Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Before they worked together on Marvel’s Iron Man 3, writer-director Shane Black and Robert Downey Jr. made this trippy cult classic crime-comedy about a thief (Downey Jr.) posing as an actor who winds up in the middle of a murder investigation alongside a private eye (Val Kilmer) and an actress in employment limbo (Michelle Monaghan).

Before this, his directorial debut, Shane Black was a screenwriting wunderkind of the 1980s, penning the wildly successful Lethal Weapon, Lethal Weapon 2 and reputedly most-uses-of-the-f-word-in-history flick The Last Boy Scout (as well as a memorable acting turn in Predator). By the time of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Black had been largely invisible for nearly a decade since writing 1996's The Long Kiss Goodnight, but showed he'd lost none of his snarky wit - from the title onwards, which riffs on film critic extraordinaire Pauline Kael.