354 Best Mystery Movies to Watch (Page 24)

Staff & contributors

Feeling investigative? If you’re not sure which movie to go for, allow us to clue you in. From detective stories and whodunnits to suspenseful dramas, here are the best mystery-themed movies and shows to stream now.

Even if Crimes of Fashion: Killer Clutch faithfully sticks to the general template of a mystery film, that doesn't guarantee its quality. It may have structure and suspects and motive but it doesn't inject its own color into the expected story beats. Maybe it's a consequence of the film being made for a network that only really shows "safe," sanitized programming, but there isn't a particularly strong sense of danger here despite the threat of violence being established from the very beginning. And while the movie has fun with individual outsized characters meant to show off how outlandish and how expressive high fashion can be, they fall to the background and are unfortunately diluted in the rest of the film's bland tropes.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, TV Movie

Actor: Alain Van Goethem, Brooke D'Orsay, David Bowles, Gilles Marini, Harry Szovik, Martin Budny, Mohamed Belhadjine, Paloma Coquant

Director: Felipe Rodriguez

Rating: PG

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Despite a solid premise that should lead to compelling drama—about men scarred by war and the morally grey inner workings of the police—Confidential Informant devolves into a half-baked thriller that's as dull as its title. Flat direction, a lack of connective tissue between scenes, and an unfortunately visible lack of production resources suck the life out of the script and from the actors' performances. There's clearly a foundation to be built upon here, but the film makes a crucial mistake in trying to have its cake and eat it too: it wants to deliver all the (unsatisfying) thrills of an antihero police procedural, but it just doesn't have the money or the creativity to do this, on top of being a character drama. And so any tension that it tries to build up deflates by the end, its characters nothing but hollow shells, stuck in a story that that never gives them a chance to be anything more interesting.

Genre: Action, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Arielle Raycene, Dominic Purcell, Erik Valdez, Jon Lindstrom, Kate Bosworth, Meadow Williams, Mel Gibson, Nick Stahl

Director: Michael Oblowitz

Rating: R

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Hallmark movies aren't automatically bad if they're cheesy and on the cheaper side; there are ways to make these characteristics work, of course. But these qualities definitely don't help if the story they're telling is uninteresting and if the actors in front of the camera couldn't be compelled to deliver convincing emotions if their lives depended on it. Watching Gilded Newport Mysteries: Murder at the Breakers kind of feels like watching people rehearse a family-produced parody of an Agatha Christie novel, or like visiting Westworld and seeing the robots play-act a fictional scenario. Every line over-explains everything that happens on screen, and the mystery elements just aren't coherent enough for them to lead to a satisfying conclusion or interesting statement about the characters and their world.

Genre: Drama, Mystery, TV Movie

Actor: Aisling Goodman, Alissa Skovbye, Amira Anderson, April Telek, Ava Telek, Cesare Scarpone, Danny Griffin, David Beairsto, Geoff Gustafson, Gillian Barber, James Drew Dean, John Prowse, Katherine Evans, Madeleine Kelders, Mark Humphrey, Nathan Witte, Sebastian Greaves

Director: Terry Ingram

Rating: PG

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