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The Usual Suspects
The Usual Suspects, released in 1995, built its entire narrative around an unreliable narrator, small-time con man Roger "Verbal" Kint, whose account of events to a police interrogator forms the film's central story, later revealed to have been substantially fabricated in one of film history's most widely discussed narrative twists. Kevin Spacey won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Verbal, and the film's final revelation of the mysterious crime lord Keyser Söze's true identity became one of the most frequently referenced and imitated twist endings in modern film history. Director Bryan Singer's decision to seed the film's twist ending with numerous subtle visual and dialogue clues throughout the earlier narrative, discoverable only on repeat viewings, helped establish rewatchability built around a hidden narrative trick as a distinctive selling point for subsequent thriller filmmaking. The film's tight, low-budget production, made for roughly $6 million, and its outsized critical and cultural impact relative to that modest budget made The Usual Suspects a frequently cited example of how a genuinely clever screenplay structure could generate major impact without requiring a large studio production budget.
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Goodfellas
Goodfellas, directed by Martin Scorsese and released in 1990, adapted the true story of mobster-turned-FBI-informant Henry Hill, and its famous three-and-a-half-minute unbroken Steadicam tracking shot following Hill and his date through a restaurant's kitchen entrance became one of the most celebrated single camera shots in film history. The film's narration, delivered directly by Ray Liotta's Hill character throughout, gave audiences an unusually intimate, matter-of-fact insider perspective on organized crime's mundane daily operations alongside its sudden bursts of extreme violence, a tonal combination that distinguished it from more operatically stylized mob films. Joe Pesci's performance as the volatile, unpredictable Tommy DeVito, including his famous improvised "funny how?" scene, won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and became one of the most widely quoted and referenced individual performances in the crime genre. Goodfellas' rapid editing style, needle-drop soundtrack of period-appropriate pop and rock songs, and its focus on the everyday texture of mob life rather than just its dramatic set pieces directly influenced the visual and narrative style of numerous subsequent crime films and television series, including The Sopranos.
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