Mystery cinema earns its keep by making the audience complicit: you piece together clues alongside the detective, or realise too late you were misreading everything. Hitchcock understood this better than anyone, and films like Rear Window and Vertigo remain the genre's gold standard for psychological unease done with precision. Browse Macca's reviews below and see how well the best mysteries hold up.
Rating: 4.0★
Nobody has ever worn their Hitchcock influence quite as proudly, or as quite as well, as Brian De Palma, and Blow Out is one of the films that earns him the comparison outright. He is one of my favourite directors, full stop, so I came to this already predisposed to
Rating: 2.5★
If you've seen Ari Aster's Midsommar, you've already met the ghost of Picnic at Hanging Rock, whether you realised it or not. Peter Weir's 1975 film, one of the most revered things Australian cinema has produced, is the clear ancestor of that
Rating: 3.5★
Few things in a thriller satisfy quite like being unable to guess what comes next, and A Tale of Two Sisters kept me wrong-footed almost the whole way through. I'd settle into what felt like a firm theory, the pieces seeming to click into place, and then
Rating: 3.5★
I came to The Maze Runner with my expectations set firmly to low. It sits on Letterboxd's "Top 250 Most Fans" list, which in my experience is often code for popular rather than good, and I had it filed away under interchangeable young-adult blockbuster, the
Rating: 1.5★
There is a special circle of cinema reserved for the truly botched video-game adaptation, and its patron saint is Uwe Boll, the man who gave us the immortal catastrophe of House of the Dead, still one of the worst films I have ever sat through. I bring him up
Rating: 3.5★
They Cloned Tyrone announces itself as one of those films that refuses to sit still in a single genre, and for a good while that is exactly what makes it such fun. Juel Taylor's debut opens as an atmospheric, darkly comic crime picture set in a rundown neighbourhood,
Rating: 3.5★
There is a deeply unsettling genius to the way David Robert Mitchell frames a suburban street. The camera slowly, deliberately pans across wide-angle shots of empty neighbourhoods, and suddenly you find your eyes darting frantically around the screen, hunting for that next dull-eyed figure casually walking towards the
Rating: 3.0★
Rachel Sennott made me queue this up. Simple as that. After being completely won over by her in Shiva Baby and Bottoms, I knew she was one of the most exciting young comic performers working right now, and I wasn't about to let a slasher-comedy with her
Rating: 3.5★
Sometimes you don't need much of an excuse to queue something up. I came to Dario Argento's 1970 directorial debut for two reasons: Argento himself, and Ennio Morricone. And honestly, Morricone was the more pressing of the two. I genuinely consider him the finest composer in
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment in The Secret of NIMH where you catch yourself leaning forward, genuinely unsettled, and then you remember this is supposed to be a Saturday afternoon film for kids. That tension, that slight discomfort at how dark and serious everything feels, is really the whole story
Rating: 1.5★
When you sit down to watch what is supposedly a horror film shot in the Northern Mariana Islands, you go in ready to make allowances. It's an unusual origin for a genre picture, and part of you wants to root for it on that basis alone. I did.
Rating: 3.5★
The first thing that'll either hook you or drive you absolutely mad is the camera work. Fernando Meirelles shoots this with a deliberately restless, almost chaotic energy, and I know plenty of critics have knocked the skewed angles and hyper-stylised framing, dismissing them as distracting or overly
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