The Best Crime Dramas Movies to Watch on Hoopla
As the third instalment in Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” trilogy after First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), Master Gardner rounds up the issues at stake in a most profound way. For anyone who’s seen a film either scripted by Schrader (such as Taxi Driver) or directed by him, there will be […]
Also known as Just 6.5 or Six and a Half per Meters, this police procedural follows the hunt for a drug kingpin named Naser Khakzad. Fast-paced action sets up the investigation off to a thrilling start, and it’s exhilarating to see Samad, the lead cop, get closer and closer to this elusive pusher. However, what […]
Dramatizing the murder of Hatun “Aynur” Sürücü, A Regular Woman frames her story from her dispassionate narration after she’s passed. This results in a harrowing tale. Knowing her death before she returns home paints every single moment with her family in fury, as they pin every frustration and blame on Aynur for numerous reasons, the […]
Babylon Berlin is mostly an intriguing spy thriller with both the sleekness and the style of the Golden Twenties, but what makes it stand out is the way it depicts the inevitability of the country’s upcoming struggles, as well as the hope it held in itself to reach a brighter future, with the new millennium. […]
Bryan Cranston, best known for his role as Walter White in the Breaking Bad series, stars as Robert Mazur, a federal agent, who goes undercover to infiltrate the trafficking network of Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. With the film based on Mazur’s memoir, Bryan Cranston gives an impressive lead performance that captures the intense distress […]
Many films centered around a mother’s love rarely dares to question it. For most people, the fundamental relationship between mother and child is a given, so viewers might be shocked at the way this murder mystery explores how much this bond can be tested. Centered on a murder case with a mentally disabled suspect, Mother […]
Gangsters usually deal in guns and drugs, but occasionally they branch out into other paraphernalia. Bullhead depicts one such gang. Nicknamed by the media as the Hormone Mafia, the crime thriller captures an organized crime network that threatens local cattle farmers to buy their stock of illegal growth hormones. Of course, the setting makes for […]
Bad Lieutenant is no misnomer: Harvey Keitel’s policeman really is one of NYPD’s worst. Already corrupt, abrasive, and abusive at the film’s outset, the movie chronicles his coked-out descent into total depravity after he’s called to investigate a heinous crime amid rapidly worsening personal circumstances. The brilliance of Bad Lieutenant is therefore a counterintuitive one: […]
Our Children opens at the harrowing end of the true story it’s based on: with the image of a distraught mother (Émilie Dequenne) in a hospital bed, begging a police officer to ensure that her children — who have just predeceased her — are buried in Morocco. From this ominous beginning, the film rewinds into […]
Admittedly, The Man from Nowhere can feel a bit derivative. A quiet and mysterious stranger befriending a child, and ending up enacting his revenge when the child gets kidnapped… It feels like writer-director Lee Jeong-beom took two certain film plots and stitched it together into one. But where the film lacks in original story, The […]
The worst has happened in A Wolf at the Door. With Sylvia finding out that her child was picked up from school by an unknown stranger, it’s up to her to figure out what has happened. Already, the premise is terrifying. Writer-director Fernando Coimbra starts this mystery through the police interrogations, with the camera focused […]
Zodiac is an edge-of-your-seat thriller that knows exactly when to be slow and when to pick up the pace. Director David Fincher delivers what he was admired for in movies like Se7en and Fight Club (and more recently Gone Girl), and that is an intelligent, not necessarily satisfactory, gripping film. The ensemble cast including a surprisingly fitting Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr. gives a great […]
Despite the title and the premise, The Naked Kiss is actually less raunchy than it sounds. Sure, it does have themes that seem more explicit than what’s expected from older classic films, but writer-director Samuel Fuller considers these themes with the weight it deserves, directly challenging the way the men of the town would scorn […]
Despite how the title sounds like, the horror of Bedevilled isn’t a devil, a demon, or a spirit. It isn’t even the way childhood friend Bok-nam snaps, taking up a scythe and going on a murderous rampage to kill all the people that wronged her. No, the actual horror of Bedevilled is that everyday people […]
When a regime falls, what follows isn’t a clean slate– it lingers, and it haunts those that were able to survive, part due to what was done to them and part to what they have done. Marshland ostensibly is a police procedural investigating a series of women murdered in rural Spain, but it’s also a […]
This teenage crime drama contains enough grit to stand on its own, but The Tribe’s real hook is in the way it’s told: entirely in Ukrainian sign language, without subtitles. Set in a boarding school for deaf students, new arrival Sergei must contend with an institution that’s run like a gang. His journey through the […]
There are plenty of great Hollywood movie musicals from the 1950s that are still held in high regard today. Guys and Dolls is one such musical, though perhaps it hasn’t gotten the iconic status that other MGM musicals garnered due to its uneven casting. Nevertheless, the film version of the popular stage musical adapts it […]
A Danish cargo ship is hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. The pirates demand millions of dollars in ransom and from there on, a psychological drama between the pirates and the ship owner develops, as they negotiate the price for the ship and its crew. A really great thing about this film is […]
Based off the real life experiences of the film’s writer, Jack Asser, Starred Up is a gritty crime drama set within a violent offenses prison in the UK. The film’s name references a youthful offender who, by virtue of his crimes, is sent to an adult facility. The film hums along like a taut bit […]
A group of male friends become obsessed with a group of mysterious sisters who are sheltered by their strict, religious parents after one of them commits suicide. Sofia Coppola does a great job taking the novel and turning it into a full featured movie. The movie is admittedly a bit slow, but it paints such […]
Tsotsi, a delinquent from Johannesburg, South Africa, realizes after shooting a woman and stealing her car, that her baby is on the back seat. A movie with very few words but which manages to be extremely touching. As you witness the transformation of Tsotsi, through his increasing affection for the baby, you will be astonished by the amazing actor, who manages […]
