★ 9.5major
Roman Polanski's 1974 neo-noir starts as a routine infidelity case for private eye Jake Gittes and ends somewhere much darker, tangled up in Los Angeles's water supply and one family's buried history. Few films commit as completely to the idea that solving the mystery doesn't mean winning.
★ 9.0major
Rian Johnson's 2019 whodunit tells you who's innocent in the first act and spends the rest of the film making that knowledge almost worthless -- right up until a second layer of scheming gets exposed underneath it.
★ 9.0major
Christopher Nolan's 2000 reverse-chronology thriller isn't hiding a fact at the end of its story -- it's hiding what its own main character has been doing to himself the entire time he's been telling it.
★ 9.4major
David Fincher's 1995 thriller follows two mismatched detectives chasing a serial killer staging murders around the seven deadly sins. When the killer surrenders in the film's final act, the case isn't closer to over -- it's about to ask one of the two men to finish it himself.
★ 9.5mind-bending
Bryan Singer's 1995 neo-noir is narrated almost entirely by the one man in the interrogation room nobody thought to watch closely -- until the closing shot forces the audience to.