Best Action Movies to Watch on Kanopy

Who would’ve thought a wordless, black-and-white, slapstick comedy would still be hugely entertaining in this day and age? Hundreds of Beavers is created in the same spirit as the Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton comedies of yore, but it’s a tribute that manages to feel fresh, exciting, and unpredictable. The premise is simple: a man […]

At times looking and sounding like a real Filipino action film from 50 years ago, while painstakingly edited to juggle storylines across several realities, Leonor Will Never Die is worth seeing for its originality and ambition alone. Among so many other films that function as sanitized “love letters to cinema,” this one bears the distinction […]

Escape from Mogadishu follows diplomats from the North and South Korean embassies as they put aside their differences and work together to escape from an outbreak of civil war in Mogadishu, Somalia. Director Ryoo Seung-wan provides thrilling, high-budget action, especially intense car chases and suspenseful escape scenes that pump you with adrenaline and leave you […]

Don’t let the title and poster fool you—Riders of Justice isn’t the testosterone-filled action flick you’d expect going in (though it does get ridiculous at some points). It centers on deployed military man Markus, played by the appropriately masculine Mads Mikkelsen, who has to return home to his teenage daughter Mathilde after his wife dies […]

It’s not easy to abandon the past. Even if you want to shed your new identity, the memory of what you’ve done still linger in other people’s minds, especially if guns and violence are involved. Old Henry is one of the few Westerns that actually examines that. Of course, it holds some of the classic […]

Watch this if you like weird movies. And don’t be fooled by the first half, which serves just to set Jesse Eisenberg’s character and the monotone life he leads. It’s the calm before the storm, during which that character is attacked by a violent gang and decides to take self-defense classes in an unusual club. […]

War doesn’t take place in just one battle– it takes multiple battles in certain strategic places across a country or even a continent. It’s because of this that when one group claims victory, it’s not immediately obvious across all territories. This is what happened in The Forgotten Battle. The film’s title refers to the Battle […]

While the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the two leads in The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil are more like an uneasy alliance of rivals competing to hunt down a serial killer. This isn’t a new concept. Filmmakers all over the world are fond of putting together two opposite characters and making them […]

Director Zhang Yimou, who already has remarkable wuxia films like Hero and House of Flying Daggers under his belt, delivers another exceptional epic. Set during China’s Three Kingdoms era (220–280 AD), Shadow revolves around a great king and his people, who are expelled from their homeland but will aspire to reclaim it. The story requires […]

Two brothers played by Channing Tatum and Adam Driver decide to rob a local NASCAR event, the Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina. They put together a team to help them, with Daniel Craig as the demolition expert and Katie Holmes as the gateway driver. Other big names behind this project are actors Seth MacFarlane […]

The Witch hardly reinvents the thriller wheel. In fact, part of the fun in watching it is calling out the cliches. Cold-blooded villain? Check. Antihero who defies death? Check. Senseless, bloody killings for minutes on end? Check, check, check. The Witch has everything you’d expect from an action movie, and yet, the viewing experience is […]

A zombie virus breaks out and catches up with a father as he is taking his daughter from Seoul to Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city. Watch them trying to survive to reach their destination, a purported safe zone. The acting is spot-on; the set pieces are particularly well choreographed. You’ll care about the characters. You’ll […]