Knives Out is a film that has grossed $164 million to date and has received considerable award recognition including an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. While I can understand the film’s popularity given the moviegoing public’s hunger for a great murder mystery, even if this isn’t that, it’s the film’s awards recognition that puzzles me. I just don’t find anything award-worthy about it.

The plot of Knives Out may be full of twists, but no more so than the plots of many of today’s TV mysteries. The bigger problem is that none of the characters, except for the central heroine and her mother, are people that the audience can warm up to.

Rising star Ana de Armis is the young nurse who inherits the fortune of mystery writer Christopher Plummer who has either committed suicide or has been murdered by someone in his household. Among the suspects are family members Don Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, and Chris Evans, one meaner and nastier than the next. The police are incompetent and the secretly hired private detective, played by Daniel Craig, speaks with a highly annoying fake Southern drawl. The best that can be said for the film is that it has marvelous set decorations, which is not something to warm the cockles of a mystery lover’s heart by itself.

A good mystery has, in addition to an intriguing plot, characters that are either interesting, sympathetic or both. Here are ten films, that like Knives Out, are available on Blu-ray and standard DVD, but unlike Knives Out, feature intriguing plots with characters that are always interesting and often sympathetic:

The plot of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man revolved around the disappearance of the title character but audiences have always thought of Nick Charles, the private detective played by William Powell who solves the case, as The Thin Man himself in this 1934 film that spawned six sequels. It was the sparkling dialogue and interplay between Nick and his wife Nora, played by Myrna Loy, that audiences, then as now, love about the film more than its plot, although the plot is pretty good, too. Maureen O’Sullivan leads a strong supporting cast as the missing man’s daughter.

Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca was a best-selling novel before it became Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film, so its original 1940 audiences were well aware of the plot turns before Hitchcock and his cast immortalized them, but whether you watch it cold for the first time or having read the novel first, you will be drawn into it by the superb acting of Joan Fontaine as the timid bride identified only as “the second Mrs. de Winter,” Laurence Olivier as her husband, and Judith Anderson as the evil housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, along with such acting stalwarts as George Sanders, Gladys Cooper, Nigel Bruce, and Florence Bates in other key roles.

Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None was filmed several times but only recently was an adaptation made from her original novel. Most versions were made from Christie’s stage version of which this is no exception. The cast is led by Oscar winners Walter Huston and Barry Fitzgerald as two of the ten inhabitants of an island cut off from the world for a weekend during which the characters are killed off one by one. Rounding out the impeccable cast are Louis Hayward, June Duprez, Roland Young, Judith Anderson, Mischa Auer, C. Aubrey Smith, Richard Haydn, and Queenie Leonard.

Billy Wilder’s 1957 film of Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution was adapted from Christie’s stage play with added twists and turns involving Tyrone Power as the accused killer of an older woman, Marlene Dietrich as his German born wife who becomes a witness for the prosecution thanks to the machinations of the plot, and Charles Laughton as his brilliant but befuddled defense attorney. Elsa Lanchester as Laughton’s nurse, a role written especially for her by Wilder, and Una O’Connor, Laughton’s mother in This Land Is Mine, and the screaming maid in Lanchester’s The Bride of Frankenstein, co-star.

Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, a literary staple since the 1930s and a frequent character in films and TV series, is represented here by Jean Gabin in a 1958 French film also known as Maigret Sets a Trap. The original story of the hunt for a Parisian serial killer was mesmerizing by itself, but Jean Dellannoy’s film raises the ante considerably with the main suspect’s wife and mother both taking credit for one of the murders. Gabin again played Maigret in 1959’s equally fascinating Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case, which was also expanded from its original story and directed by Delannoy.

Swinging London was the backdrop for Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s first film in English, in which the mystery is never solved. Like most of the director’s films, including L’Avventura and La Notte, it’s left up to the viewer to figure out what it all means. David Hemmings is the photographer who finds something suspicious in a photo he has taken. Vanessa Redgrave is the model who may or may not have something to do with the subsequent murder. This was one of the most discussed films its year along with A Man for All Seasons and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? .

The sundrenched modern film noir began with Roman Polanski’s intense 1974 thriller Chinatown. The film involves Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and legendary director John Huston (The Maltese Falcon) in a web of deceit, corruption, and murder involving Los Angeles real estate in the 1930s. Polanski filmed it from the perspective of the main character as in such Raymond Chandler mysteries Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, and The Long Goodbye. As a result, Nicholson is in every scene as private investigator J.J. (Jake) Gittes.

In Curtis Hanson’s equally sundrenched 1997 modern film noir L.A. Confidential, the action is set in an L.A. of forty years earlier, in which three L.A. detectives – one straitlaced, one sleazy, and one brutal – investigate a series of murders with their own sense of justice. The performances of Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, and Russell Crowe as the detectives, and Oscar winner Kim Basinger as a high class prostitute modeled on actress Veronica Lake (Sullivan’s Travels) were the standouts, with John Cromwell, Danny De Vito, David Strathairn, and Ron Rifkin lending strong support.

Anthony Mingella’s 1999 sundrenched modern film noir of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley surpassed even René Clement’s extraordinary 1960 version, called Purple Noon, with Matt Damon and Oscar nominee Jude Law reprising the roles made famous by Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet in the earlier version, joining Chinatown and L.A. Confidential as an exemplar of the genre. Highsmith earlier drew Hollywood’s notice with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 superb adaptation of her Strangers on a Train.

It took another two decades for Edward Norton’s adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (reviewed here last week) to join the parade of great modern films noir. Like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, this tale of murder, deceit, and corruption in high places is set in an earlier time, 1950’s New York City. Norton has never been better than as the private detective suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome, who takes on a prince of the city (Alec Baldwin) in order to solve the murder of his mentor (Bruce Willis) and prevent the murder of the only woman who has ever loved him (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).

This week’s new releases include Dark Waters and Uncut Gems.