Genre: Action & Adventure, Comedy, Crime
Actor: Daniel Ings, Giancarlo Esposito, Joely Richardson, Kaya Scodelario, Theo James, Vinnie Jones
When it comes to memorable viewing experiences, it’s usually all about the scenes that pull you to the edge of your seat. Whether you’re into suspenseful mysteries or emotional dramas, here are the most thrilling movies and shows to stream.
Genre: Action & Adventure, Comedy, Crime
Actor: Daniel Ings, Giancarlo Esposito, Joely Richardson, Kaya Scodelario, Theo James, Vinnie Jones
Robert Redford and Brad Pitt make quite the ensemble in this edgy game of espionage. With performances as strong as their jawlines, this action-packed rescue mission will keep you in suspense! Be sure to keep up with all the witty banter and interesting plot twists shifting between flashbacks and present-day scenarios. Keep in mind that this isn't your average spy movie, with a more realistic approach and a character-driven storyline, most of the flash happens cinematically.
Genre: Action, Crime, Mystery, Thriller
Actor: Adrian Pang, Amidou, Andrew Grainger, Balázs Tardy, Benedict Wong, Bill Buell, Brad Pitt, Catherine McCormack, Charlotte Rampling, Colin Stinton, Dale Dye, David Hemmings, David K.S. Tse, David Tse, Demetri Goritsas, Eddie Yeoh, Freddie Joe Farnsworth, Garrick Hagon, Hon Ping Tang, Ian Porter, Imre Csuja, In-sook Chappell, James Aubrey, Joerg Stadler, Ken Leung, Kimberly Tufo, Larry Bryggman, Logan Wong, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Matthew Marsh, Michael Paul Chan, Mohamed Quatib, Nabil Massad, Omid Djalili, Pat McGrath, Peter Linka, Robert Redford, Rufus Wright, Shane Rimmer, Stephen Dillane, Stuart Milligan, Ted Maynard, Todd Boyce, Tom Hodgkins, Tony Xu, Vincent Wang, Zsolt Zágoni
Director: Tony Scott
At first glance, Rough Diamonds seems to be a standard Netflix thriller with debts, deaths, and dirty deals. However, this Flemish-Yiddish series happens to also be a compelling family drama, centered around Antwerp’s Haredi Jewish diamond community. The series starts the season strong with the death that puts the family into chaos. It continues the series’ suspense with the return of prodigal son Noah, who, like Godfather’s Michael Corleone, initially disagrees with the family’s orthodox lifestyle, but can’t help but be drawn back to the family business. As the family scrambles to figure out their dead brother’s debt, they squabble with each other in a dynamic reminiscent of Succession, with an added organized crime twist. The resulting mix creates an intriguing thriller series that also happens to be a nuanced portrayal of a rarely portrayed community.
Genre: Crime, Drama
Actor: Casper Knopf, Els Dottermans, Gene Bervoets, Ini Massez, Janne Desmet, Jeroen Van der Ven, Julia Akkermans, Kevin Janssens, Marie Vinck, Robbie Cleiren, Sofie Decleir, Soroush Helali, Tine Joustra, Yona Elian
Mysterious and hair-raising, Revenant is a supernatural drama whose demonic possession deals with modern-day detectives and Korean folklore. This strange mix of genres makes the show’s premise slow to unfold, taking time to introduce the complex agents in each part. At front-and-center is working-class woman Gu San-yeong, who gets possessed by a demon. Kim Tae-ri’s expert acting makes both believable, simultaneously terrified and terrifying in equal measure. To be free, Gu accepts the help of folklore professor Yeom Hae-sang, who has been hunting down this demon after his mom's death. With his mom's death, as well as many others, being dismissed by the police as suicides, the show questions the reasons behind Korea's high suicide rate. Acknowledging the struggles of Hell Joseon, Revenant suggests what Yeom advises: To listen, pay attention, and learn the reasons why they're here.
Genre: Drama, Horror, Mystery
Actor: Hong Kyung, Jin Sun-kyu, Kim Hae-sook, Kim Tae-ri, Kim Won-hae, Lee Gyu-hoe, Oh Jung-se, Park Ji-young, Yang Hye-ji, Ye Soo-jung
Director: Lee Jeong-lim
Fans of the iconic crime series 24 will find much to like in Rabbit Hole, not least because Kiefer Sutherland reprises a similar role as an above-average agent embroiled in high-profile criminal cases. Despite the years between those two shows, Sutherland still turns in a top-notch performance each time, regardless if he's in a high-stakes chase or a charged tête-à-tête.
Filled with twisty mind games and action-packed scenes, Rabbit Hole is a must-watch for fans of excellent thrillers.
Genre: Drama
Actor: Charles Dance, Enid Graham, Kiefer Sutherland, Meta Golding, Rob Yang, Walt Klink
After winning Oscars for their documentary work, filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin make their narrative feature debut with Nyad. The move to narrative fiction isn’t a monumental jump for the director duo, whose cinematic documentaries (among them Free Solo and The Rescue) play like nerve-shredding action thrillers and intense human dramas. Nor does Nyad’s subject — another extreme feat of human daring and endurance — make this feel a million miles away from their most famous works.
