The Best Gripping Movies to Watch on The Roku Channel

If you’re craving for the fast-paced fights, hand-to-hand combat, and insane stunts of Hong Kong action cinema, you might enjoy Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In. This novel adaptation has a gangster storyline we’ve seen before, but the action? Impeccable. The action sequences are unrelenting with its underground fighter protagonist stumbling into a convoluted web […]

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 […]

More shooting and spectacle than story, Sisu is a stunningly shot and unapologetically gory action film set at the tail end of World War II in Finland. It follows former commando turned prospector Aatami (nicknamed “Koschei” or immortal by the Russians) as he retrieves his stolen gold from the Nazis who’ve occupied and pillaged the […]

As a result of the miraculous success of the famed Tham Luang cave rescue, which saw the return of 12 kids trapped in a cave for more than 15 days, you’ll find no shortage of documentaries about the mission. Some take the point of view of the children, even others the locals and loved ones. […]

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 […]

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 […]

While Hollywood still makes some films in this genre, there are less historical epics being released, in part due to cost, but also in part due to having had so many, ever since the start of the medium. However, there are some historical events that we rarely see on film, and one of them is […]

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 […]

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 […]

While the police haven’t been getting a good rep in recent years, there were times when cops actually got the job done, and went after the gangs that we individuals can’t. Kang Yun-seong’s narrative feature debut is based on the real-life Yanbian Heuksapa Incident, and what’s interesting is that along with having Ma Dong-seok deliver […]

What would it take to push you to kill? Thankfully, for the general public, modern everyday life would not likely push you to (so far), but in certain circumstances, people might be surprised at the lengths they’re willing to go to for their loved ones. Brawl in Cell Block 99 depicts a man pushed into […]

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 […]

You know how many films depict the magic and wonder of cinema in such gorgeous, magnificent scenes? Peeping Tom does the opposite. Sure, it has director Michael Powell’s signature flair, with excellently framed and colored shots, but he takes a much more violent route here, swapping spectacular fantasy with the psychological terror of how the […]

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 […]

If you enjoy wondering aloud to yourself how filmmakers were able to make a movie at all, 1988’s almost wordless tale of two bears trying to survive the Canadian mountains was somehow shot with real, expressive bear “actors,” despite the film being a work of fiction. A cross between a stunningly photographed nature documentary and […]

Films about drug dealing aren’t particularly new, but the way Pusher delves into their lives feels different– more realistic than glamorous, somewhat like a guerrilla documentary, with the handheld camera as a silent, unnamed witness. As the camera follows low-level dealer Frank through the course of a week, Kim Bodnia skillfully garners empathy with the […]

There’s a natural competitive thrill to this chronicle of the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee and eight of its bright young participants, but Spellbound has more than an edge-of-your-seat pull going for it. For one, there’s its holistic approach to profiling the competitors: director Jeffrey Blitz makes this as much a portrait of the village […]

Much like its monster, Brotherhood of the Wolf is quite a hard movie to pin down. It’s an unscary French creature feature but it’s a rather refreshing period drama romance, made much more action-packed courtesy of a randomly placed, supposedly Iroquois, talented martial artist. Yet somehow, it works. Perhaps it works because it was released […]

The Western had its heyday in the 60s, but the decades have proven that there’s still stories from the deserts that we haven’t heard yet, and gems that twist the genre on its head. The Proposition is a unique Western, being from the East, in Australia where the Brits have started to form colonies. As […]

While zombies weren’t new in film, it wasn’t until writer-director George A. Romero’s Living Dead saga that the zombie as we know it today was created. Day of the Dead is the third in the franchise, and like Night and Dawn, Romero was more interested in the way humans were the threat, more so than […]

Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior is, at first glance, an action-only movie that hopes to emulate something like Bruce Lee in Thailand. The Muay Thai choreography is memorable, the chase scenes are iconic, and the plot is scant in order to fit more fight scenes in it. However, the film feels electric precisely because it strikes […]

The subject of the Catholic Pieta– the Virgin Mary cradling the corpse of Jesus– has captivated plenty of artists, most famously in the sculpture by Michelangelo in St. Peter’s Basilica. This time, however, director Kim Ki-duk twists the image into modern day Seoul, with a mourning mother and a loan shark in place of their […]

Look, Wolf has a familiar, even cliché, plot. The idea of having a lead wanting to shift their life around through kickboxing is the usual stuff of cheesy sports dramas that want more viewers to watch the matches, or to learn to play the sport. But rather than take this path, Wolf instead delves into […]

Usually a film like this wouldn’t care to take the perspective of the perpetrator, and would instead dramatize a heavy, unsettling feeling around a victim being caught within their operation. But Felicia’s Journey doesn’t take that route– instead, at the same time, we meet both serial killer and potential victim through a snapshot of their […]