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Movies · Clues from Past Puzzles
Skim the opening clue - the hard, oblique one worth the most - from every Movies puzzle that has already run. Spot one you like and jump in to play the whole thing. The answers are not shown here; that is what the puzzle is for. Come back to play the latest.
- Movie #1 Its climactic rotating shot linking six characters in one unbroken move was designed as a comic-book splash page brought to life, and was the single image the director pitched the whole project on. It is a superhero ensemble that had to make five separate prior films pay off at once.
- Movie #2 Its director rewrote the adaptation more than twenty times across five years, and cast a twenty-one-year-old opposite a leading man fifteen years older after an audition she recorded on a laptop at her parents' house. It is a romantic comedy-drama in which both leads have diagnosed mental illnesses and neither is cured by the ending.
- Movie #3 Its lead plays eleven separate people in one day, changing costume and prosthetics inside a moving limousine between assignments that are never explained to the audience or, apparently, to him. There is an interlude in which accordions are played in a church for no stated reason. It is a surrealist drama about performance.
- Movie #1 Its rotating corridor was a real set, about a hundred feet long, built inside a giant rotisserie and turned while an actor fought inside it - a technique borrowed almost exactly from a musical made in 1951. It is a heist thriller in which the target is an idea rather than an object.
- Movie #2 Its lead trained for close to a year, lost a great deal of weight and dislocated a rib during production, and the exact proportion of dancing she performed herself became a public argument between her, her double and the studio. It is a psychological horror set backstage.
- Movie #3 It is shot in flat, static, often decapitating compositions that cut off heads at the edge of frame, a style its director used to make an ordinary suburban house feel like a specimen jar. It is a deadpan horror-satire, and it is very hard to describe as a comedy while watching it.
- Movie #1 Its shaky handheld camerawork during the opening massacre was partly a stylistic choice and partly a deliberate strategy to secure a rating that teenagers could actually buy tickets for. It is a dystopian action thriller adapted from a young-adult novel that its author has said came from channel-hopping between war coverage and reality television.
- Movie #2 Its title character is named after the hero of a 1966 Italian western, whose original star appears here in a small role as a nod. One supporting actor famously cut his hand open on a real glass during a rage scene and stayed in character while bleeding. It is a revisionist western.
- Movie #3 It was made for well under two million dollars by a collective operating out of Louisiana, using non-professional performers found locally, including a baker cast as the father. Its aurochs were pot-bellied pigs in costume, shot low and close. It is a magical-realist drama set below sea level.
- Movie #1 It was shot largely without a finished screenplay, with scenes improvised and rewritten daily, and the studio had to mortgage the rights to its own characters to raise the money. Its lead was considered close to unemployable at the time. It is the superhero picture that started an interlocking series.
- Movie #2 Its writer came from the theatre and this was his first feature, which shows in dialogue that runs far longer than film convention allows. The Belgian tourist board was reportedly less than delighted by the number of times characters describe the location as boring. It is a crime comedy that turns very dark.
- Movie #3 Its snow was real, its child leads were largely non-professional, and its most talked-about sequence is filmed in a single wide static shot of a swimming pool from underwater, with the violence happening at the edges of frame. It is a coming-of-age horror film.
- Movie #1 It won every single award it was nominated for at the Academy Awards - eleven from eleven - a clean sweep no other film has managed, though two have matched the eleven wins. It is the closing part of a fantasy trilogy, and its reputation for having several endings is entirely deserved.
- Movie #2 It fictionalises its own source material fairly heavily - the real widow was not yet widowed, and there were five brothers rather than four - changes made for shape rather than accuracy. It is a period drama about where a very famous children's story came from.
- Movie #3 Its trench sequences were built at a decommissioned airfield and shot in deliberately drained colour, in sharp contrast to the warm grading of the director's previous feature with the same lead. It is a wartime mystery wrapped around a romance, and it was disqualified from a national film award over its financing.
- Movie #1 It was written as one film, ran past four hours, and was split in two at the distributor's insistence. A long fight in a Tokyo restaurant switches to black and white partway through, partly for effect and partly to get past censors. It is a martial-arts revenge picture assembled out of other films.
- Movie #2 Much of its dialogue was improvised around a loose outline, and one supporting performance was so far outside what was written that the character was expanded during the shoot. It is a comedy about grown men refusing to be grown men, and it made a film star of a sketch comedian in his mid-thirties.
