Category: Thriller

  • Saboteur (1942)

    Saboteur is hardly top-tier Alfred Hitchcock, but even below-par Hitch is damned entertaining. And this wartime suspense yarn certainly holds your interest. It relies on a familiar theme of the director’s — an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime embarks on a cross-country chase to clear his good name — that he had used in…

  • Night Nurse (1931)

    Pulpy, violent and sexy (not necessarily in that order), Night Nurse presents a world seedy enough to make most noirs look like Disneyland by comparison. This Pre-Code gem is short, fast and slam-bang entertainment. Barbara Stanwyck stars as Lora Hart, a dedicated young nurse who lands work in a city hospital. There’s not much else…

  • Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

    With a knockout of a premise and an ample supply of firepower, Assault on Precinct 13 heralded the arrival of a promising, workmanlike genre director in John Carpenter. The action-thriller slipped in an out of U.S. theaters in 1976 with little fanfare, but quickly achieved cult status across the Atlantic and helped set the stage for Carpenter’s…

  • 2 Days in the Valley (1996)

    Too many moviegoers and critics initially dismissed 2 Days in the Valley as a Pulp Fiction knockoff, and today the movie might best be remembered for Charlize Theron in her big-screen debut as a statuesque gun moll. But this flick deserves better. Writer-director John Herzfeld‘s modest comic thriller bears a passing resemblance to Pulp Fiction,…

  • Eastern Promises (2007)

    Throughout most of his career, David Cronenberg twisted moviegoers into knots by exploring their fears of losing control, particularly when it came to one’s body. Such shenanigans spawned masterpieces of the macabre, from the exploding heads of Scanners to an even-creepier-than-usual Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, but too often, Cronenberg’s thematic obsessions overwhelmed his storytelling.…

  • Sin Nombre (2009)

    The directorial debut of Cary Joji Fukunaga, Sin Nombre, is an early demonstration of the filmmaker’s gifts, revealing a lyricism and visual style that elevate the material well beyond melodrama. The Spanish-language film interweaves the stories of two young people who eventually cross paths. In Chiapas, Mexico, Casper (Edgar Flores) is not your typical hood.…

  • Missing (2023)

    As gimmicks go, Missing has a mildly intriguing one. The mystery-thriller unfolds entirely on screens of computers, cellphones and smartwatches. If you happened to see the 2018 thriller Searching, then you know the shtick: amateur sleuth investigates a mystery through the trappings of the internet, social media and the like. In fact, Searching‘s editors, Nicholas D. Johnson and…

  • Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

    The first thing you might notice about the vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive is how effortlessly cosmopolitan they are. Smart, artsy, sexy — these undead are unequivocally cool. That’s no surprise when you consider this is the work of writer-director Jim Jarmusch, a purveyor of the idiosyncratic (Dead Man, Night on Earth, Ghost Dog:…