Knives Out perhaps is not the best written movie out in this year, but surely it is one among the most entertaining.

Saying the film is predictable is not wrong, but it is missing the point. Just toward the first halves the film dropped plenty of clues toward pointing the suspect of the crime, but the point was not about "who did it", but "how and why it was done." Indeed, perhaps in the first half audience is intentionally misled to get the impression of typical murder mystery through Knives Out stylistic "who did it" fashion, but as the film goes it shows that there is more to it [spoiler]especially since what and who cause the murder is already revealed in the middle of the film[/spoiler].

If one pays attention to the details. audience have been invited to ask ourselves about the mystery of the process of the murder - on the continuously shaking legs and the barking dogs - and even the especially charming Daniel Craig asked us, almost invitingly, who really hired him and why? The twist and turn is not about the result; but the process.

And doing that, Rian Johnson is still able to slip a neat "moral of the story", with a rather bittersweet moment when the truth is finally revealed. "You're a good person who follows your heart" might be one of the most repeatedly cliche, but taking a backdrop of distrust and money in a family drama, Johnson's words spoken through Craig's character with his characteristic accent made the delivery much more impactful. The slick cinematography and excellent music directing in the whole movie supports this perfectly paced murder mystery.

There is a notable questionable holes that may push you from your suspension of disbelief, but still: a delightful Christmas story to end the year; Knives Out is one film I'd recommend to get you absorbed to its intricate details.

_Knives Out_ disappointed me, it’s cliched and not as clever as those it pays homage to. 2019 is really the wave of “woke” American movies that think they're way more clever than they actually are.

Every character is an exaggerated stereotype of some sort, shallow caricatures. The good senior millionaire – see he isn’t bad like the rest of his family! Except, who do you think raised this family? The well-intentioned “black” cop and dumb “white” detective. The members of the family are obviously meant to be parodies of stereotypes, but they’re either too on the nose or too underdeveloped, and just end up becoming the stereotypes they’re parodying.
But the impossibly kind messiah born to an illegal immigrant bothered me the most - Marta Cabrera has exactly two expressions throughout the whole movie, such an anti-feminist character, no agency whatsoever. She is the modern Mother Teresa – the best nurse, has to always tell the truth, and needs to save the woman blaming her for murder. It’s her story but she is so passive, and solves nothing. Her only defining character traits are that she’s an immigrant and has a kind heart. By the time Marta is referred to as good for the 20th time, they’ve ensured she feels less like a person and more like a symbol for _The Perfect Immigrant_.

I wish more was done with the big name actors. Daniel Craig (along with Ana de Armas) got the most screentime but his performance of attempted humor didn’t translate, and his fake Southern accent was really irritating. I get that it was exaggerated, but his acting sucked. A bad casting choice, he just doesn’t fit the character.

I felt like the story was building to something more than it actually was the entire time. The mystery felt like a backdrop for Rian Johnson to vent off his own political frustrations. You can tell he is way too online. Expect to hear things like, _“How's your SJW degree coming?”_, _“Alt right troll”_, or _“Liberal snowflake”_. This clunky use of buzzwords doesn't add anything to the characters or the story. These are manufactured quirks that try to disguise underdeveloped characters as developed. They don't even qualify as satire, because satire needs actual insight and depth to it, some sort of critique. The movie doesn't make any real points about class or privilege. Rian Johnson needs to learn few things about subtlety while bringing his ideologies in movie. And whoever has to clean his house should be given all his wealth I guess.

Overall, it's an _'immigrants vs. the rich people'_ movie and you can guess where it goes from the beginning because well, it's Hollywood.

[9.4/10] A good mystery has to do a lot to be, well, good. It has to have a satisfying answer to the “whodunnit” question. But that answer can’t be too predictable or the audience won’t have the thrill of following along. But it also can’t be too out of left field or it will feel like a cheat. So any mystery writer has to balance including enough setups and clues to where the payoff feel earned, but so many that the solution feels obvious or pre-ordained.

But there should also be something more at the heart of the mystery than just the answer to who the killer is. The answer should reveal something deeper about the story, about its major players, about the why and the who behind the mystery. In short, there should be...well...a good donut hole inside the smaller donut inside the larger donut.

*Knives Out* does it all with flying colors. Its mystery succeeds like clockwork. Writer-director Rian Johnson (of *The Last Jedi* fame) sets up every little detail to perfection. He lays out his suspects and their motives, establishes the victim and the investigators, and doles out subtle hints at just the right intervals to keep the audience guessing, but informed enough to craft their own theories and follow along.

