The Best Thrilling Movies to Watch (Page 11)

Heretic starts slow and talky, veering into philosophical territory as Hugh Grant’s creepy Mr. Reed drills Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East) about faith and religion. But pretty soon, it turns into an utterly gripping escape thriller and supernatural mystery. Some things about the movie will frustrate you, and even more will have […]

Jessica Chastain plays a driven Washington lobbyist called Elizabeth Sloane in this high-speed political thriller. After being pitched to work for the gun lobby, she decides to work for the opposition: an NGO trying to pass a background check bill. It’s a long movie, and even if everything happens fast, it still lags.  The events […]

At first glance, Drug War is basically just what it says on the tin– cops crack down on kingpins, lords, and lackeys to save regular people from illegal addictive substances. Even the drug lord-cop dynamic would be a familiar plotline for crime thriller fans. But through this familiar plotline, Hong Kong director Johnnie To takes […]

Perfect for Halloween marathons with friends, The Return of the Living Dead treads the now well-worn template of zombie apocalypse movies with outstanding practical effects and a refreshingly unserious attitude. What the film might lack in terms of character writing or deeper themes, it more than makes up for with a relentless forward momentum. There […]

A young girl is looking for her father while struggling to care for her family. The film is bleak and slow but great performances from the cast, especially the lead, will keep you engaged throughout. The story has a very real, raw, and natural feeling to it, so natural in fact that at times, you will […]

In adapting hardboiled detective novel Falling Angels, writer-director Alan Parker mixes the story’s original noir with the New Orlean supernatural in 1987’s Angel Heart. The gamble mostly pays off. Mickey Rourke brilliantly brings hapless Harry Angel to a terrifying reveal, stoked by the mystery presented by an inscrutable Robert de Niro, while Lisa Bonet makes […]

Another indie zombie movie? Far from it. One Cut of the Dead, written and directed by Shin’ichirô Ueda, became a global sensation following its small theatrical run in Japan for its creative and original screenplay. A hack director and film crew are shooting a low-budget zombie movie in an abandoned WWII Japanese facility when they […]

True Romance is a wildly entertaining and twistedly enjoyable crime film, directed by Tony Scott (Top Gun) and written by a young Quentin Tarantino. It stars Christian Slater as a young nebbish comic book store employee named Clarence who falls in love with a prostitute named Alabama (Patricia Arquette), and sets his mind to rid […]

Beginning with a great opening shot of townhouse on a side street in Paris, only ti discovers that the shot is actually from a video sent to Anne and Georges Laurent (Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil). The married couple who live in that house have no idea who sent the video. More videos appear and events unfold. […]

The Platform is the closest thing to Parasite released so far. This interesting Spanish movie is about 90% a science-fiction drama and 10% a horror movie. It’s an allegory set in a future where prisoners live in vertical cells, and each cell has to wait for the cell above it to eat to get food. […]

A special forces team conducts a raid at a multi-story ghetto building where a criminal boss runs his business. Things quickly go wrong and chaos ensues. Full of pure action, with no overblown Hollywood-type CGI nonsense. It is made the way action movies should be made, full of realistic fight scenes. It is exciting, brutal and […]

The shiver-inducing talents of Stephen King, David Cronenberg, and Christopher Walken meld to produce this supremely chilly supernatural thriller adaptation. Schoolteacher Johnny’s (Walken) perfect life is overturned when a horrific car accident puts him in a coma that robs him of five years of his life — and with them, his job and girlfriend Sarah […]

Rarely do we get horror movies that are as dedicated to toying with audience expectations as Barbarian. Even rarer is a horror movie that pays so much attention to setting, and how men and women approach and interact with physical spaces in different ways. It’s a film that’s ultimately about entitlement—except it’s delivered to us […]

It’s hard to shake off the life you’ve grown into, but more so on the streets with a high crime rate. Menace II Society introduced viewers to that life with a sudden shocking opening that perfectly makes clear how fast violence can strike and permanently mark one’s life forever. It’s a familiar plot line, but […]

One of The Drop’s many strengths is its dark, clever, yet compassionate script. It will take you into the heart of the Brooklyn crime scene through the characters and their respective more or less fragile lifestyles. The extremely good performances, however, soon become the focus and attire of the film. James Gandolfini couldn’t be more at […]

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 […]