The most obvious departures from the directors’ documentary strengths — Nyad’s flashbacks and hallucination scenes, for example — do sometimes highlight their newness to narrative filmmaking, however. These scenes feel shallow and therefore disconnected from the movie’s otherwise deeper treatment of its subject, just as the performances dip into outsized cliches at times. Mostly, though, Nyad manages to float above the trap of trying too hard to be an inspirational sports drama thanks to its confrontation of Diana’s prickly personality. This flips the film’s perspective onto that of Diana’s team (including her coach and former girlfriend, played by Jodie Foster), who ultimately suffer the consequences of her stubbornness. That refusal to submit to hagiographic impulses gives the film a documentary-like edge of truth, making the rousing moments here feel genuinely earned.
Genre: Drama, History
Actor: Anna Harriette Pittman, Anne Marie Kempf, Annette Bening, Belle Darling, Carolyn McCormick, Diana Nyad, Elizabeth Chahin, Ellen DeGeneres, Eric T. Miller, Erica Cho, Ethan Jones Romero, Garland Scott, Grace Subervi, Harraka Eliana, Iván Oleaga, Jeena Yi, Jodie Foster, John Bartlett, John F. Kennedy, Johnny Solo, Karly Rothenberg, Kate McKinnon, Katherine Klosterman, Lilo Grunwald, Luke Cosgrove, Marcus Young, Melissa R. Stubbs, Nadia Lorencz, Orpha Salimata, Pearl Darling, Rhys Ifans, Samantha Gordon, Sophia Hernandez, Stephen Schnetzer, Tisola Logan, Toussaint Merionne
Director: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin
As 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 no surprises here: lost men, despairing men, men who are desperate to believe in something. But the salvation of love lurks around the corner and the new film makes no exception. An unconventional couple, Joel Edgerton and Quintessa Swindell (as Maya) make up the beating heart of this suspenseful drama with an emotional push and pull delivered in small doses. What could have been a kitschy, insensitive work blossoms into a treatise on how gentle the harshness of life can be.
Genre: Drama, Romance, Thriller
Actor: Amy Le, Eduardo Losan, Esai Morales, Ja'Quan Monroe-Henderson, Jared Bankens, Joel Edgerton, Matt Mercurio, Quintessa Swindell, Rick Cosnett, Sean Richmond, Sigourney Weaver, Suzette Lange, Timothy McKinney, Victoria Hill
Director: Paul Schrader
British director Adrian Lyne (9 1/2 Weeks) is famous for his uncompromising treatment of seedy eroticism and charged stories. Fatal Attraction is a staple of the erotic thriller genre and with good reason, it's steamy and very 1980s in the best possible way. Like a good vintage, it has the whiff of old times, but with the pleasure of a spectacle that belongs to the past. That's the lens through which you can view the story of a deranged mistress who won't stop at anything to ruin your life and marriage, and still savour some sanity in the 21st century. Seen from a slightly removed perspective, the film becomes a stylized variation on conservative AIDS panic and a provocation to conservative heteronormativity. It has to be said that not all of the film has aged well, especially the gender politics at play. But if you can soothe yourself with a revisionist reading, it pairs well with Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct: the things Michael Douglas's characters do for (extramarital) thrills...
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Actor: Anna Thomson, Anne Archer, Barbara Harris, Carol Schneider, Christine Farrell, Christopher Rubin, David McCharen, Ellen Foley, Ellen Hamilton Latzen, Faith Geer, Fred Gwynne, Glenn Close, Greg Rhodes, J.D. Hall, J.J. Johnston, James Eckhouse, Jan Rabson, Jane Krakowski, Judi M. Durand, Justine Johnston, Larry Moss, Lois Smith, Lynnanne Zager, Marilyn Schreffler, Mary Joy, Meg Mundy, Michael Arkin, Michael Douglas, Mike Nussbaum, Rocky Krakoff, Sam Coppola, Stuart Pankin, Tom Brennan, Vladimir Skomarovsky
Director: Adrian Lyne
When he’s accepted into the prestigious Islamic university Al-Azhar, fisherman’s son Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) gets an eye-opening education — but not the kind he expected. A place associated with notions of purity is imagined as a hotbed of hypocrisy and corruption here, as naive young Adam finds himself unwittingly embroiled in a state plot to seize control of Al-Azhar (because, as one government official puts it, “We can’t accept having two pharaohs in the land”). Cairo Conspiracy's intricate plot confronts monsters in government and strips away religious leaders’ veneer of divinity as a reminder that they’re merely fallible men. What's more, the film grapples with the knotty mess of politics raging inside the institution’s walls in such a way that even its palatial courtyard feels claustrophobic. Rife with paranoia and subterfuge, Cairo Conspiracy feels utterly unique thanks to this skillful transposing of the shadowy machinations of courtly intrigue dramas and '70s paranoid thrillers into a very contemporary Egyptian setting.