But he also imbues all that mystery machinery with a larger theme that meshes perfectly with the ecosystem and the family he’s created. On a pure story level, that comes down to rewarding the person who works hard, who acts with kindness and altruism even when it could rip their lives apart, while the people who claim to be her betters are a hypocritical bunch who were born on third base and think they’ve hit a triple. But on a social level, it’s about the same hypocrisy in how we treat immigrants, in how people of every persuasion treat someone they think they’re above, how that treatment shifts markedly when it conflicts with their self-interest, and how that immigrant’s hard work, decency, and above all selflessness makes her more worthy than all the scratching, clawing simps she’s father above than she realizes.

But rather than devolving into didactic sequences to communicate these ideas, Johnson does it all with style and with good humor. Even for a murder mystery that mostly occurs within a single house, Johnson, cinematographer Steve Yedlin, and their superb team bring so much visual flair to the picture. Even before anyone’s said a word, the autumnal feel of the piece and the august old manor establish a sense of tone and place within the world of *Knives Out*.

Once the movie kicks into gear, that aesthetic virtuosity remains. Johnson and Yedlin set up any number of Wes Anderson-esque tableaus, arranging all the major players in a series of expressive group shots. The scene where the Thrombeys descend on Marta conveys the overwhelming chaos of the scene by switching to steadicam and putting us into the suddenly jostled world that the poor girl’s been thrust into. And the sequence where a faux-affable Walt all but advances on Marta, with the thump of his cane and his first tightening around its handle, communicates the intimidation at play.

Despite those moments of fear, and the tension that permeates the film almost from the jump, *Knives Out* is a rollicking good time. For as much as the movie is a taut mystery and broader sociopolitical commentary, it’s also an eminently fun laugh riot. Johnson knows when to puncture the tension with a big laugh, and bolstered by Daniel Craig’s performance of a colorful Hercule Poirot by way of Frank Underwood, he’s able to make his characters poignant, menacing, or hilarious on a dime.

But he also knows how to deploy them nigh-perfectly in his well-crafted whodunnit. Johnson and company structure and pace their film brilliantly. The opening act lulls you into thinking you know who the obvious suspects and likely motives for the murder of the Thrombey patriarch are. But then he turns the mystery on its ear, showing the audience exactly, and in elegant detail, how he died and who killed him. The opening police interviews turn out to just be a smart way to introduce these characters and establish their place within Harlan Thrombey’s world.

From there, we follow the tension of the knowledge that Marta is the murderer, but also enlisted to help Benoit Blanc discoverer who the murderer is. The devices that Johnson uses in that effort -- Marta’s lie-related nausea, Harlan’s mystery novel-writer expertise in fooling the authorities, the extra question of who hired Blanc -- all heighten the fun and the twisty excitement as the case progresses. This is, laudably, Marta’s story, and the way her position change, from bystander to inadvertent murderer to overwhelmed patsy to triumphant hero, is aided by the different ways the mystery bends around her.

But the most striking of all if the way that both friend and foe turn against her once it’s revealed that she stands to inherit Harlan’s entire estate. Even including the intricately-crafted mystery, it’s *Knives Out* best twist. Johnson spends so much of the first act accounting for the different ways the various Thrombeys treat Marta, from dismissive to patronizing to seemingly embracing and understanding. But the second that her financial interest seems to run counter to theirs, every one of them, even and especially the ones who seemed to be decent and kind to her, immediately view her as an interloper denying them of what’s rightfully theirs.

That’s powerful. Johnson and his team build a mystery that unfolds spectacularly, with twists and turns to keep the viewer on the edge of their seat, small clues that add up to big reveals, and variations on the usual form that make it both thrilling and seamless. And yet, it’s biggest strength lies in what the answers to the mystery novel questions *Knives Out* asks say about the answers to the societal questions it asks in kind.

Johnson’s film is populated with people who believe they are self-made, who built themselves from the ground up, but who are (with one notable exception), entirely hangers on to someone who truly rose to the top of his field through hard work. It’s that kind soul who recognizes his equal and successor not in the slew of self-siding progeny jockeying for position against one another (whom he “cuts loose” to wean them of their dependency), but in the one person they all consider themselves better-than. The Thrombey’s all think themselves superior by dint of birth and by right, but it’s the young woman who, through the good character, industriousness, and decency none of them possesses, proves herself smarter and more worthy than any of them to inherit his fortune, and his legacy. And that makes for one hell of a mystery.

