Acclaimed writer and director Rian Johnson (BRICK, LOOPER, THE LAST JEDI) pays tribute to mystery mastermind Agatha Christie in KNIVES OUT, a fun, modern-day murder mystery where everyone is a suspect. When renowned crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead at his estate just after his 85th birthday, the inquisitive and debonair Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is.

No movie in 2019 feels more alive than Knives Out, Rian Johnson’s first film since Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

It upends the whodunit genre with a stream of twists that kept me guessing until the final act while also delivering a surprisingly effective critique of white privilege. If you’re paying attention, it’s the smartest movie of 2019, but even if you’re not, it’s still prickly fun.

On the 85th birthday of eccentric mystery author Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), his extended family gather at his home for a night of revelry. The next morning, Harlan is found dead, and a private detective is hired to investigate.

Meanwhile, the entire family unravels into hysteria. Who has claim to his wealth? What are the circumstances of his death?

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Thrombey’s part-time nurse, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), emerges as the emotional lead and narrative focus. Her relationship with her employer makes her vital to the investigation, even as she becomes increasingly entangled in the mystery. She’s nervous, good-hearted, assertive, and vomits whenever she lies.

Marta may be the closest to a three-dimensional character on Johnson’s chessboard, but the rest of the cast has plenty of quirks, flaws, and motives. You’ll walk away from seeing Knives Out struggling to pinpoint your favorite character.

Chris Evans sheds the nice guy persona of Captain America by playing the biggest asshole in Knives Out. If the cast weren’t so stacked, he might even steal the show. Daniel Craig’s an absurd Southern gentleman as Detective Benoit Blanc; Jaime Lee Curtis is a cigarette-smoking, domineering older sister; and Toni Collette is essentially playing Gwyneth Paltrow — a healthy lifestyle guru whose free spirit comes at a vapid price. Katherine Langford, Michael Shannon, Lakeith Stanfield, and Frank Oz (!) round out the cast.

Large portions of the story are told through narrative flashbacks during police interviews, and what actually happened often contradicts what the interviewee is telling Craig’s detective. In classic style, we get to rewatch the same events from different perspectives. To hear one person tell it, a heated argument might look like a tender reunion. In one case, a welcoming smile is later revealed to be a self-righteous form of encouragement to fuel a racist tirade. Johnson layers Knives Out with thorny, unlikeable, provocative people — right down to the alt-right teen who spends much of the film masturbating in a bathroom.

A whodunit in an era when people can google spoilers on their phones may seem out of time, but Knives Out is patently aware of the nowness of its own story.

An argument about President Donald Trump erupts in the middle of this well-heeled party, and it may be awkward for some to watch.

Knives Out is the type of movie Americans should be talking about this weekend over their Thanksgiving leftovers. It’s steeped in the vernacular of 2019 — at one point the alt-right teen calls his grad student cousin a social justice warrior — but instead of dating itself, these references will keep the movie as a sort of time capsule.

If Rian Johnson has a fault as a writer-director, it’s that most of his work — including Star Wars: The Last Jedi — has a wafting air of pretentiousness. As a storyteller, he’s always trying to buck trends and defy your expectations.

In Knives Out, Johnson serves up a fun, charming, hilarious, compelling mystery that’s impossible to dislike — though Trump supporters may grumble.

Most murder mysteries use red herrings and misdirection like a butcher knife. The result can be lowbrow, schlocky pulp entertainment. But Johnson wields these narrative tools like a scalpel. Though hardly subtle, the scene changes and the structure keep things humming smoothly. This cast will keep you entertained as two hours and 10 minutes zip by.

If you pay close enough attention, you might just crack the case before Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc — who deserves an entire franchise of mystery movies! But that won’t harm your ability to enjoy Knives Out in the slightest.

When’s the last time you could say that about a murder mystery?

Knives Out cuts into theaters on November 27, just in time for Thanksgiving.

Sometimes the worst in our families and ourselves comes out during the holidays, so how do we make this season the beautiful time it’s supposed to be?

“In 1623,” wrote Professor Thomas S. Kidd in his review of The First Thanksgiving, “Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford proclaimed the first Thanksgiving.

“’The great Father,’ he declared, ‘has given us this year an abundant harvest...and granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience.’ He directed the Pilgrims to gather that November, ‘the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Plymouth Rock, there to listen to ye Pastor and render Thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all his blessings.’

“Except Bradford didn't write that.

