Movies in the Thriller/Drama genre

Watching The Debt, I was reminded of how entertaining a well-executed Cold War thriller can be. Although elements of this movie, based on the 2007 Israeli film Ha-Hov, have a kinship to Steven Spielberg's Munich, the overall thrust is more in line ...

Wim Wenders' The End of Violence offers the same type of experience one could expect from sitting through a David Lynch film with a reasonably-coherent narrative (unlike, for example, Lost Highway). Arguably Wenders' most disjointed film to date, ...

Several years ago, I recall reading an interview with British novelist P.D. James (the author of the Adam Dalgliesh mystery series) in which she was asked why it took her an average of three to four years to write a new book when other writers work...

With a title like Faster, it has to be a balls-to-the-walls action flick, right? Although that's how George Tillman Jr.'s feature is being marketed, that's not what it is. Faster is a revenge thriller that's more interested in delving into the da...

Perhaps the most curious and counterproductive aspect of The Fifth Estate, the so-called "Wikileaks movie," is the decision by director Bill Condon and screenwriter Josh Singer to establish the film as a thriller. The material covered in the produc...

Five Minutes of Heaven is about consequences - the unintended consequences of an action that can have repercussions years or decades after an event. This material, which forms the mother lode of Five Minutes of Heaven's substance, is powerful and c...

Freedomland is one of an increasingly endangered species: the adult movie that's about something. By "something," I mean a serious issue - the kind of thing films shy away from for fear of alienating viewers. Underneath the trappings of a police ...

A modern crime thriller with noir inflections, Galveston operates in the seedy underbelly of the American South. Hitman Roy Cady (Ben Foster), struggling with a recognition with his own mortality, recognizes that he hasn’t lived a good life....

Combine the talents of director Robert Altman and actors Kenneth Branagh and Robert Duvall, and you have the apparent recipe for a motion picture worth waiting for. But, although The Gingerbread Man is a finely-tuned example of mainstream entertai...

Gone Baby Gone is powerful stuff - a movie that derives its plot twists from moral conundrums rather than from narrative sleight of hand. The best mystery novels are the ones that use the genre as a stepping-off point for developing characters and...