The Best Gripping Movies to Watch on Hoopla
Some movies are so enthralling they pull you to the edge of your seat, and there you stay until the end. For a guaranteed good time, check out the most gripping movies and shows to stream now.
When modern systems like law enforcement and forensics fail to come up with definite answers to a murder, loved ones of the victim usually have no recourse, which is the fear at the heart of Irish horror film Oddity. To lose someone you care about, forever, hurts. So when Darcy takes more strange and esoteric […]
x1As 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 […]
In The Promised Land, director Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair) and Mads Mikkelsen reunite to create another intense, enjoyable drama based on true historical events. Mikkelsen is reliably gripping as Captain Ludwig Kahlen, but it’s his back-and-forths with the diabolical landowner Frederik Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg) that are the standout scenes here. And though The Promised […]
One of the most overlooked films in recent years, Boiling Point is an intense British drama about the life of a head chef. We get to view his world for exactly 90 minutes and, yes, it is all shot in one go. No camera tricks or quirks, just pure filmmaking. Many other movies have tried […]
Despite being based on a 19th-century serial novel, Lost Illusions feels remarkably close to contemporary concerns about fake news and the devaluing of art for profit. But as the story is also, obviously, set in the 19th century, all this bribery and these backdoor dealings are done entirely through the written word and by sending […]
A road trip movie with an unknown destination, Hit the Road plays with our expectations by avoiding any obvious questions we might have, and making us focus on the real important things. Informed by the censorship and persecution faced by critics of Iran’s government—including director Panah Panahi’s own filmmaker father, Jafar—the film places more focus […]
A young woman’s coming-of-age threatens to topple the uneasy hierarchy of her family in this striking debut from Croatian director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović. The trigger for Julija’s (Gracija Filipović) angsty rebellion is the arrival of her parents’ enigmatic wealthy friend, Javi (Cliff Curtis), whom her controlling father Ante (Leon Lučev) is hoping to squeeze a […]
One woman’s main character syndrome reaches shocking lows in this vicious Norwegian satire of social-media-era narcissists. Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and her artist boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther) are a deeply toxic couple who torture everyone around them with their constant, petty one-upmanship. When he lands a flashy magazine spread, though, Signe’s usual tactics for slyly […]
To be fair to this visibly low-budget adaptation of H. G. Wells’ seminal science-fiction novel, it doesn’t always settle for the cheap way out. Though it still leaves much to be desired in its visual effects, awkward action scenes, and generally unimaginative direction, Fear the Invisible Man makes a valiant effort to deepen its story […]
In Luzzu, tradition and modernity — plus principles and necessity — come crashing up against each other like waves in a raging storm. Trying to navigate his way through the tempest is Jesmark (Jesmark Scicluna), a Maltese fisherman proudly descended from a long family line of the profession. But Jesmark’s work — and his identity, […]
Even a straightforward documentary on the New York East Village visual artist David Wonjarowicz (pronounced VOY-nuh-ROH-vitch) would be thrilling, given the energy and the irreverence of his artworks especially during the AIDS epidemic from the 1980s to the 1990s. But director Chris McKim goes above and beyond, essentially imagining how Wojnarowicz would have directed his […]
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 […]
Bull is a gritty and haunting drama featuring a phenomenal performance by Rob Morgan as a bullfighter. In a poor Houston suburb, he plays an aging and lonely black man doing everything he can to survive. He brushes off unrelenting racism, rides even when it’s life-threatening and raises chickens to sell them. His next-door neighbor […]
It would be easy to define Rose Plays Julie as a cross between Promising Young Woman and Killing Eve, but this psychological thriller turns the camp factor down to zero and makes even just the act of watching somebody else an existential experience. Directors Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy treat this story with stone-cold intensity […]
Featuring real, in-the-moment footage of operations to rescue young queer individuals from the continuing anti-gay purges in the Chechen Republic, Welcome to Chechnya makes for a demanding but essential call to action. There’s a genuine sense of fear that pervades the documentary, not just for those being rescued after being forcibly outed, beaten, and trapped […]
How far would you go for the people that you love? Regardless of the answer, whether that would be one mile, five hundred, or five hundred more, the distance won’t matter if there’s something that blocks you. 200 Meters is a drive with the titular length, it’s not even longer than a mile. But it […]
x2Following a group of journalists uncovering an entire architecture of institutional corruption in Romania, Collective makes for an inspiring watch—not just because these people are pursuing a story outside their usual wheelhouse, but because their enemy really is so much greater than they can handle. Yet they continue chipping away, never once backing down from […]
