This source of instant laughs for me inspired this latest post. Gamers usually react with that level of elation when they find something they’ve never seen before, only matched by their sadness when the secret gets found out. Movies are no different: hiding and finding secrets makes up something like 80% of the cinema on the planet.
Below are 6 examples of movies where secrets are found. I will NOT spoil what the secrets are: merely just rate the happiness scale (0, lowest, to 5 stars) of the person who’s secret is discovered.
Now let’s go find an effing secret!!!
| Movie Title | Touch of Evil (1958) |
| Movie Rating | |
| The Secret’s Out Happiness Scale | . Not only is everyone unhappy with the reveal, but the audience of today is immediately cringey when Charlton Heston was hired to play a Mexican police detective. |
| Why The Movie’s Good | Casting racism aside, one of Orson Welles’s last movies packs a wallop! The movie opens with a terrifying explosion, which leads us down a dark mystery with all sorts of terrifying hostage situations and double crosses. Heston is solid, Janet Leigh is great, and Welles himself smartly plays a portly larger than life police chief with all the wattage of his youth coupled with a world weariness that makes him a fascinating character. |
| Movie Title | Andhadhun (2018) |
| Movie Rating | |
| The Secret’s Out Happiness Scale | . There’s small silver linings, but all reveals here lead to something at best icky and at worst, deadly. |
| Why The Movie’s Good | This Bollywood flick is as fun as Knives Out was in 2019. The movie starts innocently enough: Ayushmann Khurrana plays a blind piano player who has a meet cute with Radhika Apte. She gets him a job playing piano at her restaurant, which leads Khurrana to play for Tabu, a happily married, successful woman. What then happens is a devilish ante up of fun, dangerous, and pitch black satirical revelations. Each new twist comes in a different package: sometimes it’s shockingly fast, sometimes is thrillingly slow, but all of them are executed masterfully by director Sriram Raghavan. And Tabu is a blast playing the woman around which all the chaos seems to stem from. I put the trailer below, but I HIGHLY recommend going in cold. You’ll have much more fun! |
| Movie Title | Ghost in the Shell (1995) |
| Movie Rating | |
| The Secret’s Out Happiness Scale | . Many powerful people disagree, but for the main character? The reveal is satisfying as hell. I’m calling it a wash. |
| Why The Movie’s Good | Fans of the Matrix might be a little less impressed after watching this movie, of which the Wachowski’s film owes a great debt to. God bless Japan for insisting that animated films don’t just have to be for kids: a story like this would cost a fortune in real life. Our lead, a cybernetic being, takes some time getting used to, but once you’re on board, the movie gives us a sign of future filmmaking to come about robots becoming sentient, hacking, and government surveillance programs, and is widely considered one of the greatest anime films to come out of Japan. |
| Movie Title | Charade (1963) |
| Movie Rating | |
| The Secret’s Out Happiness Scale | . Sort of the opposite of Andhadhun: there are many revelations here, but most of them are positive for the leads. |
| Why The Movie’s Good | An Alfred Hitchcock movie made to perfection by Stanley Donen. Audrey Hepburn’s husband is murdered early in the movie, and quickly she realizes her husband had a dangerous life that she’s now been dragged into. And why is Cary Grant’s Peter Joshua being so helpful and present the last couple weeks? What follows is a globetrotting endeavor with all sorts of strange characters using double, triple, and quadruple crosses. What makes the movie great though is the Grant/Hepburn connection, finding the right note of silly scary chemistry that the great Hitchcock capers all possessed. |
| Movie Title | Exotica (1994) |
| Movie Rating | |
| The Secret’s Out Happiness Scale | . While the secrets are dark, having them come to life brings a sense of peace to these troubled souls. |
| Why The Movie’s Good | This film feels like a ghost story. Atom Egoyan, the director, uses Elias Koteas voiceovers and the strip club set to create an ephemeral feeling the whole time you’re watching his film. Those feelings hit you like a sack of bricks by the end, as you’re taken into a world of traumatized, damaged people, trying to cope with a lifetime of loss and regret. And this strip club, of all places, allows them a way to find connection to the world again, like a warped little family. It’s totally weird, but equally fascinating and engrossing, and stays with you long after the movie ends. |
| Movie Title | The Shop Around the Corner (1940) |
| Movie Rating | |
| The Secret’s Out Happiness Scale | . Of course knowing who the pen pal lover you’re writing to is going to make you happier! |
| Why The Movie’s Good | In a year of great romcoms, this one proudly stands alongside them. Set in a Budapest fashion store, Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan are each the person of their fantasies. They just don’t know it, because its only through writing, and they kinda dislike each other as competing salesman in the store. You’ve Got Mail stole this setup and made it into a 1990s romcom. However, the success of the 1940s original is the excellent script, which does a terrific job building a world of characters inside of the shop, making that the focus of the film. Yes the romcom takes precedence at times, but you’re equally interested in the lives of the errand boy, or the store owner as well, making this story more well rounded than it probably had any right to be. |