Is there any other filmmaker more suited to the melodrama than Pedro Almodóvar? Broken Embraces holds many of the themes he’s often played with, but this time through the cynicism of film noir, with time moving a blind man into stoic silence. As he remembers the doomed production and tragic love triangles he was caught […]

Taking place almost entirely in a single classroom, the two-hour-plus runtime of this French drama breezes past thanks to its sheer unrelenting energy. You’d be forgiven for assuming The Class is a documentary, so fly-on-the-wall is the filming and so naturalistic the dialogue, much of which was improvised from loose guidelines. Unlike so many cinematic […]

On their drive back from a Tinder date that was only average, a couple are pulled over by a racist police officer. Things escalate unexpectedly and the couple, one of whom is a lawyer aware of the corruptedness of the system, start a life on the run together. This thrilling set-up mixing social commentary and […]

I Saw the Devil is a South Korean psychological thriller/horror film. IT IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!!! It has a lot of blood and gore that could make even the strongest stomachs turn. A young woman is kidnapped from her car while waiting for a tow truck and the kidnapper murders her far […]

Fright Night wastes no time confirming that, yes, that handsome new neighbor is a vampire, and yes, he has to be defeated. By cutting to the chase, the film refreshingly lets its heroes and villains spend a lot of time together, goading each other on in a battle of wills. But apart from that, Fright […]

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 […]

At the risk of being cliché, I’m going to state that only the French could have made a movie about racial issues and the troubles of youngsters in the suburbs and still make it elegant. I’ve tried looking for other adjectives, but I couldn’t find one that better describes those long takes shot in a […]

FBI agents Rupert and Alan (Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe) visit Jim Crow-era Mississippi to investigate the disapperance of three civil rights activists. They find out soon enough, however, that answers won’t come easy when local officials and police have ties with the KKK. There’s no shortage of films like Mississippi Burning, but it stands […]

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 […]

Based on the book by John Le Carre, this slow-burning thriller tells the story of a half-Chechen, half-Russian immigrant suspected of terrorism, who is suddenly spotted in a big German city trying to get his hands on money that was left to him. Gunter (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the head of an international counter-terrorism unit […]

There’s a cyclical tragedy at the heart of Bad Education, that starts with love, then continues in separation, and ends with hoping to redeem one’s self, and it would have felt repetitive if it wasn’t for the metafictional framing of Pedro Almodóvar. It boldly tackles the sexual abuse occurring in Catholic boarding schools, from which […]

A documentary that reveals just how insane the men that compete in the MotoGP are. It follows Valentino Rossi, one of the best riders of all-time if not the best, in a very pivotal season for him, 2010-2011. An in depth look into his competitiveness but also his passion for the sport and for the machines in […]

The unbelievable true story the first mass-shootings in America, and a documentary made with so much attention that it is almost impossible to forget. The animations might put you off if you watch the trailer, but they are what makes this movie so amazing. Added to old tapes and current statements from survivors and heroes, […]

Escape from Mogadishu follows diplomats from the North and South Korean embassies as they put aside their differences and work together to escape from an outbreak of civil war in Mogadishu, Somalia. Director Ryoo Seung-wan provides thrilling, high-budget action, especially intense car chases and suspenseful escape scenes that pump you with adrenaline and leave you […]

Last Days in Vietnam is a documentary that recounts the final weeks of the conflict in 1975, as North Vietnamese forces surged toward Saigon and U.S personnel anxiously awaited word of an evacuation plan. At the time, U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin was reluctant to accept defeat, and delayed a U.S. withdrawal in his (rapidly diminishing) […]

Nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature. On the day before Hurricane Katrina, a young aspiring rap singer in the 9th Ward turns her new video camera on herself and her neighbors. She keeps shooting as the water rises, neighbors struggle to rescue each other, people panic and flee. Weeks later she returns to her neighborhood […]

In an age where recent horror films mostly use the jump-scare as a crutch to make their CGI-spawned (not to mention generic) creatures seem scary, The Babadook portrays real scares, relatable characters and a moving story. Jennifer Kent (director and writer) sets this on the backdrop of heavily Lars von Trier-inspired cinematography, elevating The Babadook […]

The House I Live In is a truly exceptional documentary, directed and narrated by Eugene Jarecki, focused on America’s long-standing “War on Drugs”. Jarecki travels America to interview various individuals and families on both sides of the law, examining many personal experiences related to drug offenses, unjust legal policies and excessive incarceration. He further provides […]