![]() ![]() (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. ![]() M is cinema's darkest landmark: a portrait of awful appetites that was revolutionary for also being an oblique mirror on society at large. ![]() 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. 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. 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. But it’s Grant’s movie: a Hollywood A-lister happy to be the punchline when the scene calls for it. 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. 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. Of course, making a movie this effortless is hard work. ![]() 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. 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 60 most nerve-racking heist movies ever □ The 20 best thriller movies on Netflix □️ The 35 steamiest erotic thrillers ever made Written by A bbey Bender, Joshua Rothkopf, Phil de Semlyen, Tom Huddleston, Andy Kryza, Tomris Laffly & Matthew Singer But the best of them will draw you in, steal your breath, leave your head spinning. Clearly, the thriller contains multitudes. Under the thriller umbrella, you’ll find political conspiracies, murder mysteries, explosive and quietly tense psychological dramas – and, of course, lots and lots of crime. How they initiate that response, however, varies widely. You can be sure the greatest thriller movies do it right. Next to horror, it’s the most physical of all film genres, one that, when done right, prompts a visceral response unlike any other. In your teeth as you grind down the enamel and your leg that won’t stop involuntarily shaking. A thriller can be hard to define, but you know one when you see one – or rather, when you feel one. ![]()
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