The Best Intense Movies to Watch
When it comes to great entertainment, it’s all about the scenes that grip both your attentiion and emotions with full force. Whether you’re into suspenseful thrillers or emotional dramas, we’ve rounded up the best intense movies and shows to stream.
Depicting the horrifying cycle of abuse in the state’s prison system, The Alabama Solution is tough to watch. It was already hard to reckon with the related news reports, but what makes this documentary necessary is the way filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman teamed up with activists inside to get a deeper look into […]
What makes crime thrillers exciting isn’t necessarily the crime itself– it’s when the leads meet their match. The Beast in Me finds grieving author Aggie Wiggs and real estate developer Nile Jarvis at odds over community property, but as they get to know each other, they both realize their shared “bloodlust”, their inability to let […]
After being promoted as a project lead, Ron falls down due to his office chair breaking. At first he tries to joke it off, but the work piles on, the expectations get higher, and all he can do is call The Chair Company. It leads him to an unexpected conspiracy that could be a combination […]
From the creators of HBO’s Mare of Easttown comes Task, a gritty crime drama that follows two men —one cop and one criminal —who, despite their differences, are on a similarly rocky journey towards healing. The series is slow to start, and it doesn’t help that the premise is something you’ve seen many times. But […]
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a limited series depicting World War II in the eyes of an Australian prisoner of war, but make no mistake, that’s not all it is. Oh, sure, a big chunk of it is set in the 40s. Jacob Elordi delivers an excellent performance as Dorrigo Evans, a […]
From Ground Zero doesn’t have the most number of shorts within an anthology film, though it comes pretty close with 22 segments, ranging from 3-6 minutes from different directors in Gaza. That’s a lot of shorts, with not a lot of time for each story. Most anthologies tend to be a set of three, but […]
While it had a tumultuous end, there was a reason why Sweet Home was the first Korean drama to reach Top 10 in the USA. The most obvious reason was that the apocalyptic horror eerily echoed humanity’s concerns at the time. What people would have seen as derivative from other apocalyptic stories actually felt relatable […]
It’s easy to feel like you’ll know exactly what you’ll get once you see stills from Guy Ritchie’s MobLand, which stars Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren. But while it features cliches of the mafia genre, MobLand is far from boring. Plenty of things are happening all at once, and in lesser hands, these […]
Alien has done it again. Another prequel installment, Alien: Earth gives another glimpse into the sci-fi vision that fans of the franchise would likely enjoy. This time around, it’s in show form. The extra runtime gives showrunner Noah Hawley more space to build the Alien universe, and he takes that time to flesh out fundamental […]
In films made about celebrities befriending normal people, we’ve seen the dynamic play out romantically or tragically in the end. In this respect, Lurker is totally unpredictable. There are moments where the thriller seems to lead to one or the other, in part due to how ambiguous Oliver and Matthew’s relationship started, straddling the line […]
Set in Tulsa, The Lowdown follows Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke), a bookstore owner by day and investigative journalist by night. When he uncovers secrets harbored by the powers-that-be in Oklahoma, he finds himself in tricky situations, which he navigates with an amusing mix of awkwardness and finesse. The premise is nothing new, but Hawke delivers […]
Not everybody holds a good relationship with their sisters, but ideally, we get to reunite and repair things in a good time. Unfortunately, for some families, the only time they reunite is due to a parent nearly dying. This is the case in His Three Daughters, where the three sisters meet after years living apart. […]
It’s a tall order to depict One Hundred Years of Solitude. Considered to be one of the world’s most important novels to read, expectations were high, the magic realism required a hefty budget, and the sprawling seven-generation plotline felt like it couldn’t fit within a feature film, or around 90-120 minutes. It’s because of this […]
After the only war the Americans have lost, American post-Vietnam war portrayals tend to lean as patriotic revenge fantasies or romanticized disillusionment, but rarely do they portray the people caught in between. HBO’s The Sympathizer is an adaptation of the Pulitzer winning novel of the same name, and while it’s mainly an American production, Park […]
While based on the Mononoke series, which is in turn, a spin-off of Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, it might seem that Mononoke The Movie: The Phantom in the Rain would require some background reading for people new to the story. Thankfully, there’s no need to do homework for this beautifully designed masterpiece, as the Medicine […]
Given the original real-life story behind it, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that The Girl with the Needle was so bleak. Serial killing, after all, is bad. But rather than focus on the historical killer, writer-director Magnus von Horn hones the camera to focus on one such mother that would have sought for help from […]
During adolescence, teenagers get to learn and discover themselves and the world, but for most people, this means going through puberty, maybe taking up a sport or hobby, and not the occult vs alien shenanigans of DAN DA DAN. The science fiction-fantasy mix is unhinged and chaotic, throwing Momo and Ken directly into the worlds […]
