The CriticMovies like The Critic
- Key Features:
- Theater, Blackmail, Betrayal, Faustian bargain, Power struggle, Desire, Intrigue, Ambition, Deception, Thriller, Murder
- Tone:
- serious, suspense-driven, dramatic
- Target Audience:
- Drama enthusiasts, Thriller fans, Noir aficionados, Literary adaptation viewers
- Emotional Arc:
- Intrigue → Suspense → Dread
The Critic

Jimmy Erskine is the most feared theatre critic of the age. He lives as flamboyantly as he writes and takes pleasure in savagely taking down any actor who fails to meet his standards. When the owner of the Daily Chronicle dies, and his son takes over, Jimmy quickly finds himself at odds with his new boss and his position under threat. In an attempt to preserve the power and influence he holds so sacred, Jimmy strikes a Faustian pact with a struggling actress, entangling them and the boss in a thrilling but deadly web of desire, blackmail, and betrayal.
The Critic
One fateful night in a small English regional theatre during World War II a troupe of touring actors stage a production of Shakespeares King Lear. Bombs are falling, sirens are wailing, the curtain is up in an hour but the actor/manager Sir who is playing Lear is nowhere to be seen. His dresser Norman must scramble to keep the production alive but will Sir turn up in time and if he does will he be able to perform that night? The Dresser is a wickedly funny and deeply moving story of friendship and loyalty as Sir reflects on his lifelong accomplishments and seeks to reconcile his turbulent friendships with those in his employ before the final curtain.

A struggling actress tries to help a friend prove his innocence when he's accused of murdering the husband of a high-society entertainer.

A Shakespearean actor takes poetic revenge on the critics who denied him recognition.

A web of blackmail and murder attracts the attention of a barrister with a seemingly idyllic life, threatening to derail his career on the path of success.

Jane Marple solves the mystery when a local woman is poisoned and a visiting movie star seems to have been the intended victim.

In the West End of 1950s London, plans for a movie version of a smash-hit play come to an abrupt halt after a pivotal member of the crew is murdered. When world-weary Inspector Stoppard and eager rookie Constable Stalker take on the case, the two find themselves thrown into a puzzling whodunit within the glamorously sordid theater underground, investigating the mysterious homicide at their own peril.

Indolent aristocrat Tony employs competent Barrett as his manservant and all seems to be going well until Barrett persuades Tony to hire his sister as a live-in maid.

When a young stage hopeful is found dead, suspicion falls on her mentor, a successful Broadway producer.

Liam, an aspiring and ambitious young writer, eagerly accepts a tutoring position at the family estate of his idol, renowned author J.M. Sinclair. But soon, Liam realizes that he is ensnared in a web of family secrets, resentment, and retribution. Sinclair, his wife Hélène, and their son Bertie all guard a dark past, one that threatens Liam’s future as well as their own.

An engaged Hollywood agent receives a mysterious letter for an anonymous sexual encounter and becomes ensnared in a sinister world of lying, infidelity, and digital data.

A bigoted junkie cop suffering from borderline personality disorder and drug addiction manipulates and hallucinates his way in a bid to secure promotion.

Actor Lester Blaine has all but landed the lead in Myra Hudson's new play when Myra vetoes him because, to her, he doesn't look like a romantic leading man. On a train from New York to San Francisco, Blaine sets out to prove Myra wrong...by romancing her. Is he sincere, or does he have a dark ulterior motive?

A mysterious story of two magicians whose intense rivalry leads them on a life-long battle for supremacy -- full of obsession, deceit and jealousy with dangerous and deadly consequences.

When troubled musical prodigy Charlotte seeks out Elizabeth, the new star pupil of her former school, the encounter sends both musicians down a sinister path with shocking consequences.

Seduced into the decadent world of Lord Henry Wotton, handsome young aristocrat Dorian Gray becomes obsessed with maintaining his youthful appearance, and commissions a special portrait that will weather the winds of time while he remains forever young. When Gray's obsession spirals out of control, his desperate attempts to safeguard his secret turn his once-privileged life into a living hell.

Cultural critic David Kepesh finds his life -- which he indicates is a state of "emancipated manhood" -- thrown into tragic disarray by Consuela Castillo, a well-mannered student who awakens a sense of sexual possessiveness in her teacher.

The wife of an abusive criminal finds solace in the arms of a kind regular guest in her husband's restaurant.

With his eye on a lovely aristocrat, a gifted illusionist named Eisenheim uses his powers to win her away from her betrothed, a crown prince. But Eisenheim's scheme creates tumult within the monarchy and ignites the suspicion of a dogged inspector.

