23 Best Thriller Releases on Amazon Prime Video

When it comes to storytelling, especially when adapting a character that has starred in more than 30 novels and three films, it doesn’t matter if the plot relies on tropes. It matters how one utilizes those tropes. When it comes to the Ben Watkins-created Cross, there are few actors better suited to breathing new life into the Psychology PhD having Detective Alex Cross than Aldis Hodge. Hodge, an actor who engenders goodwill no matter where he pops up, is an excellent fit for the character. He gets the mix of intellect, self-righteous fury, and tendency towards self-destructive isolation just right. Unfortunately, he’s doing it in service of a series that isn’t close to the same level. The good news is he isn’t alone in playing above Cross’s level of quality. Isaiah Mustafa brings a gruff clarity to Alex’s lifelong best friend and current partner on the force, John Sampson. His Sampson seems to get that he’d be the hero in any other story, but as long as there’s Cross, he’ll always be second on life’s call sheet. The performance isn’t heavy with jealousy, though, but rather a frustration that his friend can’t stop making choices that hurt him and his family in the name of protecting them. Alona Tal, as the duo’s FBI contact Kayla Craig, is another standout. Her mix of “one of the boys” attitude and nonstop flirtation makes her a vibrant presence on-screen. That brings important moments of lightness to a show that too often confuses dourness as proof of serious storytelling. Who wouldn't trust Ryan Eggold? Nothing suspicious about his look. (Keri Anderson/Prime Video) As alluded to above, Cross isn’t an especially unique offering. Making the smart choice to tell an original story rather than adapt a specific novel does not lead to the show avoiding most of the genre’s trappings. There is a dangerous serial killer who’s in a cat-and-mouse game with Cross and his team. Like most pop culture serial killers—but very few real-life ones—he has a bizarre gimmick. In this case, he likes to pick victims that resemble executed convicted murderers and make them look almost exactly like killers through force-feeding, haircuts, cosmetic surgery, and more. When he achieves his vision, he murders them in the same manner their look-a-likes were executed. The police, inspiringly, call him Fanboy. Continue Reading →

The film's biggest highlight is the actor as an unlikely hero: a beekeeper-turned-assassin. Bees, scammers, and a hive of lies. Jason Statham’s latest record-breaking feature The Beekeeper is honey-soaked, with wisdom that leaves the viewer wanting more and learning to be wary of scammers, stop elder abuse, and save the bees. As he aggressively fights to save the bees (and society) from total destruction, Statham serves up the same kind of grizzled Brit-buster vibes he's given us through decades of punch-em-up action. But this one's something special, a caper that leans into the meme of both Statham's curious star power and his apian brethren. Directed by David Ayer, The Beekeeper tells the story of Adam Clay (Jason Statham), a beekeeper and retired member of the crime-fighting organization of the same name. But when his elderly neighbor Mrs. Parker (Phylicia Rashad) is subject to scammers and loses everything, Adam goes on a mission to find the scammers and kill their operation to “protect the hive.” His journey leads him all the way to the White House, even involving the FBI and CIA. Continue Reading →

With her first film, Promising Young Woman, writer-director Emerald Fennell took a storyline that was essentially a cloddish-but-glossy retread of such female-driven revenge sagas as Ms .45 and I Spit on Your Grave, infused it with insights regarding gender issues that would barely have passed muster in a 100-level college class and somehow rode it to inexplicable praise and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Continue Reading →

Both the main characters in Michel Franco’s Memory are struggling to deal with the echoes of their past. Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), a recovering alcoholic and single mother to 13-year-old Anna (Brooke Timber), desperately wants to forget the unspoken traumas of her childhood. Saul (Peter Saarsgard), on the other hand, can’t grab a hold of his past. He’s powerless as early-onset dementia slowly but inevitably steals it from him. After their high school reunion, he wordlessly follows her home and spends the night standing outside her building. In turn, she visits him at the house he shares with his brother (Josh Charles) and niece (Elsie Fisher). Then she takes him for a walk and accuses him of participating in a rape that she endured at the age of 12, a crime that he has no memory of committing.  Continue Reading →

Upon the news of the passing of William Friedkin, every headline reporting on the news focused on two films. It’s not surprising that the media spent so much time talking about The French Connection and The Exorcist, two bona fide masterpieces that paved the way for a new era of American filmmaking. What was disappointing was this seeming willingness to reduce a cinematic legend’s legacy to a burst of time in the early 1970s, thus dismissing the five decades that followed as either negligible or outright unworthy of interest.  Continue Reading →

