Movies in the Thriller genre

With a title like Phantom, one might easily assume that this movie is a ghost story. In actuality, however, it's a submarine thriller loosely based on actual events from 1968. The tale told by Phantom falls into the realm of "historical fiction." A...

Phone Booth became one of a number of post-9/11 films to fall victim to an increasing reluctance on the part of motion picture studios to release movies where on-screen events echo real-world tragedies. Joel Schumacher's thriller was originally se...

"There are eight million stories in the naked city. This [is] one of them." That iconic closing line from the TV series Naked City is one of the things I thought of at the beginning of Nicolas Pesce’s Piercing, which shows an art deco versio...

It's Vin Diesel week! Suddenly, this largely unknown actor, whose only significant credits were a part in Saving Private Ryan and some voice work in The Iron Giant (as the title character), is a hot commodity with significant roles in two films op...

Give the makers of Point Break credit - in reworking Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 thriller, they didn’t go for a point-by-point revision. Director Ericson Core and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer opted to try something different. Unfortunately, differ...

Irwin Allen would be proud. Poseidon is a throwback - a 1970s-style disaster film made with 2006-era special effects. The movie delivers in most of the ways that matter for a motion picture of this ilk, with Poseidon never trying to be something ...

It comes as a bit of a surprise that, for consistently suspenseful chase sequences, the pick of the 2012 summer crop is the under-the-radar thriller from writer/director David Koepp, Premium Rush. The average chase, filmed with the traditional sele...

Time travel movies meddle with paradoxes and causality - these things lie at the core of their essential fascination. The difference between a good time travel movie and a bad one often rests with one simple quality: Having established a set of "...

Watching The Prestige is like observing a magic act where the magician's sleight-of-hand isn't deft enough. The trick almost works, but not quite… With its mechanical twists and turns and lack of heart, the movie often resembles Sleuth in superf...

The generic cop movie has become such a tedious bore that when something like The Departed comes along, it injects energy into a genre that, over time, has lost momentum to a dried-up wellspring of creativity. Even as recently as the '80s, when Di...