The streaming wars continue to rage on, but it is hard to deny the fact that HBO Max may have the most impressive catalog of movies available anywhere. That said, the sheer amount of movies available on the service can be a bit daunting. We all know the feeling of scrolling for an eternity in search of the perfect movie, only to look up and find you’ve spent nearly an hour on the decision. So, how best to whittle down your choices? Well, focusing on a specific genre is always helpful, and what better genre to spice up movie night than the good old-fashioned thriller.
In a world of constant distraction, finding a movie that will demand your attention is invaluable. This is where thrillers thrive. We can laugh at comedies and scream at horror, but suspense is the only feeling that truly works its way into your brain. You might not be experiencing exactly what the characters are going through, but just feel the sweat on your palms and the way you grip your partner’s hand and tell me you aren’t feeling the same thing as the characters on screen. For this list, we selected the 10 best thrillers on HBO Max, pulling from the best of the last 70 years of cinema to find the movies that will leave you tense and short of breath.
10. KIMI (2022)
KIMI is unapologetically a COVID-19 movie in every way. Now, that might not be a selling point; you just want to enjoy entertainment without reliving our collective global nightmare. But KIMI isn’t a slog, despite its time-stamped setting. Instead, it simply uses COVID — namely the period we decided to call “lockdown” — as a narrative starting point. The focus of our story is Angela Childs (Zoe Kravitz), a woman who suffered from agoraphobia prior to COVID but whose symptoms have been aggravated by the fact that the outside world seems even more dangerous. Her job working for a tech company, designing a new SIRI-like app, has her listening to thousands of people she’s never met go about their daily routines. This gives the film a definite Rear Window feel, modernized a bit but still featuring a literal peeping Tom plot. As you might have guessed, she soon stumbles upon something nefarious and must face her fear to help solve the crime.
9. Collateral (2004)
Michael Mann’s Collateral weaves its way through the plot at an absolute thrilling speed, taking sharp left turns and hurdling through red lights in a way few movies can pull off. This movie works so well, in large part because of its two leads, Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx — two charisma machines working at very near the top of their game. Cruise, especially, is working at a particularly high voltage here as Vincent, a hitman making his way throughout the Los Angeles night on a clear and specific mission. Foxx plays a taxi driver who becomes his hapless and mostly innocent chauffeur. It isn’t long until the two are on the run from the FBI and things truly begin to skid out of control. What works so well about the movie is its relatively limited scope, taking place mostly as one long conversation between Foxx and Cruise as things escalate around them. If you think you know where each scene of this movie is going, you are likely to be wrong, which really is when a thriller works best.
8. The Card Counter (2021)
The Card Counter strikes a tone unlike anything else on this list. There are a few jokes, some excellently rendered poker scenes, intriguing romance, and some of the darkest, most difficult-to-watch scenes you’ll ever witness. However, that might not be all that surprising when you learn that The Card Counter was written by Paul Schrader, the scribe behind Taxi Driver and First Reformed. The subject matter, which he attacks here, is no less encompassing than America itself, namely the culpability for the evil it so often enacts on the rest of the world. Our hero in this story is William Tell, played stoically by Oscar Isaac, a recently released convict who served time for his involvement in the horror perpetrated by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison (the flashbacks to these memories are particularly haunting).
7. Nightmare Alley (2021)
Thrillers can be so many things and that’s what makes them so addictive. In the case of Nightmare Alley, we get a thriller that’s heavily indebted to noir-style storytelling with a hint of straight horror sprinkled on top. Bradley Cooper stars here as a conman determined to make a buck, at increasingly horrid costs. As a viewer, we want to like him, but that fondness is tested again and again as he continues to show the monster he truly is. With the first half of the movie taking place largely at a kind of traveling circus/carnival and the second half in a contrasting high society, we are given prime examples of the way evil seeps into every corner of the world. To say that Cooper’s Stanton Carlisle gets his comeuppance is putting it mildly.