Let's face it: At this point, you're either in for the overamped, Saturday-morning-cartoon lunacy of a Fast and Furious movie or you're not. Building from its humble roots as a 2001 street-racing Point Break riff to the gargantuan action tentpole it's after a whopping ten movies (eleven if you count Hobbs & Shaw), the series has built quite the convoluted lore over the decades. There are dead characters who come back to life (Sung Kang's Han), living characters who can never come back because their actors are no longer with us (see: Paul Walker's Brian), sworn enemies who join the familiar just one film later. It's dudebro soap opera, fueled by nitrous oxide and every weird, bonkers thing the filmmakers can think to do with a car. Continue Reading →

First, some music to set the mood, with thanks to Paul Thomas Anderson. If it's 1985 and you've got something to do—say, going for a hike, cutting class to paint a waterfall with a pal, or retrieving a shipment of cocaine that your terrifying crime lord dad's good-for-nothing pilot dumped before getting himself killed— and it's a quiet day out, then Georgia's Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest would seem like the place to go. The trees are tall, the grass is green, and the Cocaine Bear is on a murderous rampage. Continue Reading →

Taking a look at the offerings of Slamdance, Park City's more indie-minded festival. Initially developed in 1995 as an alternative to the more polished version of independent cinema presented at Sundance, the Slamdance Film Festival has evolved over the past 28 years. These days, with a few exceptions, most of Slamdance’s slate could easily compete with those films chosen for that other festival. In fact, several proved better made and more interesting than much of Sundance’s selections. This year’s winner of the Slamdance Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature, Linh Tran’s Waiting for the Light to Change, proved entirely worthy of the accolades. Set at a lake house in Michigan during winter’s last gasp, the film centers on a getaway trip gone wrong. For high school sweethearts Jay (Sam Straley) and Kim (Joyce Ha), the occasion is a chance to reunite with their friend Amy (Jin Park) after she’s been several hundred miles away in California working on her Masters. Jay’s stepbrother Alex (Erik Barrientos) and Kim’s cousin from China, Lin (Qun Chi), round out the quintet.   Continue Reading →

In the strange 21st-century rise of conspiracy theories and cult-like behavior, the most frightening aspect of it is that some people really are true believers. Certainly, there are those who are just trolling, claiming to believe in insane things like Democrats eating Christian babies just to get a rise out of people. But what about those who are serious, who aren’t even textbook “crazy,” just normal people who at some point began to truly believe in chemtrails, or that everything that happens in the world is secretly orchestrated by an underground race of lizard people, or that the end times are here? What if they don’t want to believe these things, but they can’t help it? How do you reason with that? Continue Reading →

It’s Christmas time, and a man at the breaking point finds himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. But he isn’t retired cop John McClane this time. Instead, it’s Saint Nick with a sledgehammer he’d like to swing into your bowl full of jelly. The premise of Violent Night is simple (Die Hard but with Santa), and the filmmakers mostly pull off the kill-fest thanks to some game performers and one inspired sequence.   Continue Reading →

Ask someone if they’ve seen 2014’s Goodnight Mommy, and if their immediate response is to shudder, you’ll know they have. The Austrian cult horror film combines so many tropes – psychological horror, body horror, paranoia, twins, creepy kids, creepy moms, etc. – that it seems like it should be an incoherent mess, but is instead a tightly paced, relentless assault on the nerves. Even the trailer is creepier than many mainstream horror films, while only showing a tiny bit of how bad things get in it. Continue Reading →

As the discourse rages over how tame the mainstream movie scene can be—with its sexless heroes and bloodless violence—it can be tempting to elevate any film that hearkens back to "the good old days" of sex and slashers just for the sake of its own supposed transgressiveness. But luckily, Ti West's X largely earns that title, a playful and idiosyncratic ode to both ends of the '70s sleaze cinema spectrum (hardcore porn and Wes Craven-esque slashers) alike. Not only that, it's blissfully literate towards its influences, with a nod to larger points about the aesthetics and politics of desire, the fetishization of youth, and so much more. Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

