Grade: A
Knives Out is like the best of what Wes Anderson could do, or used to do before his movies became annoying, pretentious, and gimmicky. Director Rian Johnson (Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi) parades on a large cast of colorful characters, and just tells a great story. It has the promising premise of a Wes Anderson film, but lacks the extraneous bells and whistles he relies too heavily on, like the colored filters and the excessive classical music on the soundtrack.
Despite the movie’s main location and some costumes/props looking oddly period, by all other appearances, it takes place in the present day. There are smartphones, and lines about Twitter, Instagram, and – the most recent reference I caught – Baby Driver, released in 2017. Knives Out opens in the mansion of Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer, supremely effective even though we only see him in flashbacks) – a successful murder mystery novelist. The plot of this movie is like something he would have written. One of the maids goes up to his study to find him dead on his couch, with a slit throat. Enter the children and grandchildren, played by such valuable and recognizable faces as Don Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon, Chris Evans, and Katherine Langford. They are easier to keep track of than you might think. They are an endearingly quirky bunch, but in one of the movie’s only flaws, they simultaneously yell over each other a few too many times. I guess it’s supposed to be funny, but it just constituted behavior to me.
In what is an ensemble piece through and through, the two main players turn out to be Marta, the nurse, played by Ana de Armas, and a show-stealing Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, a detective. Craig affects a deep South’n drawl which made me think of Lewis Grizzard or Kevin Spacey’s character in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The first time we see Blanc, he is sitting in the background as two other detectives do the majority of the questioning, and he promises to be mostly a silent, aloof observer – but he ends up having a much more prominent presence.
I’ve given you enough background, and will leave you to find out how Marta, the detectives, the family, and Frank Oz’s delightful cameo play into this. We, the audience, actually get the truth of Thrombey’s death halfway through the film. The events after that are just the web being weaved in more and more exhilaratingly exhausting ways. By the end, all the facts about the plot are revealed and explained. It can be confusing if you don’t pay the best of attention, and will undoubtedly inspire repeat viewings and/or discussions with friends who have seen it, but I think everything checks out. I had a burning question at the end, but it pertained to the more dramatic, emotional “right-brained” side of the plot. It wasn’t answered for me, but not because the movie was lazy. Indeed, Knives Out is too smart to unintentionally leave a loose end, other than to inspire curiosity. Knives Out is clever, funny, and sad. It has chemistry, exceptional ensemble work, is wildly entertaining, and is a joyous reminder of why I like to go to the movies.
Grade: A
Film Reviews by Mark 
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