In 2025, dare I say that it’s nice to be highlighting a film made for mature audiences. Avoiding the pratfalls of sequels, remakes, comic book movies, and overly costly bombast, Black Bag, written by David Koepp (Mission: Impossible) and directed by Steven Soderbergh (Traffic), is most easily described as an old school spycraft feature. Opening with an extended tracking shot of spy George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) making his way through a happening nightclub in London, his contact soon informs him that there is a rat leaking some sort of tech software named Severus from within the agency. If there is one thing Woodhouse despises, it’s a liar, so he invites all of the suspects to a dinner party to try to get to the bottom of it.

There is no denying that gialli can be a bit out there. These Italian twisty murder mysteries can often combine abstract writing, new age technologies of the 1960s and 70s, and some sex and drugs to make for a trippy experience... but you ain’t seen nothing yet. The most surrealist giallo of them all might just be 1968's Death Laid an Egg, directed by Giulio Questi. Welcome to the most posh chicken farm you’ll ever see. With a scientist (Biagio Pelligra) working nearly around the clock to genetically produce a new form of poultry that will almost instantly fatten with limited bone structure... all while countless chickens are being prepared for market by some new fangled automated technology, wife Anna (Gina Lollobrigida) and her secretary cousin Gabrielle (Ewa Aulin) lounge around their resort-like swimming pool as the former’s hubby, Marco (Jean-Louis Trintignant), gets his kinky rocks off with prostitutes at a hotel as he falls deeper and deeper into a fugue state.

Park Chan-wook has never hidden the fact that he is a huge fan of Alfred Hitchcock – frequently highlighting Vertigo as the movie that got him into film making. Like many before him, perhaps most notably Brian De Palma, he has found clever ways to integrate influences from The Master of Suspense within his own work, the easiest comparison being Stoker... a loose remake of Shadow of a Doubt. But his most recent feature, Decision to Leave (2022), which he co-writes and directs, might even be more so – though crafted so subtly that you really need to know your Hitchcockian filmography to see where he is pulling from. Originally getting the idea from the song “Mist” by Jung Hoon Hee and Song Chang-sik, which fuses quite nicely with the above quotation from Confucius, this mystery crime thriller flits between the always mist filled skies of seaside Ipo and the mountainous city of Busan. Though insomniac detective Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) resides in the former with his wife Jeong-ahn (Lee Jung-hyun), he lives six days a week in the latter – a place that he has moved to for his job.

Like a severe and utterly serious version of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical dark comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, you would think that Fail Safe would have been the original release in theatres that was then later spoofed, yet that is not the case. Released approximately six months later in the same year, as you might imagine, it led to very poor returns at the box office – dare I say it (as the film deals with this subject matter)... it was a bomb! Despite that, over time, it has become a bonafide classic. Based upon Eugene Burdick’s 1962 novel of the same name and directed by Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon), he introduces us to our main players by way of little vignettes.

Channeling the mesmeric movies churned out by the studio system back in the 1930s and 40s, Allied (2016), directed by Robert Zemeckis, channels the likes of Morocco, Casablanca, Across the Pacific, Gilda, To Have and Have Not, and numerous others – attempting to find a spark from the classic themes of melodrama, romance, suspense and the epic nature of the annals of the cinematic past, with quite successful results. Set the year Casablanca and Across the Pacific were released – 1942, the story in fact starts in Morocco, with recently parachuted in Canadian spy Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) meeting up with another undercover agent, Marianne Beauséjour (Marion Cotillard), who will be pretending to be his wife.

Often deemed to be the last classic film made by the great Buster Keaton, The Cameraman (1928) was the final time the silent legend would have anything close to full creative control over one of his own features... as he folded his independent studio to sign with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) – who promptly made him their third highest paid star. Though his future would soon turn very bleak, this first film with the new studio was his own idea.