An upper-crust family dinner is interrupted by a police inspector who brings news that a girl known to everyone present has died in suspicious circumstances. It seems that any or all of them could have had a hand in her death. But who is the mysterious Inspector and what can he want of them?

A wife questions her life choices as she travels to Stockholm with her husband, where he is slated to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A couple attempts to unravel a sinister plot within the English countryside estate of a dying man who has gathered an eclectic and notable group of house guests.

The surreal tale of an unassuming man who is accused of a never-specified crime and shambles through bizarre encounters to escape this nightmare.

Private eye Philip Marlowe investigates a case of blackmail involving the two wild daughters of a rich general, a pornographer and a gangster.

A murderous lust for the British throne sees Richard III descend into madness. Though the setting is transposed to the 1930s, England is torn by civil war, split between the rivaling houses of York and Lancaster. Richard aspires to a fascist dictatorship, but must first remove the obstacles to his ascension—among them his brother, his nephews and his brother's wife. When the Duke of Buckingham deserts him, Richard's plans are compromised.

After his life is turned upside down when his wife is killed in a London terrorist attack, a brilliant but introverted CIA decoder takes matters into his own hands when his supervisors refuse to take action.

With her husband Jack perpetually away at work, Margaret Hall raises her children virtually alone. Her teenage son is testing the waters of the adult world, and early one morning she wakes to find the dead body of his gay lover on the beach of their rural lakeside home. What would you do? What is rational and what do you do to protect your child? How far do you go and when do you stop?

Leonard is an English tailor who used to craft suits on London’s world-famous Savile Row. After a personal tragedy, he’s ended up in Chicago, operating a small tailor shop in a rough part of town where he makes beautiful clothes for the only people around who can afford them: a family of vicious gangsters.

A record store clerk is an obsessed fan of an actress of stage and screen. However, when faced with rejection, the fan strikes out in increasingly violent ways.

Down a seedy city street in her neighborhood, young Enola Penny is obsessed with what appears to be a long abandoned theatre. One night, she sees that the front door is slightly ajar and impulsively decides to sneak inside. But there in the dark, decrepit auditorium, a show unlike any other unfolds before her eyes. Its host is an eerie human puppet named Peg Poett who will introduce Penny to six tales of the bizarre: A couple traveling in a remote part of the French Pyrenees cross paths with a lustful witch; A paranoid lover faces the wrath of a partner who has been pushed to her limit; The Freudian dreams of an unfaithful husband blur the lines between fantasy and reality; The horrors of the real world are interpreted through the mind of a child; A woman addicted to other people's memories gets her fix through the vitreous fluid of her victims' eyeballs; And a perverse obsession with sweets turns sour for a couple in too deep.

As a young girl, Alison Parker attempted suicide after being traumatized by her father's sexual exploits. Now an elite fashion model, she moves to a Brooklyn Heights apartment building where she encounters a number of bizarre, eccentric tenants and attempts to uncover the building's sinister secret.

Career con man Roy sets his sights on his latest mark: recently widowed Betty, worth millions. And he means to take it all. But as the two draw closer, what should have been another simple swindle takes on the ultimate stakes.

When Watson reads from the newspaper there have been two similar murders near Whitechapel in a few days, Sherlock Holmes' sharp deductive is immediately stimulated to start its merciless method of elimination after observation of every apparently meaningless detail. He guesses right the victims must be street whores, and doesn't need long to work his way trough a pawn shop, an aristocratic family's stately home, a hospital and of course the potential suspects and (even unknowing) witnesses who are the cast of the gradually unraveled story of the murderer and his motive.

Mysterious Orfamay Quest hires Los Angeles private investigator Philip Marlowe to find her missing brother. Though the job seems simple enough, it leads Marlowe into the underbelly of the city, turning up leads who are murdered with ice picks, exotic dancers, blackmailed television stars and self-preserving gangsters. Soon, Marlowe's life is on the line right along with his case.

An ailing barrister agrees to defend a man in a sensational murder trial where the unconvincing testimony of the defendant's wife becomes a subject of confusion.

Charles Dobbs is a British secret agent investigating the apparent suicide of Foreign Office official Samuel Fennan. Dobbs suspects that Fennan's wife, Elsa, a survivor of a Nazi Germany extermination camp, might have some clues, but other officials want Dobbs to drop the case. So Dobbs hires a retiring inspector, Mendel, to quietly make inquiries. Dobbs isn't at all sure as there are a number of anomalies that simply can't be explained away. Dobbs is also having trouble at home with his errant wife, whom he very much loves, having frequent affairs. He's also pleased to see an old friend, Dieter Frey, who he recruited after the war. With the assistance of a colleague and a retired policeman, Dobbs tries to piece together just who is the spy and who in fact assassinated Fennan.