- Movie #3 It was shot on consumer digital video cameras, which the director chose partly for cost and partly because the smeary, low-resolution look could not be replicated on film. Deserted London streets were captured at dawn over several weeks with police holding traffic for minutes at a time. It is a post-apocalyptic horror.
- Movie #1 The studio was so alarmed by the lead performance during production that executives repeatedly asked whether the actor was drunk, and he reportedly told them they could either trust him or replace him. It is a swashbuckling adventure comedy adapted, improbably, from a theme-park ride.
- Movie #2 It was shot in Tokyo in twenty-seven days, largely without permits, with the crew moving quickly and filming in public spaces before anyone could object. The director wrote it for one specific actor and has said she had no plan if he declined. It is a melancholy comedy-drama about insomnia.
- Movie #3 Almost none of its cast had acted before. They were recruited from the neighbourhoods it depicts and trained for months in workshops where scenes were improvised rather than scripted, then filmed with handheld cameras in tight spaces. It is a crime drama covering roughly two decades.
- Movie #1 It out-earned its predecessor by a wide margin and finished the year as the highest-grossing release in America, which was not something animated sequels were assumed to do at the time. It is a fairy-tale comedy that spends most of its energy mocking the studio system that produced it.
- Movie #2 Human characters were the studio's long-standing weak point, so this was the first of its features built entirely around them, which meant solving skin, hair and clothing simultaneously. It is an animated superhero comedy that is really about a man in his forties who misses his old job.
- Movie #3 It runs almost exactly in real time, in something close to eighty minutes, and was shot in long unbroken takes as two people walk through Paris. Both leads share the writing credit. It is a romantic drama in which essentially nothing happens except conversation.
- Movie #1 Its antagonist's four mechanical arms were built as practical puppets operated by teams of technicians on set, with digital work used only to erase the operators - a decision made because the director wanted the actors to have something real to flinch from. It is a superhero sequel usually named as the point the genre grew up.
- Movie #2 Its disappearing-world effects were achieved in camera wherever possible - lights switched off by hand, sets struck while the actors stayed in frame, faces of extras deliberately obscured by the crew rather than by software. It is a science-fiction romance about deliberately forgetting somebody.
- Movie #3 Its most discussed sequence is a single unbroken side-on shot of a corridor fight, staged over three days and reportedly used on the seventeenth take. The lead actor learned to fight for it and also ate several live octopuses on camera. It is a revenge thriller with a reputation that precedes it everywhere.
- Movie #1 The author insisted the entire cast be British, which ruled out a great many bigger names and forced a nationwide search through school halls for an eleven-year-old nobody had heard of. What resulted is a children's fantasy adventure built almost entirely from practical sets and animatronics.
- Movie #2 Its central technical problem was hair. The lead character is covered in more than two million individually simulated strands, which took the animation team years of research and required rendering time nobody had budgeted for. The result is an animated comedy about industrial workplace safety.
- Movie #3 It began as a television pilot, was rejected by the network that commissioned it, and was then rebuilt into a feature with additional footage shot more than a year later - which is why its first half behaves like an ongoing series and its second half does not behave like anything. It is a surrealist neo-noir mystery.
- Movie #1 All three parts were shot at once, over more than a year in New Zealand, on a gamble so large that the studio backing it would have collapsed had the first one failed. The result is an epic fantasy adventure whose scale was achieved mostly with forced perspective and enormous quantities of handmade chainmail.
- Movie #2 Its colour sequences run backwards and its black-and-white sequences run forwards, and the two meet in the middle at the exact moment the audience finally understands what has been happening. It is a neo-noir thriller assembled to make the viewer share a specific disability rather than merely observe it.
- Movie #3 Almost every shot was digitally graded toward green and gold, which was unusual enough at the time that the process itself became a talking point. It is a whimsical romantic comedy about a shy young woman who decides to arrange other people's happiness while comprehensively avoiding her own.
- Movie #1 Its production used so much of one particular shade of fluorescent pink paint that it was widely reported to have caused a worldwide shortage of it. A fantasy comedy that is also, fairly openly, a satire of the company that manufactures its subject.
- Movie #2 It began as a serialised story its author posted free on his own website chapter by chapter, then sold for less than a dollar as an ebook when readers asked for a downloadable version. A science-fiction survival story, and the space agency it depicts consulted on it extensively.
