Movies in the Drama/Thriller genre

Sometimes it’s the little things that impede the full success of an ambitious film. That’s the case with Alex Garland’s Civil War – an alternate-history dystopian road trip movie that does its best not to answer the many questions viewers ...

Anatomy of a Fall is an uncommonly perceptive and thought-provoking procedural. Because the movie transpires in France and works using the rules of French jurisprudence, it is better able to address questions of truth than a U.S.-based iteration o...

When one speaks of cultural relevance, some movies capture it in the moment (oftentimes dating the production in the process). Others grasp it as if looking in a rearview mirror. But there’s a small group, either through clairvoyance or happenst...

A take-notice performance from Anna Kendrick (who drops the f-bomb more times than in all of her previous roles combined) can’t hide how threadbare and ultimately unsatisfying the narrative of Alice, Darling is. Written without much concern for ...

The Good Nurse is what it appears to be: yet another of those true crime movies that Netflix churns out with regularity. The only difference between this and another of the limitless similar films in the streaming giant’s library is that this on...

It could be argued that The Banshees of Inisherin works better as an allegory than a straightforward narrative. There’s power in the message conveyed by writer/director Martin McDonagh’s screenplay; it’s less a drama and more a rumination ab...

Vengeance tries for something different and succeeds. But, although screenwriter/director B.J. Novak swings for the fences, he doesn’t quite get the ball out of the park. This Blumhouse production marries fish-out-of-water elements with some phi...

The screen adaptation of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing, written by Lucy Alibar and directed by Olivia Newman, comes with a built-in audience – the novel has (to date) sold 12 million copies and, if only a fraction of those readers pays ...

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...

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 ...