“Someone — we don't know who — fabricated this ‘proclamation’ in the late 20th century…. Yet quotes from Bradford's ‘proclamation’ circulate around the internet and appear in books such as 48 Liberal Lies About American History and Sermon Outlines for Busy Pastors.

“Surviving records from the Pilgrims actually tell us little about the ‘first Thanksgiving,’ tempting folks to fill in details where they don't exist. In this, the Pilgrims join a long line of historical characters that Americans — and especially some evangelicals — have attempted to form in their own image.”

This temptation to put a rosy glow around this holiday quickly runs into trouble with historic details like “not long after the first Thanksgiving — which was indeed a peaceful, if tense meal between the English and their Wampanoag neighbors — the Pilgrims launched a preemptive assault on local Massachusetts Indians that resulted in violence and bitter resentments. The English even placed the severed head of one Native American on a pike outside their fort.

“Recalling this is telling the truth, not revisionist history. Even one of their dismayed former pastors wrote from Holland that he wished they had converted some Indians to Christianity ‘before you had killed any!’”

Those of us with more ‘challenging’ families to deal with at Thanksgiving might relate.

Two Reasons Not to Stab Anyone

Remembering the ‘reason for the season’ is tough when Uncle Hamlog begins railing against the results of the most recent election, three of the youngest cousins have devolved into raptors and are having a screaming contest in the back room, or Stepmom Teetotaler starts shooting snide comments at whichever relative had to gall to serve real champagne at their wedding (the bride had her shoulders uncovered too, shameless little hussy).

People are often ridiculous, painful or outright hateful. In a sinful world, that’s an unfortunate result and reality. This becomes especially hard when they’re also the ones that we’re called to love and respect.

Family is usually a regular fixture of life, so there’s increased opportunities for everyone to hurt each another.

While most people talk about gratitude during Thanksgiving, we might do well to consider forgiveness as well, as Pastor Claude Houde, founder of Église Nouvelle Vie and World Challenge board member, noted in a pre-Thanksgiving sermon. “The church [or family] is a collision of imperfection. When we are coming together with all of our lives, backgrounds, hurt people that hurt people — I’m not a prophet, but I can prophesy this to you…in the next year, at one point or another, you will be offended….

The second prophesy is I promise you that, in the next year, you will offend someone. You will disappoint someone…. In the end, what destroys and tears up marriages, lives, relationships, churches is not the offense; it’s the refusal to forgive.”

Pastor Houde added, “With unforgiveness comes anger and a certain blindness. Your past is being distorted and your present. Your thanksgiving begins to be aborted. You can’t thank God for anything. You begin not to see. You’re blinded to other people’s qualities. You’re blinded to what God can do and has done and will do for you. Unforgiveness can even make our worship something that God rejects.”

Even laying aside the personal effects of unforgiveness, Rick Thomas points out another reason in his article for how to have a genuine Thanksgiving with difficult people: “The point of the gospel coming into your life was not to give you all of your dreams or to meet all of your expectations. Salvation was not granted to you so you could relax, but so you could get busy sharing Christ with others (Philippians 1:29).

“The gospel is a rugged cross that must be modeled and taught to needy men and women. The gospel is the message in your heart that He wants you to carry to those who need to hear it, like Uncle Biff. If our gospel cannot transcend our differences, we have no gospel worth discussing.”

Living our lives not only free from the shackles of unforgiveness but also as a witness to skeptical family members is easy to forget about in the middle of conflict. The Bible doesn’t give us any excuses, though. “Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18-19).

That message of reconciliation is for family too.

Putting Away the Sharp Cutlery

In 1863, the Civil War was in full swing. That summer, the Vicksburg and Gettysburg campaigns carved a grisly path across the United States. The entire country was wracked by conflict, and even families were at odds with one another over the political stances they had taken and the atrocities that were piling up on both sides as a result.

President Abraham Lincoln sat down that October and, in the middle of this nation-wide tension, wrote, “The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies.

“To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

“In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity…peace has been preserved with all [foreign] nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict…. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

“It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

“And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity [sic] and Union.”

As we approach this Thanksgiving in a year that has been polarized — violently at times — by medical horrors and political strife, we must prepare to meet with the broken, anxious people who are our family. The lion’s share of that preparation will be forgiving past hurts and submitting ourselves to the Lord of mercy.

Knives Out Thanksgiving

The holiday may not be easy, but it can still be filled with gratitude for the good God we serve.