It is clear, as we look forward to this autumn’s new films, that a crimewave of sorts is happening. Whether cosy or brutal, true-crime-ish or fictional, filled with forensic crime scenes and hazmat-suited people shuffling out of despoiled apartments, or with twinkly-eyed character actors sampling cake and making coppers look like chumps, or with stylish lone women menaced by a criminal mystery that only they can solve … crime is everywhere, and showing it’s a solid bet at the movies.
True crime and cold crime podcast fanciers are being catered for, and lovers of genteel murder mysteries, and those who might enjoy a sophisticated comic twist on crime in a luxurious or blue-collar setting. Streaming platforms have shown that documentaries about crime get views, and terrestrial television has long since allowed drama to be dominated by crime. The movies are now taking the hint.
There is tasty-looking fare with The Woman in Cabin 10, adapted from the page-turner by Ruth Ware, with Keira Knightley as a lone travel writer on a luxurious cruise liner who is convinced she has seen someone thrown overboard but can’t find any way of proving it. Veteran feelgood director Chris Columbus has taken on Richard Osman’s smash hit novel The Thursday Murder Club, with Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, Ben Kingsley and Pierce Brosnan as the quirky residents in a British retirement community who with indomitable grit solve crimes that have left the uniformed police removing their helmets to scratch their heads.
But heavy-hitter directors are also giving us films with a crime tinge. Darren Aronofsky has pivoted from the sensitive body-image themes of his previous film The Whale, to make Caught Stealing, based on the cult bestseller by Charlie Huston, with Austin Butler as a former baseball player in New York who gets mixed up with the city’s criminal underbelly.
Paul Thomas Anderson is about to give us what promises to be a black comic paranoid fantasia on the subject of all sorts of crime, with One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland.
Perhaps the most startling auteur take on crime this autumn is Kelly Reichardt’s fascinating The Mastermind, starring Josh O’Connor. This famously quietist and realist film-maker has now created her own intriguing version of the heist drama. Ocean’s Eleven it isn’t, but in its intimate ordinariness, its unhurried ambient detail and moment-by-moment observational detail, is weirdly gripping. O’Connor plays an art school dropout and loser in 1960s Massachusetts who figures he can pay a couple of goons and a getaway driver to help him steal four paintings from a museum, having already established, in an unobtrusively nailbiting initial scene, that he can pinch objects from a glass cabinet without anyone noticing. But he winds up having to make a chaotic getaway himself.
By way of contrast there is the grandiose brashness of Spike Lee, who offers his own defiantly personal take on Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 noir High and Low – pumping up the remake with superlatives in the title, Highest 2 Lowest – with Denzel Washington as a big-shot music producer whose godson is accidentally taken by kidnappers. A far-fetched suspense sequence set on a New York subway train has hints of that 70s crime classic The Taking of Pelham 123, and the pure chutzpah and sweep of the film is extremely enjoyable, though perhaps Japanese cinema purists will not like it.
Derek Cianfrance is a director associated with romance and with realist emotional complexity, but he too has now succumbed to the grimy allure of true-crime with The Roofman, starring Channing Tatum as Jeffrey Manchester. In the 1990s, Manchester became a US pop-culture antihero in some quarters, dubbed “The Roofman” by the press for his habit of breaking into branches of McDonald’s through the roof in the dead of night, hiding in the lavatories, and then at opening time, emerging and robbing everyone. The movie promises to be part of that 90s-style black-comic variant of crime that is proving popular again.
And quite aside from these single-issue prestige features, there is the return of Rian Johnson’s wildly popular crime movie series Knives Out, which gave Daniel Craig a returning franchise gig at the very moment he had stepped down from James Bond. He returns as droll detective Benoit Blanc in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, which has a religious theme and the same sprightly tongue-in-cheek tone. The title might be a playful tribute to the courage of one of its actors: Jeremy Renner, making his first film since his near-death experience of being run over by a snowplough in 2023.
Crime, it seems, is coming in many flavours.