies (see also Pulp Fiction and Repo Man), one she can't help but open.

Scraping up against the limits of knowability, David Fincher's mind-blowing crime thriller targets the truth itself as a serial killer's final victim. Zodiac is the definitive movie of its troubled decade, showing us good men thwarted by the elusive spirit of a murderous ghost. The real-life exploits of California’s Zodiac Killer haunted Fincher as a child; his film is an expression of obsession, onscreen and off.

The killer moment: We're seated in a break room with a creep who's full of unsettling excuses (the ominous John Carroll Lynch). His watch has the killer's target symbol on it, but that's not enough for these cops to pounce. ‘I am not the Zodiac,’ he says. ‘And if I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.’

Film noir doesn’t get more iconic than Billy Wilder’s tale of an insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray) roped into a devious scheme by a femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck) intent on murdering her husband. To watch the film, with its shadows and Stanwyck’s swaggering seduction, is to lose oneself in a gritty and mysterious world that has influenced countless movies since.

The killer moment: In a brightly lit Los Angeles supermarket aisle that’s suddenly ominous, Stanwyck purrs, ‘It’s straight down the line for both of us,’ setting the template for women up to no good.

A creepy boarding school, a monstrous headmaster, his quietly fed-up wife, another disgruntled lover – thrillers rarely come better stocked for suspense. France’s own Alfred Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot, subversively teams up the timid spouse (Véra Clouzot, the director's wife, playing a plain Jane in braids) with the hedonistic mistress (Simone Signoret, sporting a contrastingly provocative look) for a vengeful murder scheme against their common enemy. Clouzot uses every device at his disposal: eerie corridors, grimy swimming pools, ear-splitting kids. The result is a truly scary thriller that influenced Psycho. Clouzot’s fiendish nail-biter climaxes with such a domino chain of reversals, it even had a title card at the end asking the audience to not spoil the film for others. Don’t expect to know who’s deceiving whom until the last frame.

The killer moment: Unforgettably, the headmaster’s white-eyed corpse rises up above the surface of a bath – but not as the ladies planned.

John Huston’s magnificent adaption of Dashiell Hammett’s noir has so much going for it, it’s hard to know which parts to praise first: The plotting is drum-tight; the villains are indelibly slippery (especially Sydney Greenstreet’s ‘Fat Man’ and Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo); Mary Astor’s femme fatale is a sexy, amoral joy; and the titular MacGuffin, a black statuette, is so iconic, the prop itself fetched $4 million at auction. (That’s a lot for a 12-inch bird that was once dropped on Humphrey Bogart’s foot during shooting.) How about the hero, then? Sam Spade is everything you want from a noir gumshoe: whip-smart, hard-bitten, cocky and unfazed by that pea-shooter you’ve got pointed at him. It’s not even that he’s a particularly good guy, it’s that everyone else around him is so much worse. Bogie’s Spade was the embodiment of a new kind of Hollywood protagonist to emerge during the war years: a man who can slip from heroism to obnoxiousness and back again, all during the same slug of whisky.

The killer moment: ‘What is it?’ a detective asks of the falcon. Spade answers, immortally: ‘The stuff that dreams are made of.’

Robert Towne once raved that ‘all contemporary escapist entertainment begins with The 39 Steps’ – and as the man who wrote Chinatown, he’d definitely know what he’s talking about. The magic in this endlessly re-enjoyable Hitchcock effort, an early blueprint for Hitch classics to come, comes via its fine balance between the looming menace and frothy sense of fun. The Master knew how to make his stars’ chemistry work to counterbalance the deathly predicaments he placed them in, and he rarely found a more perfect squabbling-flirting double act than Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll.

The killer moment: When the respectable Professor Jordan shows Hannay that part of his finger is missing, revealing that he’s an enemy agent and that Hannay is properly up the loch without a paddle.

Set in a troubled America that hides an undercurrent of violence under its skin, Jonathan Demme’s taut serial-killer procedural borders on Grand Guignol horror. Unconventionally finding its saviour in the shoes of a female law enforcer – FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster, blending strength and vulnerability) – The Silence of the Lambs divides its terrors between grotesque moths, a blood-curdling butcher of women and the cannibalistic Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a nightmarishly manipulative collaborator with a taste for liver and fava beans. Featuring exceptional cross-cutting leading up to its grand finale (a twisty reveal sends shivers down your spine), Lambs is one of the greatest movies of the ’90s, and the rare thriller to be recognised at the Oscars in a major way.

The killer moment: Using night vision, Buffalo Bill pursues Clarice in the dark. In the seconds that follow, no one dares to breathe.

Famously, Orson Welles’s involvement in this magnificently sleazy borderlands crime flick was meant to be strictly in front of the camera: he was hired to play Hank Quinlan, the grotesque corrupt sheriff, and nothing more. It was star Charlton Heston who lobbied for Welles to be handed the directorial reins, and who backed him – at least initially – against interference by the studio, Universal. The result was an impossibly rich Welles movie that could be held up to Citizen Kane: a brutal, explicitly sexual crime story; a satire on race and prejudice; a sad-eyed lament for wild pre-conformist America; and one of the most gorgeously directed films of all time – even the dialogue scenes play like ballet. Not that Universal noticed. They eventually recut the film against Welles’s wishes. It’s only in the past two decades that we’ve been able to appreciate this masterpiece nearly as its creator intended.

