the last Knives out movie, Wake up the dead manit’s streaming now netflixbut this isn’t the only mystery movie streaming right now.
Prime Video has many, and Watch With Us is here to recommend two of the best, and one that’s so bad it’s nice.
The Agatha Christie refrigerator A haunting in Venice and the neo-noir thriller Out of Time skillfully generate entertaining suspense, while the relic of the 90s hackers it will make you wonder how people ever surfed the web with dial-up modems.
‘A Haunting In Venice’ (2023)
Master detective Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) has solved many unsolvable cases, but even he is perplexed by his latest mystery. When spirit medium Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) is murdered in a séance in an ancient Venetian palace on Halloween night, everyone suspects the supernatural except Poirot, who doesn’t believe in such things. But who killed her and why? It was Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), a grieving mother who arranged the séance to communicate with her dead daughter? Or was Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a mystery novelist with a bad case of writer’s block and a rapidly dwindling bank account?
A haunting in VeniceThe big flaw is its ending, which splits the difference between whether or not this case involves a regular killer or something more otherworldly. But like most of Christie’s stories, the fun is in the journey, not the destination, and it’s a surprise to see Branagh questioning suspects like Fey and Jamie Dornan while a storm rages outside. As the film’s director, Branagh isn’t afraid to turn the camp up to 11, so expect plenty of Dutch angles and conveniently timed lightning.
A haunting in Venice is streaming on Prime Video.
Out of Time (2003)
Denzel Washington Now he’s known as one of the greatest actors alive, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he starred in a series of action and thriller films that seemed to exist solely for him to pay his mortgage. Not the case with Out of Timean excellent crime thriller from the director Carl Franklin that makes the most of Washington’s star presence and underutilized sex appeal.
Washington plays Matt Whitlock, a respected Florida police officer who has an affair with Ann (Eva Mendes), who is trapped in an abusive marriage with football quarterback Chris (Dean Cain). When Ann is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Matt encourages her to undergo radical treatment that costs nearly half a million dollars. Without the funds to save her life, Matt helps her by stealing cash from work and giving it to her without anyone else knowing. But when both Ann and Chris die in a mysterious fire, Matt suspects he’s been played and he’s running out of time to prove it.
Out of Time is a modern update of classic film noirs like Double compensation i Out of the pastonly sexier and more violent. Washington and Mendes have great chemistry on screen, and they really sell a premise that, on paper, might have been too far-fetched to believe: that Matt would be willing to risk everything for this woman. The plot is twisted in all the right ways, with an unpredictable and satisfying ending. The only downside is that Washington hasn’t made a movie like this since it was released.
Out of Time is streaming on Prime Video.
‘Hackers’ (1995)
I don’t know about you, but I love watching movies from the 80s and 90s that deal with technology that is now hopelessly outdated. They are strange artifacts from a lost time and are often hilarious in their depiction of this almighty and somewhat spooky invention called the Internet.
One of my favorites is hackersan admittedly cheesy and not-so-cool 1995 thriller about a reformed teenage hacker, Dade “Zero Cool” Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller), who moves to a new town, enrolls in a new high school, and befriends, you guessed it, a group of hackers. In his quest to prove to his new friends that he’s as good as his reputation suggests, Dade hacks into a mining company’s database and inadvertently uncovers a conspiracy to sink an oil tanker to cover up a money laundering scheme. The bad guys don’t want their plan exposed, so they frame Dade, who already has a criminal record. Can his new hacker friends save him from a life in prison?
The hacker plot is very simple and overcomplicated – I’m still trying to figure out how sinking a ship will distract everyone from millions being stolen from company bank accounts. But that’s beside the point of enjoying Hackers, which are all flash and superficial pleasures. From his MTV-style montage that tries so hard to be kinetic and “trendy” to a young Angelina Jolie proving that even a star can sell hokum like that, hackers it has a strange, naïve charm that makes it more watchable now than when it was first released. If you ever feel nostalgic for the initial sounds of Microsoft Windows 95then hack into it hackers right now