Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier, 2024)

Don Johnson and Aaron Pierre in Rebel Ridge

Cast: Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, David Denman, Emory Cohen, Steve Zissis, Zsané Jhé, Dana Lee, James Cromwell, CJ LeBlanc. Screenplay: Jeremy Saulnier. Cinematography: David Gallego. Production design: John P. Goldsmith, Ryan Warren Smith. Film editing: Jeremy Saulnier. Music: Brooke Blair, Will Blair. 

Rebel Ridge begins painfully, with the too-familiar image of a Black man being forced to the ground and handcuffed by two white cops. But it recovers from that to become one of the better action thrillers of recent years, thanks to writer-director-editor Jeremy Saulnier's ability to surprise, a charismatic performance by Aaron Pierre as Terry Richmond, the protagonist, and a reliably watchable one by Don Johnson as Terry's antagonist, Chief Sandy Burnne. Granted, the plot of Rebel Ridge is familiar: stranger comes to a small town and tangles with corrupt law enforcement, a trope we've seen in Reacher and the Lee Child novels it's based on, for example. But Saulnier gives his characters depth and he avoids the expected conclusion in which the bad guys get blown away in a spectacularly messy fashion. There are witty moments, too. Terry gets help from several people, including Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), a court house clerk, and Liu (Dana Lee), the elderly owner of a Chinese restaurant. When Terry introduces them to each other, he tells Summer that Liu is a veteran of the Korean War. Summer chirps the familiar "Thank you for your service," whereupon Terry explains that Liu was on the other side. Rebel Ridge is no ground-breaker, but it deservedly won the Critics Choice Award for best TV movie, and we should be seeing a lot more of Aaron Pierre. 

Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

Daniel Craig in Knives Out

Cast: Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, LaKeith Stanfield, Christopher Plummer, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell, Riki Lindholme, Edi Patterson, Frank Oz, Noah Segan, K Callan, M. Emmett Walsh, Marlene Forte. Screenplay: Rian Johnson. Cinematography: Steve Yedlin. Production design: David Crank. Film editing: Bob Ducsay. Music: Nathan Johnson.

Knives Out is an old-fashioned whodunit with a brilliant detective on the case, but folded into the intricacies of its plot are some sharp-edged politics. It's almost as if Agatha Christie gave us Hercule Poirot's views on Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler or Dorothy Sayers had employed Lord Peter Wimsey to confront Sir Oswald Mosley. In Rian Johnson's screenplay, the plot is given some spin by the Trumpist sympathies of some of the Thrombey family and by the plight of Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), who fears that her mother's status as an undocumented immigrant will be revealed. But the politics is largely there as a flavoring for the stew of motives and meanness. The setup is this: The wealthy thriller novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead, his throat cut, after the family has gathered to celebrate his 85th birthday. The verdict is suicide, but someone has hired the celebrated detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to investigate -- even Blanc doesn't know who sent him a cash payment that put him on the case -- and demands for an investigation only get hotter after Thrombey's will is read and the eager would-be heirs learn that he has left everything to Marta, his nurse. She naturally becomes a prime suspect, but she has an amusingly improbable quirk: She can't tell a lie without vomiting. And she knows a lot more than she's willing to tell, including the fact that she thinks she's the one responsible for Thrombey's death. Various theories of the case come to light as Blanc weighs the evidence, but eventually the truth will out -- almost literally, when Marta blows chunks on the culprit. There's a lot of sly, wonderful acting in the movie, starting with Craig playing against the James Bond type as the Southern-accented sleuth. The movie was a big hit, so there's talk of more Benoit Blanc mysteries, but it will be hard to top this one.