- Movie #3 It is staged and stitched together to look like a single unbroken take from beginning to end, which meant trenches had to be dug to the exact length of the dialogue being spoken while walking them. Its director based it on stories his grandfather told him about carrying messages in the First World War.
- Movie #1 Its costume designer built the look out of specific real cultures rather than an invented one, drawing on Basotho blankets, Himba hairstyles and Tuareg dress, and became the first African American to win the Academy Award in that category. A superhero action film with a very deliberate visual thesis.
- Movie #2 It has barely any spoken dialogue, running instead on American Sign Language, and its young deaf character is played by a deaf actress who taught much of the cast to sign. A creature-feature survival thriller built almost entirely on sound design.
- Movie #3 Its exosuits were practical rather than digital and weighed something like eighty-five pounds, which the cast had to actually wear and move in for months. A science-fiction action film adapted from a Japanese novel, and the studio later reversed its own title on home release after the marketing underperformed.
- Movie #1 Most of its lead role had already been recorded by a different comedian who died before the film was finished, and the replacement then insisted on re-recording everything a second time in a Scottish accent, reportedly costing millions. It is an animated fantasy comedy built largely out of jokes at fairy tales' expense.
- Movie #2 It was made for about four and a half million dollars by a director whose entire career until then had been sketch comedy, and it returned more than fifty times its budget. Its own director prefers to call it a social thriller rather than horror, though it works comfortably as both.
- Movie #3 A working illusionist was brought in to consult so that the tricks would be built on real methods wherever possible, though the film cheerfully abandons that discipline by its final act. A heist thriller dressed as a stage show.
- Movie #1 One of its principal actors died before filming was complete, and his remaining scenes were finished using a body double and a digitally reconstructed face, at a cost of several million dollars. It is a historical revenge epic, and its script was still being rewritten while cameras rolled.
- Movie #2 Its director had been nominated five times without winning before this one finally took it, which most people read as an overdue career award rather than a verdict on the film itself. A crime thriller, remade from a Hong Kong picture released four years earlier.
- Movie #3 Its alien writing was designed as a genuine working system rather than decoration, with an artist building over a hundred distinct symbols and a real linguist consulted on how the translation process would actually proceed. A science-fiction drama in which almost nothing is resolved by force.
- Movie #1 Its script sold in a bidding war for a reported two and a quarter million dollars, an extraordinary sum for a writer with no hit to his name, who insisted on keeping the director's chair as part of the deal. It is a supernatural psychological thriller, and its colour grading hides a rule: the colour red appears only where the other world has touched something.
- Movie #2 It is a remake of a 1960 picture that was mostly an excuse for its famously boozy cast to hang around Las Vegas together, and the director took it on immediately after two films that had both put him in the Oscar race the same year. A heist comedy, played very light.
- Movie #3 Its director was notorious on set for demanding take after take, in some cases well past seventy, and shot the whole thing digitally at a point when that was still unusual for a major release. It is a procedural crime drama about an investigation rather than a killer.
- Movie #1 Its four leads were put through roughly four months of full-time martial arts training before a single scene was shot, one of them working through it while recovering from neck surgery. The result is a cyberpunk action film that reset what Hollywood fight choreography was expected to look like.
- Movie #2 Its impossibly tidy town is a real place, a planned coastal community on the Florida panhandle that needed almost no set dressing to pass as a soundstage. It is a satirical science-fiction drama, and it arrived several years before reality television made its premise ordinary.
- Movie #3 Its younger lead wore prosthetic makeup for months so his face would read as a plausible version of his co-star's, and studied that actor's recordings to copy his speech. A time-travel thriller, with a chunk of its second act relocated to Shanghai to secure financing.
- Movie #1 Its director made a dozen submersible dives to the real wreck before shooting a frame, and has pointed out that he ended up spending more time down there than its passengers ever did. What he built around that footage is an epic historical romance sitting inside a disaster picture.
- Movie #2 Production shut down completely for a year in the middle of shooting so its star could lose around fifty pounds and grow out a beard, and the director filled the gap by making an entirely separate thriller with much of the same crew. It is a survival drama whose middle hour is very nearly wordless.
- Movie #3 It is built in the shape of the thing it is about: a voice-over in the opening minutes lays out the three stages of a magic trick, and the film then performs each of them in order. A period thriller about professional rivalry in Victorian London.