The sooner you adjust your expectations for Nomad—and realize that this isn’t a travel documentary but Werner Herzog’s own wonderfully offbeat way of remembering his dear friend—the better. Any uneven moments in this film’s construction are smoothed over by the sheer authenticity of what Herzog puts on screen, from his own distinctive narration, to gorgeous […]
A nostalgic look at ’90s Belarus brings to bear a sharp generational divide. Evalina is a young DJ living in Minsk with her mother, but dreaming of Chicago, the birthplace of House music. Her attempts to gain a US visa land her in a small factory town, where the tensions between her modern lifestyle and […]
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 […]
There’s more than a touch of Louis Theroux to this engrossing documentary — fronted by New Zealander pop-culture journalist David Farrier — about an innocuous-seeming Internet phenomenon: the actually-sinister subculture of “competitive endurance tickling”, in which young men undergo “tickle torture” for money on camera. When Farrier unassumingly requests an interview with an American producer […]
The bare bones of The Limey’s story — vengeful Cockney ex-con Wilson (Terence Stamp) flies to LA to investigate the suspicious death of his daughter Jenny — are gripping enough, but what Steven Soderbergh does with them elevates this neo-noir thriller into something utterly singular and stacked with layers upon layers of meaning. An icon […]
One of Shakespeare’s most indelible works is brought roaring to life in this explosive adaptation. The action is transposed from the 1400s to brutalist 1930s England, with the bloody civil war between the houses of Lancaster and York being waged by tanks and planes instead of cavalry. The switch isn’t merely cosmetic, though: in an […]
Named for all the connections that form a functioning society, Threads is a harrowing look at what might happen when those ties are rent apart by nuclear war. This British TV movie — released during the Cold War — so violently seized on the nuclear anxieties of the time that its premiere was dubbed “the […]
Danish writer-director Lars von Trier concludes his so-called Depression trilogy with the two parts of Nymphomaniac, an elaborate retelling of the life of a young woman (played by Stacy Martin and then, by Charlotte Gainsbourg) lived from one libidinous pleasure to another. The film’s elaborate subplots have a life of their own and flashbacks often […]
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: […]
Here’s a based-on-a-true-story courtroom drama that transcends the limits of its genre by virtue of an incisive and unexpectedly prescient script. Twenty years before 2016 sent us hurtling through the looking glass and into a post-truth era, the idea that you could deny the facts as you pleased teetered terrifyingly on the brink of legitimacy […]
Barbara (Petzold regular Nina Hoss) has fallen from grace, at least by the standards of 1980s Germany. A renowned doctor at a prestigious East Berlin hospital, she has been demoted to a paediatrician at a tiny town on the Baltic coast: a punishment for daring to try and leave the DDR. The Stasi spy on […]
The film that catapulted Kevin Costner to fame, No Way Out, is based on a novel by Kenneth Fearing, “The Big Clock”, and is also preceded by a film adaptation of it, around 40 years prior. Director Roger Donaldson found himself in charge of a film, haunted by the Cold War and spy thriller tropes, but […]
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 […]
The first in famed Korean director Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy (after cult films Oldboy and Lady Vengeance), Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance follows a Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun), a deaf-mute man who resorts to crime when his ailing sister is in need of a kidney transplant. He decides to kidnap the daughter of a wealthy man named […]
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 […]
We take it for granted now, but Michael Mann’s feature debut Thief was one of the first crime thrillers that took style and substance very seriously—so much so that its neon-lit, rain-soaked, slightly tilted shots continue to be markers of the genre. Thief is visually and sonically stunning, but the titular criminal, Frank, is most […]
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 award-winning third feature by director Ava DuVernay, Selma, was released around the 50th anniversary of the historically significant marches (Selma to Montgomery) that aided the civil rights movement’s efforts to assure African-American citizens can exercise their constitutional right to vote, harassment-free. The film has been celebrated not only as an artwork, but also as […]
Long before we became accustomed to oxymorons like “scripted reality” shows, there was a time when viewers could expect to trust what they saw on TV. One of the pivotal events shattering that illusion in the US was the 1950s quiz show scandal, in which producers of popular broadcasts like Twenty-One were revealed to be […]
Given that it is a modern day, colored film remake of a classic, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai was always going to be compared to the 1962 film, especially since it’s considered one of the greatest Japanese films of all time. Admittedly, there’s not a lot added aside from the 3D filming, and for fans […]
When we think about dog films, we think about overly sentimental, feel-good flicks, with the dogs sometimes voiced by famous actors, that affirm the relationship between man and his best friend. White God is a dog movie, but it’s not that kind of dog movie. The dogs are not voiced, but yet they feel so […]