If you’re expecting the sleek, playful, and totally over-the-top spy shenanigans of 2005’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, you’re not going to find it in this 2024 version, not that it’s a bad thing. In fact, this show stands on its own, reinventing the spy couple into a professional partnership rather than an immediate spark that […]
High school can be an incredibly cruel place, but it’s not as systematically cruel as the Baekyeon Girls’ High School of the Pyramid Game K-drama. It’s a terrifying twist to regular high school bullying, as it doesn’t just allow kids to bully less popular kids, it creates accomplices, encourages bullying and also gives concrete numerical […]
Before she captivated the film world with her performance in Scorcese’s crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone starred in Erica Tremblay’s feature film debut Fancy Dance, earlier in 2023. It’s a tragic drama, wherein Gladstone portrays Jax, a lesbian woman dealing with the government that failed to find her sister, and that […]
With the various police procedurals available online, it can feel like an oversaturated genre, at best. At worst, with the struggles the world has to do with regards to the justice system, police procedurals can glorify the institution. Criminal Record examines this, but it doesn’t give the easy answers other shows have when discussing the […]
Succession, whether that be of family assets or of job titles, is always a tricky situation to navigate– often, those choosing a successor would have to check in with the possible choices next in line in order to make sure there are no resentment, otherwise, it could drive the hillside horror present in The Bequeathed. […]
How far would you go to please the one you love? You might indulge your spouse with a white lie every now and then like the men in Swathi Shetty’s life each time she asks about her cooking, but Killer Soup takes it a whole step further when she asks Umesh to impersonate her similar-looking […]
Partially due to the surviving Norse myths, as well as certain modernized cinematic depictions, most people think of the Norse gods as fairly benevolent, if a bit violent, entities. With Zack Synder at the helm, it’s unsurprising that he would take an edgier approach to the Twilight of the Gods, but this time, it works […]
That The Curse is squirm-inducingly awkward won’t be news to anyone who’s watched a Nathan Fielder show before, but TV’s king of cringe digs his heels in on that approach here. The Curse chronicles the making of another show: HGTV’s inelegantly named “Flipanthropy,” which follows Fielder’s Asher and wife Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone) as they […]
Everything about Sugarcane is arresting, whether it’s the epic shots of the sweeping reservation (“Canada is our land,” one native announces), the emotional moments shared by survivors of the abusive residential schools, or the damning discoveries they find in an investigation into the Catholic priests. Every second of it is sure to shock and infuriate. […]
With the success of Narcos, Netflix has created multiple shows about drugs in Latin America to the point that the genre is a tad oversaturated, but with Sofia Vergara heading the miniseries on the real-life cocaine queenpin, Griselda is one that you have to watch. Unlike other depictions of Blanco, Vergara’s series puts her front […]
A good biography remains fully faithful to the actual history, but a great one understands what their life story means as a whole, on a larger scale. Number 24 could have been one of many World War II biopics. It could have just celebrated Norwegian resistance fighter Gunnar Sønsteby and his numerous deeds. By simply […]
Challenging, strange, and utterly captivating from start to finish, Sanctuary takes the relationship between a pathetic, wealthy man and a desperate, plucky young woman—a relationship built on consensual acts of sexual humiliation—and makes it so much more dynamic and entertaining than it has any right to be. The film takes place entirely in one hotel […]
In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton set out to the Antarctic in the hopes of making the first land crossing on the continent. His ship, the Endurance, couldn’t complete the journey, and so Shackleton and his crew had to pivot from setting a record to simply surviving. Almost a century later, a group of scientists are […]
Reimagining a children’s classic as a mature serial killer mystery, PLUTO already had high expectations for its anime adaptation. The limited series adds an additional challenge, with only hour-long episodes dedicated to each of the series’ eight volumes, which follows not only Gesicht’s own investigation, but also in-depth stories of each of the remaining Great […]
After the successful release of The Gentlemen (2019), it would have been easy to just continue the story with the same cast of characters, but instead Guy Ritchie makes a spinoff with the same cannibis chaos, but instead expands it to a startlingly funny depiction of the British aristocracy and the criminal underworld. It has […]
There’s a degree of removal in Perpetrator which some viewers may find jarring: most visibly, in the performances, whose heightened sensitivity can seem unlikely for a horror film. That said, director Jennifer Reeder’s main conceit here is to entertain and make you think, and she doesn’t want you to get too comfortable. In the central […]
Are connections truly fated, completely chosen, or purely circumstantial? The slow tragedy of Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle hangs entirely on the question, which captivated readers and filmmakers with the concept, including Bertrand Bonello, which forms the foundations of 2023’s The Beast. Bonello lets loose The Beast in the Jungle into an AI […]
