Mystery
Noah’s Barks pages relating to the mystery genre.
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Dark City
Dark City starts out so good, the kind of nuclear neo-noir it needed to be to breathe life into the genre. But what starts as an atmospheric, slightly surreal mystery story progresses into larger-than-life action about psychics and aliens. It’s a fucking obnoxious mess made more so by Kiefer Sutherland’s absurd overacting. “Sway” and “The… (read more)
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Eden of the East
‘Eden of the East’ asks game participants how they would spend 10 billion yen. At the very least, you shouldn’t need that much to make a better-written anime than this. (read more)
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Spider
A technical masterwork that ranks among one of David Cronenberg’s most intricately plotted, with visual storytelling and essential symbolism. Spider‘s web falls apart when the technical side never gets to completely eclipse with the screenplay. Every scene is a slow dance to a point realized two steps in. The thriller format proves to be poor… (read more)
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Blow-Up
Is Blow-Up a historical representation of the Mod scene? A satirical criticism? The answer matters less than anything that happens in this film. The Mod vanities are quickly redundant, very weak, and fail to make this supposedly attractive pull of no responsibility sympathetic. And yet, for all of this empty hedonism, 10 minutes focused on… (read more)
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The Usual Suspects
Just knowing there’s a twist is bad enough. Why can’t people just keep their damn mouths shut? After all, The Usual Suspects is a lesson in such. Thanks to some very impressive editing, the exposition itself feels like the action. Which is good because that’s most of the movie. While the ending is indeed great,… (read more)
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12 Monkeys
Sci-fi stories about the futility of attempting to change the past are nothing fresh, but 12 Monkeys dresses its thought experiment up in a moebius strip story and a tech-noir thriller atmosphere. In spite of this, the diffident screenwriters view their own ideas as lunacy and introduce tasteless comedy while taking the easy ways out… (read more)
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Shutter Island
It’s a dark day when you see a Martin Scorsese movie that relies on jump scares. Every time the score of Shutter Island score got quiet I turned the volume down immediately to avoid damaging my ear drums. Pronouncing the twist in a mystery movie so obviously is baffling, but there’s really no defending it… (read more)
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Eastern Promises
Eastern Promises finds new water in the gangster movie well by focusing on a new corner. Italians are no longer the focus here but instead Russians, and Eastern Promises finds an incredibly engaging medium between their fascinating culture and a mystery. This immediate hook allows for the film to unfold at a natural pace where… (read more)
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Frantic
Frantic is one of Polanski‘s first steps out of the darkness of his early work. From despair to mere cynicism. In what’s one of the director’s most Hitchcockian suspense tales, the nerdy side of Ford must unite with the naughty Seigner on an initially intriguing but quickly standard mystery. The plot lacks a sense of… (read more)
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Tenebre
Tenebre is the most thoroughly competent Dario Argento film I’ve ever seen. That is to say, it’s one of the dullest. Argento usually finds success in absurdity, so he never really grasps it in this straightforward murder mystery. The killings are full of gore but generic slashings and stabbings, and the mystery isn’t very enthralling… (read more)