Knives Out

Daniel Craig is the Kentucky Fried Poirot with all-star suspects - Chris Evans, Ana de Armas and Toni Collette among them - in this nimble and brilliant crime caper.

Murder mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is a veritable one-man crime-fiction industry and his adult children – and their children – have been living off him for years. When he turns up dead, the apparent victim of a murder, it seems that no-one has a motive for killing the golden goose. At least, that’s what the detectives assigned to the case think. But Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) – the debonair ‘Kentucky-fried’ private investigator mysteriously hired by an anonymous source – has other ideas. With a superb cast at their arch best (Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, Michael Shannon, Katherine Langford, Ana de Armas and Don Johnson, to name a few), this is impeccably written and designed, full of unexpected twists and turns from start to finish.

Johnson clearly knows his mystery genre greats from fiction, television and film. Agatha Christie, Murder, She Wrote and Sleuth are some of the reference points. But while always aware of the conventions, here Rian Johnson does for the murder caper what he did with Brick for noir and Looper for science fiction. He injects them with fresh magic and shows you whole new ways of looking at a beloved genre. Knives Out is a classic whodunnit and as sharp as the blade that killed the patriarch at the heart of the film.