Nothing can crank up suspense quite like the movies. And it's the thriller genre that sets out to start your pulse-rate hammering, make your brain fizz and get your palms sweating.
The setting could be anything, but right the way back to Humprey Bogart's classic potboiler The Maltese Falcon, the world of crime has had a iron strangle-hold on cine-thrills. Sometimes, the cops are the focus. Clint Eastwood went iconic with his 44 Magnum as a hardcore cop in Dirty Harry and The Dead Pool, while Steve McQueen wired his star wattage and driving skills into giddy crime thriller Bullitt. But often, it's the criminals who spill the thrills. Steve McQueen turned ex-jailbird for the pump-action excitement of The Getaway. In pressure-cooker heist movie Dog Day Afternoon, hapless Al Pacino botches a bank robbery and becomes an unwitting media hero. Michael Caine's stone-cold hitman tears up London in brutal Brit revenger Get Carter (and Sly Stallone tries to do this same in the US remake).
Quentin Tarantino juiced up the thriller with his spiky scripts for True Romance and Natural Born Killers. Both films track lovers on the lam, with Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette the bloody couple in Tony Scott's popcorn movie, while Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis take a bubble-bath in sex and death as Oliver Stone's massively controversial eye-scorcher takes aim at media violence.
But let's not forget, there's so much more to this genre. For starters, sometimes the cops "are" the criminals. Throwback noir thriller LA Confidental meshes an all-star cast (Russell Crowe, Kim Basinger, Guy Peace, Kevin Spacey) with a brilliantly knotted script for a compelling, twisting mystery where no one is what they seem.
And of course, some of the finest thrillers see ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. Hitchcock was the master of this game, with films like Strangers On A Train ' in which two men agree to ‘swap' murders ' writing the rulebook for guilty, desperate suspense. Hollywood's biggest stars have all been hauled into the thrill-machine: Burt Reynolds tackles rapist hillbillies in woodland horrorshow Deliverance; Harrison Ford is the wrong man on the run in The Fugitive; Adrien Brody suffers time-travel flashbacks in psycho-thrillers The Jacket (or does he?); and George Clooney finds himself sucked into deadly political conspiracy in Syriana. The squeamish should be warned: that last one's a less a nail-biter than a nail-puller...