Jamie Lee Curtis is an amazing actress in everything, but she’s particularly great in the horror genre. For instance, in 2015 she starred in the hit slasher series “Scream Queens,” playing Dean Cathy Munsch, whose no-nonsense demeanor and perpetual disdain for sorority girls help her survive a serial killer’s weeks-long rampage through her college campus. The first season in particular was delightful in its silly, mean-spirited, violent charm, and Curtis was selling every single line the questionable scripts gave her. Curtis also starred in some low-budget flick in the ’70s called “Halloween” or whatever.
Despite Curtis’s final girl bona fides, her biggest critical success has nothing to do with the horror genre — at least as far as Rotten Tomatoes is concerned. Her highest rated movie is “Knives Out,” the 2019 mystery comedy film written/directed by Rian Johnson. The movie has a 97% score on the Tomatometer, 1% higher than “Halloween” and 29% higher than season 1 of “Scream Queens.”
To be clear, Rotten Tomatoes divides reviews of films into a simple good/bad rating. A movie with a 97% rating is not 1% better than a movie with a 96% rating — it just means 1% more critics thought the film ranged anywhere from “passable” to “the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” That said, the critical performance of “Knives Out” is especially impressive given how new it is. Older films tend to have an advantage on the platform due to how many contemporary reviews never get uploaded to the site. (The original “Star Wars,” for instance, wouldn’t have a 93% score if you included every single review it got back in 1977.)
Why Knives Out did so well with critics
The reason “Knives Out” is technically the highest-rated film in Jamie Lee Curtis’ résumé is because, well, it’s really good. It’s a cozy mystery film that sets itself up as a whodunnit in the first act, turns into a thriller in the second, and gives us a triumphant final act that still includes a satisfying whodunnit reveal. It’s also a breakout performance for Ana de Armas, and the world’s introduction to the wonderful gay southern detective that is Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). It helps that the movie is star-studded, and it also doesn’t hurt that it was an original, self-contained film, something viewers in the franchise-dominated 2019 movie landscape desperately needed.
Jamie Lee Curtis gives a memorable performance here as Linda Drysdale. She’s a woman who’s roughly as selfish and out-of-touch as the rest of the rich Thrombey family, but is given extra depth through her loving relationship with her father Harlan (Christopher Plummer). The two share a fondness for writing secret messages with invisible ink, one of the few displays of non-transactional affection we see between Harlan and any of his kids.
This detail, established in the first act, leads to a cool moment in the movie’s final moments, where Linda finds a letter from her father that reveals her husband Richard (Don Johnson) is having an affair. Richard had found the letter early on, but he didn’t get rid of it because to him it looked like a blank page — whereas Linda knows exactly what it is the moment she sees it. This all leads up to a devastating, wordless exchange between Linda and her husband, where both of them instantly understand that their marriage is over.
Why Halloween and Everything Everywhere All At Once did so well with critics
Another recent non-horror success for Curtis is “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” where Curtis plays a grouchy IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre. Like with Linda in “Knives Out,” this is a role that easily could’ve been one-note and unsympathetic, but “EEAaO” gradually reveals that Deirdre has a soft side. The multiverse premise allows Curtis to play a dozen different versions of Deirdre, and each of them reveal an extra layer to her. Was Curtis’s performance memorable enough to deserve beating out Stephanie Hsu at the Oscars that year? Probably not, but Curtis is still undeniably strong. This movie has a 94% rating on the tomatometer, and had one of the best budget-to-box office ratios of 2022.
Although Curtis has proven she can excel in any genre, we do of course still need to recognize “Halloween” as one of the best slasher movies of all time. Curtis’s character Laurie is a beloved final girl — in fact, /Film has officially ranked her #1 — not just from her performance in the first film but from her returning role in the “Halloween” franchise’s many, many sequels. People can complain all they want about how drawn-out the franchise has become, but with Jamie Lee Curtis as the main lead, can you really blame the writers for going back to this well so often? This was the role Curtis should’ve won her Oscar for; that 97% Tomatometer rating is 100% deserved.
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