The Best Gripping Movies to Watch (Page 6)
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.
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 […]
There are only 20 seats in Formula 1 each year, meaning that drivers are not only racing to win but to be kept on the roster. With the big stars, Ferrari and Mercedes, habitually shrouded in secrecy, Formula 1: Drive to Survive focuses more on the back of the grid. Lewis Hamilton, the five-time world […]
First They Killed My Father adapts the memoir of Cambodian refugee Loung Ung, and it’s not an easy life she’s lived. From the eyes of her child self, the turbulence of the time is already shocking to see, having had to go through starvation, separation from her family, and being thrown into the Cambodian civil […]
Though it sets itself up as a mystery series, the tense and dramatically heavy Save Me avoids easy questions and focuses instead on how a crisis can affect different members of a community in equally painful ways. The show isn’t immune from random coincidences and contrivances, but even these little twists in the plot point […]
There is so much power to this story based actor Shia Laboeuf’s life. As a kid, he lived with his father on the road during the filming of Even Stevens and other star-making roles. His dad was a war veteran who goes to bikers’ AA meetings and who had a brief acting career himself. He […]
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 […]
Organized crime and drug dealing has been a topic of many a film, sometimes even glamorizing the whole endeavor, but rarely do these depictions acknowledge the weight it can do to a culture, particularly indigenous cultures. Birds of Passage is a film about drug dealers, but it’s a much more distinct take, tackling Colombia’s reputation […]
A twitchy, uncomfortable noir film for the digital age, Decision to Leave blends the trappings of a restless police procedural with an obsessive forbidden romance. Here, director Park Chan-wook flips every interrogation and piece of evidence on its head, pulling us away from the whodunit and towards the inherently invasive nature of a criminal investigation. […]
Alice in Borderland is a fast-paced heart-wrenching puzzle of a show that will have you wracking your brain and wiping your tears, often at the same time. It combines the wit of Hunger Games, the ruthlessness of Battle Royal, the goriness of Saw, and the social commentary of Squid Game, though sadly it has yet […]
Animated in every sense of the word, The Mitchells vs. the Machines is a fun and lively watch for anyone of any age. On the surface, it’s about a tech company’s AI going haywire as it turns against humans and takes over the world (an obvious and much-deserved dig at Big Tech). It also immediately […]
Created by Harlan Coben (the crime novelist-turned-showrunner behind many streaming mysteries), Safe is a fast-paced thriller following a widower in search of his missing daughter. The more he digs, the more he realizes that his town is anything but small and sleepy, and that he can’t trust the people closest to him. It’s the sort […]
Juror #2 is the kind of film that doesn’t waste time: it’s immediately compelling as it throws questions about morality, guilt, and conscience straight to your face. There are familiar people in this stacked cast, including Chris Messina and J.K. Simmons, but it’s Nicholas Hoult as the titular second juror and Toni Collete as the […]
The Little Drummer Girl starts slow, but it’s hard to peel your eyes away from the screen when it finally kicks into gear in the third episode. Every frame is packed with style, for one, and Le Carre’s espionage maze reliably thrills for another. Paired with Park Chan-wook’s eye for detail, as seen in modern […]
Adapted from Caleb Carr’s blockbuster crime novel, The Alienist follows a team of amateur investigators in 1896 New York: Daniel Brühl as Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, the formidable titular “alienist” who studies the psychology of those alienated from society; Luke Evans as John Moore, a newspaper illustrator; and Dakota Fanning as Sara Howard, the first female […]
This fiery coming-of-age drama has an unlikely origin story: director Jonas Carpignano was first introduced to the sprawling Roma clan that makes up most of the movie’s cast when one of them stole his car while he shot another film. The charismatic Amato family made such an impression on him that he decided to center […]
The medium of cinema has been used as a tool for revolution, but so too was it complicit in genocide. That was true of the Khmer Rouge regime, as the remaining footage of the time came entirely from the state, to be used in re-education programs and propaganda to hide the difficult realities caused by […]
As has become typical of a David Simon series, The Deuce manages to bring myriad characters and perspectives into one setting, but somehow without resulting in information overload or stale drama. Simon’s work (most famously, The Wire) has always been arguably more ethnographic than traditionally dramatic, and here it’s no different: the portrait he and […]
Borrowing heavily from yakuza films of the past, The Blood of Wolves feels like a movie plucked straight out of the 1970s and given a slick coat of 2010s neo-noir shine. The film never tries to reinvent the recipe it’s working with, but it doesn’t have to when its violence is still satisfyingly brutal, its […]
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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 […]
While best known for his provocative, existential dramas, Lars von Trier also made a provocative mini-series with surprising supernatural horror. Set at Denmark’s leading public hospital, The Kingdom takes familiar medical drama conflicts in handheld camera and sepia tone, but infused with an unsettling understanding of how the finest minds can fail, and how small […]
Rosetta begins fiercely, with a shaky handheld camera chasing the eponymous teenager (Émilie Dequenne) as she storms across a factory floor and bursts into a room to confront the person she believes has just lost her her job. The film seldom relents from this tone of desperate fury, as we watch Rosetta — whose mother […]
This crazy heist movie is told in a very original way. Because it’s based on a true story, the movie (with actors and a story) is sometimes interrupted by the people it’s about. The opening scene even reads: “this movie is not based on a true story, it is a true story”. Two friends decide […]
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 […]
With the Hays code, the film adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel had to be changed to depict Mildred Pierce in a less sympathetic light. More than half a century later, Todd Haynes teamed up with HBO to pick up the book and adapt it once again. Kate Winslet may not have the stern determination […]
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 […]
Set in the small town of Åmål, western Sweden, the debut feature by Lukas Moodysson (We Are the Best), is itself a metonymy for the bigger questions of life. It’s playful and dead serious at the same time, in the way it portrays teenager Agnes, who, after two years of living in Åmål, still hasn’t […]
Before anything else, Miracle Mile is a romance. It begins with a meet-cute so adorable, it convinces lovebirds Harry and Julie to stick to each other in the next moments of the film, which couldn’t be more different than the first. Where the opening scene is sweet and lovely, the ones that follow it are […]
In an age where every show gets called “original” the minute after it comes out, this amazing series from the creators of Orange is the New Black will actually make you go “no, that show is different!”. Starring an almost all-women cast (except for the coach, played masterfully by podcast icon Marc Maron), it’s the […]
