Movies like Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Why it's similar — Richard Osman's retirement-village amateur detectives work the same Christie-with-a-modern-grin register Glass Onion is sitting in: a closed-circle British whodunit whose surface chumminess is doing real plot work, with the actual crime running underneath the cosy weekly meetings. Both keep the genre's classical mechanics — diagrammed suspects, false confessions, third-act tableau — while updating the casts to people the contemporary audience recognises from elsewhere.

Why it's similar — Colin Higgins's San Francisco caper has the same comic-detective DNA Johnson keeps reaching back to — Hitchcock plotting played for laughs without losing the suspense — and pairs Goldie Hawn with Chevy Chase in roughly the same way Glass Onion pairs Monáe's grief with Craig's drawl. Both films are arguments that the cosy mystery can be genuinely funny without giving up the body in the library.

Why it's similar — Michael Ritchie's Chevy Chase vehicle gives Glass Onion's particular pleasure — a wisecracking investigator running concentric circles around a self-made millionaire whose business is a fraud — its 1980s version. The films share a structural joke: the suspect believes he is hiring the detective; the detective has been investigating him from before page one.

Why it's similar — Woody Allen and Diane Keaton's Upper West Side amateur sleuth comedy keeps the bantering-couple register Johnson borrows for the Blanc-Helen pairing — two people working a homicide as though it were a dinner-party debate, with the detective work itself written as the form their friendship is currently taking. Both films treat the murder as the occasion for the relationship rather than the other way around.

Why it's similar — John Candy's incompetent-PI farce stages the inverse joke Glass Onion runs on Miles Bron: a man everyone agrees is a fool turns out to be solving the case while the people who hired him assume he is missing the point. The pairing is for viewers who liked how often Johnson lets Glass Onion's comedy out-pace its mystery scaffolding without losing the solution.