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The headline was hyperbolic. There are good thrillers made today. How’s that for keeping you on your toes, thriller-style? Anyway, whether those more modern-day thrillers hold up or become classics is obviously a little harder to ascertain, but things are looking promising – one would assume – for the likes of Sinners, Anatomy of a Fall, Uncut Gems, and Mission: Impossible – Fallout, all of them having been released within the last decade, at the time of writing.
But the best thrillers of the 1990s have already proven capable of standing the test of time, so if they’re “classics” while more recent films can technically only be “probable classics” for now, and then if you squint a bit and don’t think about things too much, then yeah, the ones from the ‘90s are sort of better. Or just more established. Watch these movies; that’s the main thing. And if you’ve seen them already (most of these are well-known heavy-hitters), then maybe watch them again, because a bunch of them are very easy to revisit.
10
‘Fight Club’ (1999)
One of those cult classics that was so beloved and (eventually) popular that it’s more just a classic nowadays, rather than one of the cult variety, Fight Club is somewhat infamous and controversial, but also weirdly approachable and kind of enjoyable. Or maybe “engaging” is a better word than “enjoyable,” since it’s a psychological thriller and a dark/unsettling drama more than it is a comedy (albeit some of it is pretty funny).
It can be summarized very broadly as a movie about a boring guy meeting a not-so-boring guy, and then they start an underground fight club together, and things proceed to get very messy. There are various surprising things that happen throughout Fight Club, though where it goes eventually is legendary and potentially the sort of thing that’ll be spoiled to most people watching it for the first time in the 2020s… but you should still watch it, regardless. Knowing where things end up and then watching them get there is a different sort of thrilling than being outright shocked/surprised, after all.
9
‘The Insider’ (1999)
It was tempting to include Heat here, but that masterpiece by Michael Mann doesn’t tend to get labeled as a thriller, even though it is thrilling (on Wikipedia, Letterboxd, and IMDb, the main genres listed are crime, drama, and action). So, The Insider is going here instead, and it was also directed by Mann in the 1990s, while being called a thriller, according to more sources.
The Insider is also a biographical movie of sorts, and far from dry or stuffy in the way you might expect certain movies based on real-life events/people to be. It’s about as tense as movies about journalism and whistleblowing get, honestly being up there alongside All the President’s Men in terms of the all-time great movies within that kind of thriller sub-genre.
8
‘The Crow’ (1994)
On the other end of things to something like The Insider is The Crow, because even though both movies can be defined as thrillers, The Crow is also a supernatural action/borderline-superhero movie at the same time as it’s a thriller. It’s about a man who’s brought back from the dead as a seemingly invincible being motivated purely by vengeance, as both he and his fiancée were murdered before the start of the main events of the film (they only appear “alive” during some flashbacks).
It’s a sometimes moving film, and also an exciting one, while the aggressiveness of the ‘90s aesthetics here also makes it feel appropriate to shout out The Crow for present purposes. It’s about as ‘90s as the 1983 version of Scarface is ‘80s in nature, but the approach works, and it’s all carried off well on a stylistic front. And, just as importantly, it is a movie that’s pretty easy to get swept up in emotionally.
7
‘Misery’ (1990)
Partly thanks to being based on one of Stephen King’s best books, Misery is incredibly riveting as a bottle movie; like, one that’s mostly set in a single location and doesn’t have too many characters in it. The term “bottle episode” is more widely used, within the TV sphere, but if you look at the characteristics of a bottle episode, then such characteristics can be identified in certain movies.
There’s a lot done with a little throughout Misery, and it’s always been impressive how thrilling it stays throughout, despite mostly just being about an author getting held captive by an obsessed fan. Much of it feels timelessly grim, intense, and also bleakly funny (at least at times), so considering how well it’s aged in more than three and a half decades, it doesn’t feel like Misery will stop working so brutally well as a thriller any time soon.
6
‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999)
Stanley Kubrick went out on a high note, with Eyes Wide Shut, and while it would’ve obviously been amazing to have more films made by him, a fitting swan song – intended or otherwise – isn’t something a great many directors get. This one feels quite different from all his other films, and yet it’s very Kubrickian (if that’s a phrase one’s allowed to use) in some regards, and does feel unmistakably “him.”
