Love Letters (Amy Holden Jones, 1983

James Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis in Love Letters

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, James Keach, Bonnie Bartlett, Matt Clark, Amy Madigan, Bud Cort, Rance Howard. Screenplay: Amy Holden Jones. Cinematography: Alec Hirschfeld. Art direction: Jeannine Oppewall. Film editing: Wendy Greene Bricmont. Music: Ralph Jones. 

In Amy Holden Jones's Love Letters Jamie Lee Curtis plays Anna Winter, a woman who discovers a cache of love letters from a man not her father among her dead mother's things and is somehow inspired by them to have an affair with a married man. Curtis does her considerable best with a role that's more concept than character, but Jones's screenplay makes her do a lot of stupid and impulsive things, made more implausible  because the man, played by James Keach, doesn't have the charisma that might inspire her to do them. The film is a throwback to the old weepies like Back Street (John M. Stahl, 1932, Robert Stevenson, 1941, and David Miller, 1961), though Curtis's character is given more agency than the women played by Irene Dunne, Margaret Sullavan, and Susan Hayward in those earlier versions, and she doesn't have to die at the end. What psychological depth Jones's film has is enhanced by Anna's relationship with her alcoholic creep of a father (Matt Clark), who seems to have a more than paternal affection for her. The movie also adds some gratuitous nudity, insisted on by its producer, Roger Corman, who backed the filming of Jones's script as a reward for her successful direction of The Slumber Party Massacre (1982).  

Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)

Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Ron Silver, Clancy Brown, Elizabeth Peña, Louise Fletcher, Philip Bosco, Kevin Dunn, Richard Jenkins. Screenplay: Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Red. Cinematography: Amir Mokri. Production design: Toby Corbett. Film editing: Lee Percy. Music: Brad Fiedel. 

Whatever points Kathryn Bigelow may earn for style in her direction of Blue Steel have to be offset by the fact that she co-wrote (with Eric Red) its nonsensical screenplay. Jamie Lee Curtis plays a rookie cop who becomes the obsession of a psychotic commodities trader and serial killer played by Ron Silver. The setup isn't a bad one, but the film is padded out with an unnecessary subplot in which Curtis's character is trying to persuade her mother (Louise Fletcher) to leave her abusive father (Philip Bosco) and a gratuitous sex scene before the expected final shootout. Bigelow demonstrated her gift for narrative economy in The Hurt Locker (2008) and for over-the-top action sequences in Point Break (1991). Blue Steel could use both.  

Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980)

Jamie Lee Curtis and Casey Stevens in Prom Night

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Casey Stevens, Anne-Marie Martin, Michael Tough, Mary Beth Rubens, Joy Thompson, Antoinette Bower, Robert A. Silverman, Pita Oliver, David Mucci, George Touliatos, Sheldon Rybowski, Debbie Greenfield, Brock Simpson, Leslie Scott, Dean Bosacki, Joyce Kite, Karen Forbes. Screenplay: William Gray, Robert Guza Jr. Cinematography: Robert C. New. Art direction: Reuben Freed. Film editing: Brian Ravok. Music: Paul Zaza, Carl Zittrer. 

High school prom is scary enough without letting a killer loose at one: It's a nexus of adolescent anxieties about sex, style, and status. But of course that makes it a natural locus for the overkill of a horror movie like the classic Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976). It would be nice to say that Paul Lynch's Prom Night is a classic of that order, but I really can't. It has a promising setup: A group of grade-school kids terrifies another kid into a fatal fall from the window of a spooky old building and, led by the snottiest girl in the group, cover up the fact that they witnessed and partly caused the accident. Six years later, they become the target for threatening phone calls, threats planted in their school lockers, and eventual murders at the prom. The identity of the murderer is slyly withheld until the very end -- although if you've seen enough of these movies you know how to eliminate the obvious suspects and maybe to catch the clues to whodunit. There are a couple of well-staged and suspenseful scenes as the victims get offed. But the film is loaded with too many dance-floor scenes that remind one of how nobody mourned when disco died. The top billing for the film goes to Leslie Nielsen, who plays the principal of the school and the father of the little girl who died, as well as her siblings Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Alex (Michael Tough). But Nielsen has only a few scenes in the movie, and the role is a kind of valedictory to his career in "serious" parts: Airplane! (David Zucker, Jerry Zucker) came out the same year as Prom Night and launched him into the most memorable part of his career, as a deadpan comic actor. Though it was a big success in its day, Prom Night is more artifact than art, valuable mostly as a picture of its era. 

A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, 1988)

Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda

Cast: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin, Maria Aitken, Tom Georgeson, Patricia Hayes, Geoffrey Palmer, Cynthia Cleese. Screenplay: John Cleese, Charles Crichton. Cinematography: Alan Hume. Production design: Roger Murray-Leach. Film editing: John Jympson. Music: John Du Prez. 

By all rights, A Fish Called Wanda shouldn't have worked: It's a blend of comic acting styles, from Monty Python to Hollywood to Broadway, under the direction of a septuagenarian best known for his work on that comparatively restrained classic of British postwar comedy, The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). It's vulgar and silly and hardly sensitive to social concerns -- it was denounced by disability rights advocates for the laughs derived from the Michael Palin character's stutter. And yet it remains one of the most successful screen comedies in history. It won Kevin Kline an Oscar for his performance as the dopey Übermensch Otto, and covered John Cleese, Palin, and Jamie Lee Curtis with glory -- especially Cleese, who not only wrote the screenplay (from a story he concocted with director Charles Crichton) but also reportedly did much of the directing for which Crichton got the Oscar nomination. The secret to its success is that it takes nothing seriously, especially the British and American national identity, but is so light-hearted in its offenses that they amuse rather than offend. It's full of little in-jokes, like calling the character played by Tom Georgeson "George Thomason," and naming Cleese's character Archie Leach without nodding to the fact that it was Cary Grant's real name. (That one may even be a double in-joke, since Grant himself ad-libbed a line about Archie Leach in Howard Hawks's 1941 screwball classic His Girl Friday.) Maybe it falls a little flat at the end, with the frantic business at Heathrow, but it would be hard to top what has gone before. 

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.