A burned-out British police detective finally snaps while interrogating a suspected child molester.

A troubled hedge fund magnate, desperate to complete the sale of his trading empire, makes an error that forces him to turn to an unlikely person for help.

Sir Robert Chiltern is a successful government minister, well-off and with a loving wife. All this is threatened when Mrs Cheveley appears in London with damning evidence of a past misdeed. Sir Robert turns for help to his friend Lord Goring, an apparently idle philanderer and the despair of his father. Goring knows the lady of old, and, for him, takes the whole thing pretty seriously.

Claire Gregory, an upper class New York personality, witnesses a murder in a luxurious nightclub. Detective Mike Keegan, recently promoted, is assigned to protect her.

With his gangster boss on trial for murder, a mob thug known as "the Teacher" tells Annie Laird she must talk her fellow jurors into a not-guilty verdict, implying that he'll kill her son Oliver if she fails. She manages to do this, but, when it becomes clear that the mobsters might want to silence her for good, she sends Oliver abroad and tries to gather evidence of the plot against her, setting up a final showdown.

When socialite and heiress Julie Wardh begins receiving blackmail letters attributed to a mysterious serial killer, she suspects her cruel and sadistic former lover Jean is behind them. With her husband Neil frequently out of town, she falls into the arms of her friend's cousin George, and as the unknown assassin begins to make his move, she fears that one of the three men in her life may be the killer.

Called to court on obscenity charges, a theatre troupe are forced to expose their neuroses and inner psychological torments.

A writer stumbles upon a long-hidden secret when he agrees to help former British Prime Minister Adam Lang complete his memoirs on a remote island after the politician's assistant drowns in a mysterious accident.

A woman’s body disappears mysteriously from the morgue without a trace. Police inspector Jaime Peña investigates the strange occurrence with the help of Álex Ulloa, the widower of the missing woman.

Two brothers and their wives meet up at a haute-cuisine restaurant to discuss what to do about a horrific crime that their sons committed together. As the quartet debate their options, the conversation reopens old wounds between the siblings.

A political activist is convinced that her guest is a man who once tortured her for the government.

Millionaire industrialist Steven Taylor is a man who has everything but what he craves most: the love and fidelity of his wife. A hugely successful player in the New York financial world, he considers her to be his most treasured acquisition. But she needs more than simply the role of dazzling accessory.

In a touring Shakespearean theater group, a backstage hand - the dresser, is devoted to the brilliant but tyrannical head of the company. He struggles to support the deteriorating star as the company struggles to carry on during the London blitz. The pathos of his backstage efforts rival the pathos in the story of Lear and the Fool that is being presented on-stage, as the situation comes to a crisis.

A retired San Francisco detective suffering from acrophobia investigates the strange activities of an old friend's wife, all the while becoming dangerously obsessed with her.

An ancient skeleton has been discovered in Jerusalem in a rich man's tomb. Colouration of the wrist and leg bones indicates the cause of death was crucifiction. other signs, include a gold coin bearing the marks of Pontius Pilate and faint markings around the skull, lead authorities to suspect that these could be the bones of Jesus Christ. Politicians, clerics, religious extremists and those using terror as a means to an end, find their beliefs and identities tested while risking their lives to unearth the truth.....

From the moment she glimpses her idol at the stage door, Eve Harrington is determined to take the reins of power away from the great actress Margo Channing. Eve maneuvers her way into Margo's Broadway role, becomes a sensation and even causes turmoil in the lives of Margo's director boyfriend, her playwright and his wife. Only the cynical drama critic sees through Eve, admiring her audacity and perfect pattern of deceit.

Chris, a former tennis pro, takes a job as an instructor and befriends his wealthy young student, Tom. After being introduced to his family, Chris is soon engaged to Tom's sister, Chloe. Despite the professional and financial advantages that this relationship affords him, Chris becomes obsessed with Tom's fiancee, American actress Nola.

It took Peggy Heller a long time to recover from the trauma of a brutal physical assault, suffered in her youth. When she married Robert, he provided her with the love and reassurance she craved for and the two settled down in a pretty house in the grounds of the public school where Robert was a master. But the headmaster of the school is not what he seems and Peggy is convinced he means to harm her - is her fear a figment of her tortured imagination or are there forces at work that intend to manipulate her anxieties with fatal consequences?

Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders his king and takes the throne for himself.

A man who loves games and theater invites his wife's lover to meet him, setting up a battle of wits with potentially deadly results.

