Movies in the Drama/Thriller genre

When one considers the phenomenon of "Spring Break," images of bikini-clad young women, bronzed guys, and inhibition-shedding parties fill the mind's eye. In general, Hollywood has used Spring Break as a jumping-off point for comedies - some romant...

Stoker is deliciously demented, and that's a good thing. This twisted coming-of-age tale takes us into Carrie territory without the supernatural element. It wends its way along an unpredictable narrative trajectory with a warped sensibility that of...

The problem with Stone, at least insofar as there is a problem, is that director John Curran (The Painted Veil) can't decide what he wants the movie to be. As with a previous script in which he had a hand, The Killer Inside Me, there are strong noi...

Sundown is draped in a haze of uncertainty, with writer/director Michel Franco (Chronic, After Lucia) intentionally obscuring key details at the outset to keep the audience in a state of partial awareness. This lends a tint of mystery to what, tol...

It’s impossible to catch lightning in a bottle twice, yet that’s what director Danny Boyle is trying to do with his belated sequel to Trainspotting. More an extended epilogue to the cult 1996 movie than a stand-alone story, T2 (the title is...

In some ways, The Town can be considered a throwback, at least insomuch as any movie reflecting the approach of '80s and '90s cop dramas can be tagged with such a label. With a crisp, clear style and a focus on character, director Ben Affleck is a...

During the Spring of 1990, I remember being transfixed in front of the television set for an hour each Sunday night over a period of five weeks. The occasion was the "Masterpiece Theater" presentation of the British mini-series "Traffik", a comple...

A wonderful thing about Shakespeare’s canon is that those plays can form the vehicles by which any director’s unique vision can emerge. Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Kenneth Branagh all recognized this. With The Tragedy of Macbeth, Joel ...

True Story can be seen as a true crime story but it's primarily about the relationship between a criminal and the journalist interviewing him; the details of the quadruple murder come in a distant second. The ironically titled narrative is about ...

In their follow-up to the underrated Good Time, the Safdie Brothers (Benny and Josh) have shown that the some of the most forceful qualities evident in their previous film were more trademarks than one-off experiments. Uncut Gems, although ver...