The killer moment: The legendary opening tracking shot – an uninterrupted three-and-a-half-minutes following a bomb’s delivery in a car trunk – is the obvious choice (and the correct one).

Nothing about Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough was exactly new: the suits were pure Rat Pack, the dialogue was Scorsese intensified and even the plot was lifted from a Hong Kong crime flick called City on Fire. But like household ingredients blended to make a bomb, the result was incendiary. Reservoir Dogs changed cinema, and we’re still dealing with the aftershocks (see the smooth criminals of Baby Driver or the entire career of Three Billboards director Martin McDonagh for evidence). But even if none of that were true, it’s still such a joyful film to experience and re-experience: every line crackles like electricity, every performance is punchy perfection and every shot feels like a bracing bucket of water in the face. Tarantino hasn’t come close to it since – but neither has anyone else.

The killer moment: Too many to mention, but the off-camera ear-slicing scene set to the peppy ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ will go down in history.

Set in a post-World War II Vienna filled with canted angles and stark shadows, The Third Man is expressionist perfection. Orson Welles’ performance as Harry Lime – thought to be dead by his childhood friend, Holly (Joseph Cotten), a down-and-out novelist, only to make a dramatic return – is one of cinema’s best. Welles swaggers through the film with cool self-assurance and delivers many an iconic line in his famous baritone. Faking one’s death is, of course, a risky proposition, and it’s challenging to present it believably. Director Carol Reed invests us totally in Lime’s fate, thrilling us with every plot twist. After watching this utterly engaging film, you’ll never look at tunnels or Ferris wheels (or hear zither music) the same way again.

The killer moment: After riding the wheel, Welles makes his famous quip (ad-libbed on the day), comparing violent Italy under the Borgias with peace-loving Switzerland. ‘And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’

The absolute zenith of New Hollywood's 1970s-era adventurousness (it was all downhill from here), Roman Polanski's majestic conspiracy thriller is the ultimate L.A. movie, locating seediness under the sun – even in the water. Robert Towne's well-researched screenplay about land grabs, murder and one ‘nosy fellow’ remains the gold standard for aspiring writers hoping to grab a whiff of sociocultural currency; watching Chinatown is, for some Angelenos, like learning that you live in a stolen paradise, or hell itself. But for all the movie's substance, it took a rascally Jack Nicholson, an absorbingly skittish Faye Dunaway, a fearsome John Huston and Polanski himself (working at the peak of his powers) to sock it over on audiences. The movie shimmers like a '30s period romance but its veins pump black bile: a toxic masterpiece.

The killer moment: A withering Noah Cross makes his sole priority clear to our hero: ‘The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!’

Several real-life child murderers, cannibals and serial killers – their nicknames are grisly enough: the Butcher of Hanover, the Vampire of Düsseldorf – terrorised Germany in the 1920s. Berlin's most moneyed and celebrated director, Fritz Lang, was drawn to the subject, which would become the spine of his first sound film, in many ways the commercial birth of the modern psychothriller. M is cinema's darkest landmark: a portrait of awful appetites that was revolutionary for also being an oblique mirror on society at large. (Filmed under the working title Murderer Among Us, Nazi party members refused Lang studio space.) The movie is immortal for Peter Lorre's career-defining performance as Hans Beckert, trapped by sweaty urges and a dragnet of cops and mobsters. Lang also turned Edvard Grieg's ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ – whistled by Beckert, but not Lorre, who couldn't whistle – into an instant signature of aural menace.

The killer moment: In front of a wanted poster, a dark silhouette appears. Leaning down, Beckert lures a child into conversation: ‘What a pretty ball you have there.’

If there’s a thriller out there more exhilarating, sexier or packed with iconic moments than this one, we’ve yet to see it. The greatest joy in Alfred Hitchcock’s spy caper is how effortless it all feels: a gliding magic-carpet ride from New York to Mount Rushmore, via Chicago and a Midwestern bus stop, as Cary Grant’s ad man suffers a potentially fatal outbreak of Wrong Man-itis. Of course, making a movie this effortless is hard work. It’s all a tribute to Hitch and his ensemble of behind-the-camera talents, including screenwriter Ernest Lehman, Saul Bass (designer of the iconic title sequence) and Bernard Herrmann, whose score lends menace and levity in equal measure. And the cast? Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau and Jessie Royce Landis – heroes, villains and worried mothers, they’re all having a ball. But it’s Grant’s movie: a Hollywood A-lister happy to be the punchline when the scene calls for it.

The killer moment: It has to be the crop-duster sequence, which begins like a Western standoff and ends with the suavest man in cinema face down in the dirt.