An American journalism student in London scoops a big story, and begins an affair with an aristocrat as the incident unfurls.

Anna Fritz is a beautiful and famous actress. Suddenly her body is found in a hotel and the news of her death goes around the planet. The young, shy caretaker Pau works at the hospital where they carried the body of Anna Fritz. He and his friends decide to take pictures of the body of Anna Fritz. They decide they could make love to her and nobody would know. They are in front of Anna Fritz ... and can do with it what they want.

A fictionalized account of the last days of Edgar Allan Poe's life, in which the poet is in pursuit of a serial killer whose murders mirror those in the writer's stories.

Northern England, 1912. The dinner of a wealthy family is interrupted by Inspector Goole, who only announces that a young woman has committed suicide. Then, he simply asks everyone present, one by one, if they knew her.

A veteran high school teacher befriends a younger art teacher, who is having an affair with one of her 15-year-old students. However, her intentions with this new "friend" also go well beyond platonic friendship.

A series of terrifying accidents and brutal murders leave a bloody trail into the subterranean caverns of an Opera house. Below the theatre stalks a man raised by creatures of the underworld.

When a professional tutor takes a job at a remote manor, he soon finds himself battling his disturbed student’s obsessions, which threaten to expose his darkest secrets and unravel his carefully crafted persona.

After a crippling injury leaves her husband impotent, Lady Chatterly is torn between her love for her husband and her physical desires. With her husband's consent, she seeks out other means of fulfilling her needs.

The life of a respected British politician at the height of his career crumbles when he becomes obsessed with his son's lover.

The wife of a psychoanalyst falls prey to a devious quack hypnotist when he discovers she is an habitual shoplifter. Then one of his previous patients now being treated by the real doctor is found murdered, with her still at the scene, and suspicion points only one way.

In the middle of a performance at la Comédie-Française, an actor dies on stage, poisoned. Martin, member of the troupe and friend of the victim, becomes the center of everyone’s attention. Suspected by the police, he’s also chased by a mysterious organization, Le Parfum vert, that seems to have ordered the murder.

Jack Regan, a hardened cop who doesn’t play by the rules, is confronted with a criminal from his past. With sidekick George Carter they are put on the case of a jewellery store heist that ends in a killing. But is that killing really an execution in disguise? With pressure from his boss and the fact that Regan is having an affair with that boss’s wife, it’s not going to be easy for him to stay out of trouble.

A young couple travels to a remote island to eat at an exclusive restaurant where the chef has prepared a lavish menu, with some shocking surprises.

As celebrated conductor Lydia Tár starts rehearsals for a career-defining symphony, the consequences of her past choices begin to echo in the present.

A businessman, on his daily commute home, gets unwittingly caught up in a criminal conspiracy that threatens not only his life but the lives of those around him.

While doing a series of reports on alternative energy sources, opportunistic reporter Kimberly Wells witnesses an accident at a nuclear power plant. Wells is determined to publicize the incident, but soon finds herself entangled in a sinister conspiracy to keep the full impact of the incident a secret.

The gruesome death of a prostitute brings suspicion on one of her clients, James Wayland, a brilliant, self-destructive and epileptic heir to a textile fortune. So detectives Braxton and Kennesaw take Wayland in for questioning, thinking they can break the man. But despite his troubles, Wayland is a master of manipulation, and during the interrogation, he begins to turn the tables on the investigators, forcing them to reveal their own sinister sides.

A blind man who regains his vision finds himself becoming metaphorically blinded by his obsession for the superficial.

In 14th Century England, this tale of murder and mystery follows a fugitive priest who falls in with a troupe of actors. As they arrive in a small town, the actors encounter a woman being sentenced to death for practicing witchcraft and murder. Discarding the expected bible stories, the actors now stage a performance based on the crime. Through the performance of the play, they discover a mystery.

A gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.

An experienced commercial pilot is forced to collaborate with his country's intelligence services to avoid being punished for a serious fault he committed on the job. He is quickly plunged into an underworld of intrigue and extortion that will put his life at risk and he will pay a very high price to escape from it.

While treating a policewoman for smoking, hypnotherapist Michael Strother has a telepathic vision of a young girl floating beneath the surface of a stream. The escaped victim of a ritualistic serial killer, the girl has become mute, and Michael is called upon by Scotland Yard to unlock the secrets she holds in order to catch a man who believes he has discovered the key to immortality.

A Hollywood studio executive is being sent death threats by a writer whose script he rejected - but which one?

An exceptionally talented face reader becomes entangled in a bloody power struggle between a child king and his uncle who plans to usurp the throne.