The first two entries in the newest Welcome to the Blumhouse collection are a flawed pair of scary films. Welcome to Welcome to the Blumhouse! This annual anthology collection of four new horror films from Get Out producers Blumhouse Productions, debuting on Amazon streaming, is back after its inaugural run in 2020. Conceptually, this seems like a nifty idea, a way to tackle bold new filmmaking concepts or styles that may not be as broadly accessible as theatrical Blumhouse fare like Fantasy Island. Unfortunately, titles like The Lie made the first iteration of Welcome to the Blumhouse feel like a grab-bag of movies that just weren’t good enough for the big screen. This year, the four movies comprising the second edition of Welcome to the Blumhouse are all apparently fixated on institutionalized horror. The first two installments that have dropped (the other two films will premiere on October 9) are Bingo Hell and Black as Night, each tackling both a different strain of horror storytelling and a unique form of systemically ingrained injustice. A common trait across the pair of features, unfortunately, is a lack of consistently high-quality filmmaking. Here’s to hoping the next final two entries in this year’s collection wrap things up on a much stronger note.  Continue Reading →

To speak of No Time to Die is to speak of what came before it. Of course, that sounds obvious in theory; the Daniel Craig era of 007 comes to an end here. They lightly tied into each other until Spectre drunkenly tried and failed at deepening the mythology. While the quality of the films varied, at least they were all distinct. It's been fifteen years and five movies -- now it all comes to a head, the stakes ostensibly high and the emotions primed to be deeper. And yet, against all odds, Cary Joji Fukunaga's offering to the franchise is derivative enough of its most recent predecessors to fumble conceptually and concretely. Continue Reading →

Melanie Laurent's adaptation of Victoria Mas' novel about a young woman's incarceration in a cruel asylum is disappointingly flat. With its literary pedigree and reasonably lavish trappings, The Mad Women's Ball wants to be seen as a sweeping and powerful drama that examines the subjugation that women suffered in the past in large part because of their gender while suggesting that too little has changed between the late 1800s and today. In practice, it feels more like a period version of those old Women-In-Prison movies that Roger Corman produced back in the early 1970s that blended obvious exploitation elements (Nudity! Sadism! Sex! Violence!) with unexpected moments of satire and social commentary and, depending on what up-and-coming filmmaker was at the helm, perhaps even a sense of genuine cinematic style. Unfortunately, this effort from writer-director Melanie Laurent is a well-appointed, well-meaning but ultimately misfired take on an all-too-familiar narrative. Eugenie Clery (Lou de Laage) is a feisty young woman rebelling against the restrictions placed on her because of her gender. This causes a great deal of consternation for the members of her well-to-do family. And yet, despite her sneaking off to the smoke-filled cafes of Montmartre or to attend Victor Hugo's funeral, it is when Eugenie claims to be able to speak to spirits that her father elects to do what was too often done to women who refused to politely follow society's conventions—commit her to the Salpetriere Asylum.Salpetriere, a "hospital" run by noted real-life French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, swiftly proves to be little more than a warehouse in which the patients are treated for their alleged maladies with a variety of brutish quackery. Continue Reading →

As sparse as it is specific, Nia DaCosta’s Candyman feels like falling into a nightmare. It has the context, but the context feels increasingly shifted. It has the gravity, but the weight at hand seems to fall onto its audience in slow motion. It has a sense of remove but also a sense of intimacy, and as the picture develops, those schisms manage to lean into one another. Bernard Rose’s 1992 original was about the outsider looking in. DaCosta’s, on the other hand, is about the insider being forcibly removed from himself, and it’s a film as attuned to its own legacy as it is the legacy that’s been hoisted upon it. Continue Reading →

It can’t be overstated how much the mid-90s belonged to Jim Carrey. Largely a stand-up comedian and supporting actor at first, Carrey shot to stardom thanks to In Living Color, and the grotesque characters he played on it, including the disfigured Fire Marshall Bill, and ponytailed lady bodybuilder Vera de Milo. His leap to leading roles in comedy features was swift and wildly successful, with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber all released the same year. There hadn’t been a comic actor much like Carrey before, someone who did childish things like pretend to talk out of his butt, but also had a wild look in his eyes that suggested a hint of danger with the body contorting nonsense. Continue Reading →

Several movies into the Conjuring universe, we’ve mostly separated the real life grifters Ed and Lorraine Warren from the America’s Mom and Dad version of them on screen. If the movies work, it’s because stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga bring warmth and gravitas to them. They sell the hell out of the bullshit their characters are peddling, whereas the real-life Warrens often came off as prickly and defensive in interviews, offended that anyone would dare to question their dubious authority. Wilson and Farmiga can only do so much, however, and it’s not enough to save The Conjuring: the Devil Made Me Do It, a by-the-numbers snooze that trades in haunted house horror for a supernatural police procedural. Continue Reading →

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