**A novel written specifically for a dramatic work**

The story of the movie is simply that we have a person murdered and a group of people suspected of being involved in killing this person because they all have an interest or benefit that this person should die. The movie is simply ask who killing old Harlan Thrombey.

Often these types of films and these types of stories that contain puzzles and crimes are based on old books such as Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, or any other novel, but this story from the movie was written specifically in order to be made in a dramatic form because the story was written for the cinema and the way the story was implemented was far-fetched. Completely different from traditional methods. This is the strong aspect of the film due to its reliance on the theatrical system. It makes you contemplate the music, the method of filming, and the placement of the characters one after the other, as if you are watching a theatrical performance.

The most beautiful thing about this theatrical show is the way the characters are presented. Each character sees it for the first time when they are called for investigation by the police and who they are and what is their relationship to the victim. But what is beautiful is when the next character is identified and we know who she/he is and what her/his relationship is to the victim them We start to doubt the stories and information given by the previous character to the investigators

With more than one character and with more than one investigation, the contradictions will become clear. This will bring us to the question that comes to our minds after 40 minutes of the movie: Who killed Harlan Thrombey?

"That certainly not what I was expecting."

- Whodunit?
- Rian Johnson.
- Why?
- To subvert the tropes of yet another sub-genre... properly!

As divisive as it was, I neither loved nor hated the love-it-or-hate-it The Last Jedi. Maybe because I'm not a huge fan of the much-beloved saga. But I can give you a quick opinion of what I thought about it anyway. The first half almost turned me off completely: tons of lame jokes and out-of-character moments that indicate that Johnson's biggest concern was to subvert expectations and nothing but. The second half of the film was way better. It proved to me that Johnson is actually very capable of adding fresh blood to the saga, so effortlessly to such an extent that I wondered why he struggled so much in the first half.

In Knives Out, Johnson didn't add a new spin on the 'whodunit' sub-genre of detective fiction; he took it and turned it on its head. He did so not only by playing with the tropes and mechanisms of this sub-genre -and boy, he did that so exquisitely and gracefully- but he also by using a new and very effective building block: Drama. It doesn't sound new, isn't it? But, actually, relying on it here, in this kind of a story, is nothing short of revolutionary, and that's simply lies in the fact it's unprecedented to build upon it here. The result is nothing but marvellous. And although that, at some point, the main concern of the plot wasn't the murder mystery per se, the mystery didn't lose its sharpness even a tiny bit. And that's a strong proof that everything worked, and integrated, seamlessly. I said integrated because the film has a plethora of comedic bits throughout its runtime -which flies by- and, to be honest, I think every single joke landed perfectly. The film also suggest a political agenda that's exquisitely woven into the plot, and provides a sharp social commentary that's impressively subtle.

Not only did Rian Johnson reinvigorate this seemingly outmoded and unfruitful sub-genre, but he also did the same thing with a couple of members of the star-studded cast: I didn't know that Chris Evans, Captain America himself, would be better as, well, an "Anti-Captain America "; Craig as Blanc is absolutely phenomenal, with his southern accent and caricature detective character; and Jaeden Martell (IT) is very interesting as the weirdo Jacob Thrombey. As for Curtis, Langford, Plummer, Collette and Shannon, Johnson makes an excellent use of their incredible acting abilities, and of their facial expressions and features, especially Shannon with his remarkable menacing countenance. The real standout, though, is Ana de Armas. I mean, she was good in Blade Runner 2049, but here, as she plays my new favourite version of Pinocchio, she proves she's an exceptionally talented actress who is capable of expressing emotions, and changing them readily, only with her eyes. Honestly, I think she should have been nominated for an Oscar!

Overall, I'm really surprised how much I loved this film. With Johnson superb and clever direction and meticulously-nuanced and witty -albeit slightly too-structured- screenplay, I think this is my favourite - even if it's not my highest-rated - film of 2019. You know what, this film is actually terrible: it's very pretentious; its puzzle is too convoluted for its own good; it has an overabundance of plot twists; it underutilized its stellar ensemble; and it has a lot of plot holes, or -in this case- donut holes! Excuse me, I gotta leave right now!

(9.5/10)