More Great Whodunit Movies to Watch After Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

All gather at the country estate of the enigmatic Lionel Twain (played by legendary author Truman Capote), who proclaims himself the world’s greatest detective and challenges the others to solve a murder that will take place in his sealed-off, trap-laden puzzle box of a mansion. Of course, it’s Twain himself who turns up dead, but that’s only the beginning of the fun in acclaimed playwright Neil Simon’s witty, highly meta spin on the classic murder mystery. Sellers’ hopelessly cringey Wang aside, the rest of the cast is delightful, and the setup itself is echoed, in thankfully more modern terms, in Knives Out and Glass Onion. (DK)

Clue (1985)

At the forefront of a longstanding wave of entire film franchises built around games and toys, and long before choose-your-own-adventure content was commonplace, there was Clue. Based on the popular board game (developed in England in the 1940s and distributed in the U.S. by Parker Brothers), Clue replicates the classic murder mystery formula that the game itself was structured around: Six strangers are invited to a remote mansion by a man who claims to be blackmailing all of them—a man who ends up dead shortly after his visitors/victims arrive.

Clue was not only funny and entertaining, cleverly using all the characters, weapons, and settings from the game, but since the game could always end differently, so did the movie. With three endings shot and randomly sent to theaters as part of the release (you could eventually see all three on home video), it was a gimmick, sure, but also a gentle way to spoof the entire whodunit genre in the bargain. There’s quite a bit of Clue in the DNA of Knives Out and Glass Onion, right down to the starry cast, which in this case included Tim Curry, Eileen Brennan, Michael McKean, Christopher Lloyd, and Madeline Khan. (DK)

Scream (1996)

Underneath all the meta-horror trappings and post-modern slasher genre commentary, it’s kind of easy to forget that Scream, the original, is a pretty nifty little murder mystery (a trick then attempted by all the sequels). It follows a classic whodunit structure: a masked killer is offing a group of teenagers and adults in the town of Woodsboro, and the only clue is that the murderer follows the rules of horror movies. Although there is no detective around to solve the case, the killer’s main target, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), takes on that role, with assists from reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and Deputy Dewey Riley (David Arquette).

The final reveal of the identity of the killer(s), along with the standard exposition explaining how it all happened, is also classic whodunit material, sort of making Scream a commentary on that genre as well. But the unraveling of the mystery does provide a genuine surprise or two and a satisfying payoff, setting the standard for the modern franchise that followed. (DK)

Murder on the Orient Express (1974/2017)

We’re going to call it a tie here, because both big screen versions of Agatha Christie’s classic novel—the former directed by the great Sidney Lumet, the latter by the sometimes great Kenneth Branagh—have many riches to offer. Let’s start with their illustrious all-star casts: the former features Albert Finney as master detective Hercule Poirot aboard the Orient Express. He travels alongside Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Perkins, and more. Meanwhile the latter finds Branagh taking the lead as Poirot himself, with exceptional support from Judi Dench, Daisy Ridley, Willem Dafoe, Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Leslie Odom, Jr. and others.