6. The Crying Game (1992)
The Crying Game, written and directed by Neil Jordan, sets its action amidst the period of time known as The Troubles, a perfectly European way to describe the 30 years of conflict within Ireland between Protestants and Catholics. The movie stars, among others, Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson, and Forest Whitaker, and was both a critical and financial success when it was released in 1992. As with many thrillers, things are never really crystal clear here, alliances and allegiances forming and dissolving before our eyes. This film became most famous for its final twist, which won’t be spoiled — just in case there’s anyone planning to give it a try — but it’s more than worth including on this list for the scintillating plot alone, even if you might know where things are going.
5. Promising Young Woman (2020)
Revenge is one of the best foundations on which to construct a thriller, and in the case of Promising Young Woman, revenge can be as satisfying for the viewer as for the main character. Carey Mulligan stars as Cassandra, a woman with a traumatic past and a score to settle with the kind of guy who believes they are one of the “good ones.” She shows them, by first-hand example, that they are decidedly not, manipulating them into displaying their worst selves again and again. Promising Young Woman is very much a movie of set pieces, and as things progress, the stakes get higher and higher. The thrills come hot and fast in this one, but that still might not adequately prepare you for the final third, which won’t be spoiled either.
4. North By Northwest (1959)
There’s only one man who can rightly call himself the grandfather of the modern thriller and that is Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock’s filmography runs the gamut from straight horror like Psycho to noir like Strangers On A Train, but 1959’s North By Northwest might be the purest example of an action-thriller in his whole oeuvre. Starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason, North By Northwest tells a globe-trotting story of mistaken identity, chock-full of high-wire action sequences and genuinely funny dialogue. It’s within this perfectly blended mix that we see the birth of what will become the modern action-thriller, one where clever asides are as essential as explosions. Perhaps most impressive is the way North By Northwest has stood the test of time, showing up again and again on lists of the best movies of all time, even as it passed its 60th birthday.
3. The Fugitive (1993)
Describing a movie as a “non-stop thrill ride” is almost parody at this point. Perhaps it’s because The Fugitive actually pulled off that qualifier so well, every other movie pales in comparison. The Fugitive is relentless, starting hot and absolutely never cooling down for a second. The first 45 minutes see a murder, a wrongful conviction, a prison break, an epic chase, and a swan dive for the ages. That’s before we truly enter the meat of the story, which takes the form of a cat and mouse game between Harrison Ford’s Dr. Richard Kimble (the mouse) and Tommy Lee Jones’s Samuel Gerard (the wily cat). Jones is better than ever as a macho, cocky, “always right” U.S. Marshall who “does not negotiate.” They really don’t make thrillers like this anymore.
2. Memento (2000)
It’s hard to overstate the lasting effect of a movie like Memento. For one, it was something of a cultural moment when it first appeared back in 2000. Both critically lauded and financially successful, it was certainly one of the most heavily discussed movies of the year. It also, of course, launched the career of one of the most important filmmakers of the 21st century, Christopher Nolan. Nolan has gone on to make some of the most popular and well-received movies of the last twenty-plus years, including The Dark Knight, Inception, and Interstellar, but it’s in Memento that we first get a sense of the obsessions and peculiarities that will define Nolan’s career. Memento is a difficult movie to describe in terms of plot, but its main characters’ short-term memory loss — his “condition” as he refers to it throughout the film — allows Nolan to explore both time and deception, two things he has returned to again and again throughout his filmography. It’s hard to picture the psychedelic time-bending of Interstellar or the M.C. Escher logic of Inception, without the structural ingenuity of Memento, a movie which is paradoxically thrilling because it is confusing as hell.
1. No Country For Old Men (2007)
It wasn’t a hard decision to feature this movie as the best thriller on HBO Max. No Country For Old Men is not only the best thriller, it may be the best movie on HBO Max. In what could be called the ultimate cat-and-mouse game, No Country For Old Men stars a trio of hard, weathered men on very specific missions; Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, and Tommy Lee Jones. “There are no clean getaways,” reads the film’s tagline, in what may be the understatement of the year. Like many from director duo The Coen Brothers, No Country For Old Men is all about the consequences of seemingly random mishaps, luck gone bad and the fallout of fate. This, unlike some of their other films, is mostly devoid of the comedic aspects that this set-up might typically elicit, but instead, it trudges onward at a deliberate pace as a masterclass in tension. Both a Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards and a box office success, No Country For Old Men made quite the impact in 2007, but more importantly, will live on as one of the best movies of all time, in any genre.