A good first date film gives you something to talk about without making you explain yourself. It should open a conversation, not close one down.
In retrospect, the 2010s were a decade of quiet excellence - films doing serious work without demanding credit for it.
Mystery cinema works because it turns passive watching into active thinking. Every frame is a question.
A mysterious new villain known only as Hush uses a gallery of villains to destroy Batman's crime-fighting career as well as Bruce Wayne's personal life, which has been further complicated by a relationship with Selina Kyle/Catwoman.
Several friends travel to Sweden to study as anthropologists a summer festival that is held every ninety years in the remote hometown of one of them. What begins as a dream vacation in a place where the sun never sets, gradually turns into a dark nightmare as the mysterious inhabitants invite them to participate in their disturbing festive activities.
In a world where families are limited to one child due to overpopulation, a set of identical septuplets must avoid being put to a long sleep by the government and dangerous infighting while investigating the disappearance of one of their own.
There is a new criminal mastermind at large (Professor Moriarty) and not only is he Holmes' intellectual equal, but his capacity for evil and lack of conscience may give him an advantage over the detective.
Professor James Murray begins work compiling words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the mid 19th century, and receives over 10,000 entries from a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dr. William Minor.
The films here work because they respect the audience. Every clue is planted. Every reveal is earned. Nothing is arbitrary.
After trying to cover up a car accident that left a man dead, a crooked homicide detective is stalked by a mysterious man claiming to have witnessed the event.
Set in Brazil, three kids who make a discovery in a garbage dump soon find themselves running from the cops and trying to right a terrible wrong.
Denmark, 2013. Police officers Carl Mørck and Hafez el-Assad, sole members of Department Q, which is focused on closing cold cases, investigate the disappearance of politician Merete Lynggaard, vanished when she and her brother were traveling aboard a ferry five years ago.
The Spanish Deep South, 1980. A series of brutal murders of adolescent girls in a remote and forgotten town bring together two disparate characters - both detectives in the homicide division - to investigate the cases.
Dr. Steven Murphy is a renowned cardiovascular surgeon who presides over a spotless household with his wife and two children. Lurking at the margins of his idyllic suburban existence is Martin, a fatherless teen who insinuates himself into the doctor's life in gradually unsettling ways.
Great films that make you cry do so because they've made you care. By the time the emotion lands, you're not surprised - you're just not ready for it.
Great mystery cinema changes how you watch everything else. You start looking for the clues in every story.