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Actor: Fares Fares, Jalal Altawil, Makram J. Khoury, Mehdi Dehbi, Mohammad Bakri, Sherwan Haji, Tawfeek Barhom
Director: Tarik Saleh
Genre: Drama, Horror, Mystery
Actor: Freddie Highmore, Keegan Connor Tracy, Max Thieriot, Mike Vogel, Nestor Carbonell, Nicola Peltz, Olivia Cooke, Vera Farmiga
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 with jet-black humor and manic energy, shifting from romantic to ridiculous to raving mad. But with instantly charming performances from Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgård—and Justin Long doing a brilliant job playing an absolute jerk—Barbarian never leaves you grasping in the dark, even if it leads you deeper into hell.
Genre: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Actor: Bill Skarsgård, Brooke Dillman, Derek Morse, Georgina Campbell, J.R. Esposito, Jaymes Butler, Justin Long, Kate Bosworth, Kate Nichols, Kurt Braunohler, Matthew Patrick Davis, Rachel Fowler, Richard Brake, Sara Paxton, Sophie Sörensen, Trevor Van Uden, Will Greenberg, Zach Cregger
Director: Zach Cregger
Undead Unluck is such a strange anime with such a strange duo. Named after their respective powers, the undead Andy seems familiar with his Deadpool-like regeneration, albeit with such a fast rate that he can shoot out body parts with such gruesome animation. However it’s the unlucky Fuuko that brings them to the most absurd comedic scenarios, including, but not limited to, surviving a giant truck crash, a lightning strike, and a whole meteor. In order to achieve their goal of dying, they have to build up a bond to maximize her unluck. As they learn more about Fuuko’s abilities, as well as the organization hunting them down, it’s likely that they’ll go through wackier situations that will escalate as the show progresses. It’s definitely something uniquely watchable, if you can handle the off-putting gore that’s part and parcel of Andy’s powers.
Genre: Action & Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Actor: Aoi Yuki, Kenji Nomura, Koji Yusa, Mariya Ise, Moe Kahara, Natsuki Hanae, Nobuhiko Okamoto, Rie Kugimiya, Rikiya Koyama, Yuichi Nakamura
Also known as Rabo de Peixe, after the real town where the series is based, Turn of the Tide follows a group of four friends, who dream of a life outside their hometown, where nothing ever happens. Except, something does finally happen, and it’s whole packs of cocaine washing up on the island’s shores. It’s a wild series, one where the show’s teen underdogs take advantage of sailing expertise and knowledge of the town in order to sell out one third of the stash from the mainland Italian mafia. And it’s one that is endlessly entertaining, as we hope for the four teenagers to succeed in their plan, and to escape for another life.
Genre: Drama
Actor: André Leitão, Helena Caldeira, José Condessa, Maria João Bastos, Rodrigo Tomás
It’s hard not to roll your eyes at what looks like yet another white-centered story set in a foreign land. But Tokyo Vice, thankfully, is hardly that. Co-produced by crime drama auteur Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral, Miami Vice), the HBO series is a stylishly thrilling and comprehensive look at the yakuza crime ring running Tokyo from the underground.
Ansel Elgort’s Jake, an investigative journalist, may be our way in, but it’s the rest of the characters who grip our interest. They’re gangster tropes fleshed out with rich and complicated backstories. Ken Watanabe’s Katagiri is a hardboiled detective—so effectively cool and scary—who you’d like to believe is good, but also has his own secrets lurking in the shadows. Rachel Keller’s Samantha is a sultry hostess who, unlike in mob films past, actually has character, motivation, and specific problems she figures out on her own. Sato (Sho Kasamatsu) and Emi (Rinko Kikuchi), Jake’s yakuza friend and newspaper editor respectively, are also given stories that genuinely intrigue and compel on their own.
Lit by Tokyo’s neon glow and set to Mann’s signature fast pace, this is a series not to be missed by action-crime fans.
Genre: Crime, Drama
Actor: Ansel Elgort, Ella Rumpf, Hideaki Ito, Ken Watanabe, Rachel Keller, Rinko Kikuchi, Show Kasamatsu
There’s not much to analyze in The Wrath of Becky, which might sound like a jab, but for grindhouse thrillers such as this, it comes as a compliment. The story is lean, the action is on point, and the dialogue is whipsmart. There is little to distract from the main attraction, which is the creatively gruesome ways in which everyone tries to kill each other.
It’s so simple, in fact, that you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a standalone film, instead of a sequel to an earlier movie, simply titled Becky. Efficiently, parts of the first installment appear as flashbacks here, but they’re hardly needed to convince us of Becky’s ferocious might. Wilson already does an excellent job with minimal but evocative gestures. Seann William Scott, too, is surprisingly terrifying as the head of the Neo-Nazi group out to get Becky. It’s easy enough to paint the incel as a villain, but to portray him with such palpable terror is a challenge that Scott steps up to.
Genre: Action, Horror, Thriller
Actor: Aaron Dalla Villa, Alison Cimmet, Courtney Gains, Denise Burse, Derek Gaines, Jill Larson, John D. Hickman, Kate Siegel, Lulu Wilson, Matt Angel, Michael Sirow, Seann William Scott, Zoie Morris
Director: Matt Angel, Suzanne Coote