Eyes Wide Shut is also heavy on mystery, given it’s about one man in a strained relationship becoming curious about his wife’s potential infidelity, and then making a series of alarming discoveries while sticking his nose into places he probably shouldn’t. That’s both oversimplifying and underselling the film, but that’s all you need to know going in, and it succeeds as more of an unsettling thriller the less you come to feel sure about anything going on throughout, really.
5
‘The Fugitive’ (1993)
All the suspense that could possibly be extracted from a movie about a man on the run who has to prove his innocence was indeed extracted by The Fugitive. The stakes are undeniably high throughout, since the main character’s been found guilty of murdering his wife, and is himself sentenced to death, only to escape from custody and then be the target of an extensive manhunt.
The Fugitive does feel indebted to certain Alfred Hitchcock movies, in some ways, though it’s more accurately an adaptation of the TV series of the same name, and that TV series was loosely based on a real-life case, so it’s not explicitly Hitchcockian. There’s also a main dynamic between the two main characters throughout The Fugitive that keeps it engrossing, as both Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones (as the protagonist and antagonist, respectively) are at their respective bests here.
4
‘Fargo’ (1996)
Just over a decade before they made one of the heaviest Westerns of all time, the Coen Brothers made Fargo, which is one of the best thrillers not just of its decade, but possibly of all time. Everything’s simple and satisfying here, especially on a screenplay front, because Fargo works as a black comedy, a crime movie, a drama, and a thriller all at once, and it does all those things genre-wise within a runtime that clocks in at less than 100 minutes.
Beyond the writing and direction, it’s also hard to fault the casting and acting in Fargo, and it really says something about how good the Coen Brothers are that this one’s not “clearly” their best movie (like, it has some competition from the previously alluded-to No Country for Old Men, as well as The Big Lebowski and, arguably, Inside Llewyn Davis, too).
3
‘Se7en’ (1995)
Se7en was, like Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, and it was the movie that made him someone to keep one’s eye on (Alien 3 pre-dated both, but its quality wasn’t quite on the same level). Se7en’s probably even darker and more emotionally intense than Fight Club, since it’s about the hunt for an especially persistent and eerily ahead-of-the-curve serial killer who’s murdering people and basing each murder on one of the seven deadly sins.
Laying it out like that might make Se7en sound a bit gimmicky, but being a bit gimmicky is not a problem this movie ultimately has, seeing as it pretty much has no problems in the first place. It’s almost as good as a “hunt for a serial killer” movie can be, and there’s really only one other semi-horror-tinged crime/thriller film of the decade that’s potentially even a tiny bit better.
2
‘L.A. Confidential’ (1997)
Adapting the work of James Ellroy to the big screen is a far from easy task, but if you’re not Ellroy himself, you can probably appreciate how well it was done with L.A. Confidential. This is an excellently executed neo-noir movie that feels like an evolution of classic film noir in so many ways, including going one extra step beyond the sorts of complex and morally challenging stories those older films already had.
L.A. Confidential works as a crime and mystery film, of course, but it’s also an amazingly thrilling watch.
To break it down as simply as possible, there are a few different people investigating a few different murders in L.A. Confidential, and then in typical noir fashion, everything becomes so much more complicated than initially seemed. It works as a crime and mystery film, of course, but it’s also an amazingly thrilling watch, and the way it stays so layered, unpredictable, and (somehow) coherent all at once does have to be seen to be believed.
1
‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)
Like with The Fugitive, The Silence of the Lambs has a very dependable premise that might sound a bit straightforward on paper, yet the execution elevates it and makes it all much more special than you might expect. It’s essentially a movie about the hunt for a serial killer at large, and the lengths one young FBI agent in training goes to in order to find said killer.
Those lengths involve striking up a strange dynamic with an already-imprisoned serial killer, and for as exciting as the eventual climax is, it’s probably the conversations between the two main characters on opposite sides of the law that prove most thrilling in The Silence of the Lambs. Otherwise, you know the deal with this one. Everyone loves it and has had almost nothing but good things to say about it for three and a half decades now. Of course it earns the top spot here.
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https://collider.com/90s-thrillers-that-hold-up-better-than-movies-today/
Jeremy Urquhart
Almontather Rassoul
