For Fans of Morgan Freeman

Se7en is the rare thriller where the horror lands not in gore but in what people are capable of convincing themselves is righteous. Freeman's Somerset is the moral compass the film needs: skeptical, tired, profoundly decent, and still curious enough to believe a library card can solve anything. When he and Brad Pitt argue about whether staying or leaving matters, you feel the whole weight of human exhaustion on one side and human fury on the other. The film earns its devastating ending because Somerset earns yours.

Glory is one of the finest war films ever made, and Freeman's Sergeant Major John Rawlins is its spine. While Matthew Broderick's Colonel Shaw anchors the narrative, it is Freeman who provides the regiment its dignity, humor, and fury. The film is about the historical erasure of Black soldiers from the story of their own liberation, and Rawlins makes you feel that contradiction in every scene without a single speech written to do so.

James Patterson's detective Alex Cross, a forensic psychologist working high-profile serial-killer cases in Washington D.C., was written with a calm, analytical authority that maps naturally onto what Freeman did with the character in Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider. The early novels, especially Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls, move fast and think hard. They are not literary fiction, but they are genuinely clever in the way Freeman's best thrillers are: the detective reads the criminal, and reading him back is most of the pleasure.

Disco Elysium works because it takes the interior monologue of a broken person trying to reconstruct a sense of self and makes it the entire game. The voices in your head argue, philosophize, and remember things you wish they would forget. It is the most literary game made in a decade, and its moral stakes, the question of what kind of detective, what kind of person, what kind of politics you can live with, feel close to the questions Freeman's best films put to their audiences.