The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.

Emily Boynton, the stepmother to three children, blackmails the family lawyer into destroying a second will of her late husband that would have freed the children from her dominating influence. She takes herself, the children, and her daughter-in-law on holiday to Europe and the Holy Land. At a dig, Emily is found dead and Hercule Poirot investigates.

An opinion columnist and author, subjected to constant misogynistic abuse on social media, snaps and goes on a killing spree against her online abusers.

The Driver is hired by a nervous movie manager to spy on a paranoid actor's wife. During his tailing of the wife, the Driver describes the right way to tail someone. As he follows her he begins to fear what he might learn of her apparently tragic life. He discovers the wife is fleeing the country and returning to her mother's, and that she's been given a black eye, likely by her husband. He returns the money for the job, refusing to tell where the wife is, and drives off telling the manager never to call him again.

Dr. John Markway invites three distinct individuals to the eerie and isolated Hill House to be subjects for a sleep disorder study. The unfortunate guests discover that Markway is far more interested in the sinister mansion itself — and they soon see the true nature of its horror.

Lucien de Rubempré, a young, lower-class poet, leaves his family's printing house for Paris. Soon, he learns the dark side of the arts business as he tries to stay true to his dreams.

After his friend, a hot young artist, is killed, a resourceful American man living in London covers up the crime and tries to keep the friend's name alive in order to exploit his legacy and reap millions in the process.

Locked in a high-tech English manor, bound in a deadly duel of wits, Andrew Wyke and Milo Tindle come together as English gentlemen to discuss the matter of Wyke's wife: the woman both are sleeping with.

A Foreign Service Officer in London tries to prevent a terrorist attack set to hit New York, but is forced to go on the run when she is framed for crimes she did not commit.

Ten-year-old Nico receives a threatening letter and now his life is in danger. No one seems to believe him except one person that he doesn't know.

A young author comes into possession of a manuscript sent by critically acclaimed writer, Germund Rein, shortly before he commits suicide.

With the help of his girlfriend Cathy and Dr. Fong, a psychiatrist, ambitious journalist Johnny Barrett poses as a madman in order to be admitted to a mental institution where a bloody murder has been committed.

A group of Nobel laureates descends on Stockholm to accept their awards. Among them is American novelist Andrew Craig, a former literary luminary now writing pulp detective stories to earn a living. Craig, who is infamous for his drinking and womanizing, formulates a wild theory that physics prize winner Dr. Max Stratman has been replaced by an impostor, embroiling Craig and his chaperone in a Cold War kidnapping plot.

Arthur Bishop is a 'mechanic' - an elite assassin with a strict code requiring professional perfection and total detachment. One of an elite group of assassins, Bishop may be the best in the business - with a unique talent for cleanly eliminating targets. When Harry McKenna, his close friend and mentor, is murdered, Harry's son comes to him with vengeance in his heart and a desire to learn Bishop's trade, signaling the birth of a deadly partnership.

The sister of a famous, but as yet uncaught, criminal named "The Hexer" is murdered. Inspector Higgins of Scotland Yard believes that "The Hexer" will surface to take his revenge on his sister's killers, and plans to set a trap to finally capture him. However, soon bodies start piling up, and it looks as if "The Hexer" may get away yet again.

William Hundert is a passionate and principled Classics professor who finds his tightly-controlled world shaken and inexorably altered when a new student, Sedgewick Bell, walks into his classroom. What begins as a fierce battle of wills gives way to a close student-teacher relationship, but results in a life lesson for Hundert that will still haunt him a quarter of a century later.

Rational, exacting, and self-controlled theater director, Henrik Vogler, often stays after rehearsal to think and plan. On this day, Anna comes back, ostensibly looking for a bracelet. She is the lead in his new production of Strindberg's A Dream Play. She talks of her hatred for her mother, now dead, an alcoholic actress, who was Vogler's star and lover.

Suave antiques dealer Alfredo Martelli is picked up by the police with no justification. At the precinct, Martelli realizes what the investigation is all about-- that he is the main suspect in the killing of his wealthy ex-lover. Is he guilty, or is he just a sleaze?

A psychiatrist becomes romantically involved with the sister of one of his patients, but the influence of her controlling gangster husband threatens to destroy them both.

The Words follows young writer Rory Jansen who finally achieves long sought after literary success after publishing the next great American novel. There's only one catch - he didn't write it. As the past comes back to haunt him and his literary star continues to rise, Jansen is forced to confront the steep price that must be paid for stealing another man's work, and for placing ambition and success above life's most fundamental three words.
