The Last Seduction from 1994 is a film-noir style erotic-thriller. Very tense and well executed for a film that was first released on HBO or Cinemax, I think.
Hitchcock is always a good choice, I think his 1948 film Rope! is kind of an early Columbo. We, the audience, know what happened, will anyone else figure it out?
Some great suggestions from all, thanks!
Made me realise I’d seen a few of these (and enjoyed them): The Game, The Prestige, The Manchurian Candidate, Taxi Driver and Dead Ringers. I seem to remember the plot of Solaris but haven’t got any memory of watching it.
From a quick check of IMDB, I think I’ll be first adding Identity, Dead Again, The Last Seduction and Rope to the ‘wish list’. And now that Hitchcock’s been brought to mind, I have to admit that I still haven’t watched Rear Window.
One ‘Rear Window’ is my favorite Hitchcock, how can you not have watched it?
How about Possession? A 1981 psychological horror film. Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani. Very wordy and weird.
A bit of a bump here. I enjoyed the following:
Basic Instinct (1992)
Fatal Attraction (1987)
Unfaithful (2002)
Dead Calm, starring a young Nicole Kidman, Sam Neil, and Billy Zane.
Games with Jimmy Caan and Katherine Ross. Newlywed couple play kinky mind games with each other for fun. House guest arrives and ups the stakes. One sequence had me on the edge of my seat.
Shutter Island was already mentioned, but bears repeating – it’s one of the best thrillers I’ve seen in a long time. As often happens, the original novel is even more immersive and enjoyable. Dennis Lehane (who also wrote Mystic River) is a hell of a writer.
Edward Dmytryk’s 1965 film Mirage. Gregory Peck plays a man with partial amnesia who finds that reality doesn’t seem to be what he thinks it is (he follows a woman down into several sub-basements of a building; when he goes back, they aren’t there), his job doesn’t seem to exist, and people are trying to kill him.
I think of it as the dark cousin of Stanley Donen’s Charade. It has the same screenwriter (Peter Stone) and some of the same stars (Walter Matthau, George Kennedy; but we get Gregory Peck instead of Cary Grant as the leading man). A very tangled little psychological mystery with scenes worthy of Hitchcock. In black and white, which seems appropriate.
Not a movie per se but I just watched the six episode “The Devil’s Hour” on Amazon Prime, and if you don’t mind a bit of SF/F then it’s an excellent complex story. It’s already green-lit for two more seasons, too, which they say will make a complete story, but you can watch just the first season without feeling like it’s incomplete.
I would add Primal Fear.
I just finished this and it was really good but very very complex so hopefully additional seasons will help my understanding of it.
Also, not quite in the thriller category but I recently watched “Cargo” on Netflix with Martin Freeman, who is becoming one of my favorite actors. It is a zombie movie but it is really about more than that. I thought it was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time and I generally steer clear of zombie movies.