It sometimes seems like true cinematic thrillers have gone out of fashion lately. It’s possible that TV and true-crime documentaries have taken over the genre. Those are great, but sometimes you want a fictional story that will keep you on the edge of your seat in two hours or less.
The good news is that HBO Max has a lot of exciting movies that you can watch over and over again.
The following are just a few of the thrillers that the streaming service has to offer right now. You didn’t find what you were looking for? Check out our list of the best scary movies and dramas on the service.
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Old (2021)
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Writers: M. Night Shyamalan, Pierre-Oscar Lévy, Frederik Peeters
Cast: Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell
Run Time: 1 hr 48 min
Old is horror master M. Night Shyamalan at his best and most focused. It started a million memes and is still a good movie on its own. It’s a scary story about, you guessed it, a beach that ages people.
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When a group of people they didn’t expect to meet on that beach, they can’t believe it at first, but they soon realise that there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop their deaths. Children grow up to be teenagers and then adults, and adults get old and die.
All of it is very sad and often violent, making for an unsettling experience that is fine-tuned to make you feel as scared as possible.
Even though it loses its nerve at times near the end, the nightmarish journey is undeniably a unique one because it sometimes gets very deep when you least expect it. It hits hard, which makes the movie more than just a meme. – Hutchinson Chase
Death on the Nile (2022)
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Writer: Michael Green
Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, Emma Mackey, Russell Brand, Tom Bateman, Annette Bening, Rose Leslie, Ali Fazal, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Sophie Okonedo, Letitia Wright
Run Time: 2 hr 7 min
Death on the Nile is a fun and exciting mystery based on a book by Agatha Christie. It has a colourful cast of strange and surprising people. Hercule Poirot, a famous detective from all over the world, gets involved in the strange life of Linnet “Linny” Ridgeway-Doyle (Gal Gadot).
Who thinks that the people who are with her on her honeymoon are up to something bad. From there, stealing, lying, and killing come into play.
The movie is a nonstop adventure that looks into each character’s past and motivations while taking the audience on a wild ride. This is the kind of movie where even the famous actors look like they are having as much fun as the audience.
Inside Man (2006)
Director: Spike Lee
Writer: Russell Gewirtz
Cast: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, and Chiwetel Ejiofor
Run Time: 2 hr 9 min
Spike Lee has made a lot of great movies over the course of his career, but Inside Man, which came out in 2006, might be one of his most entertaining movies in general. The story is about a bank robbery from both the thieves and the police’s points of view, which isn’t anything new.
But Lee takes this plot device to a new level by using interesting ways to tell the story and a series of twists and turns that keep the audience guessing. Denzel Washington is always good as the main cop, but Clive Owen as the bank robber is the most interesting character.
In the process, Lee drives home some disturbing points about prejudice and hate. This is a popcorn movie made by Spike Lee, which should be enough for you to add to your list. — A. Chitwood
High-Rise (2015)
Director: Ben Wheatley
Writer: Amy Jump
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, James Purefoy
Run Time: 1 hr 59 min
Ben Wheatly’s (Free Fire) book High-Rise is like a mix of Lord of the Flies, The Shining, and High Life (2019). It’s a direct attack on unchecked capitalism, and a few A-list actors give great performances.
The way the story is told visually, the beautiful music, and the obvious artistic messages all feel like they were taken from Korean movies. In High Rise, the deterioration of society is shown in a sophisticated and stylish way.
This keeps the critique in the spotlight. The deterioration of society feels like a slow slide followed by a sudden explosion of chaos that lasts for an unknown amount of time.
Residents who have been covered in paint and blood for what seems like days are meant to represent ideas more than specific people as they try to survive in increasingly dangerous situations.
It is violent and confusing, but it is also planned and has a point. It seems a bit long, but it goes beyond the usual thriller tropes to make a stronger point and show a bigger picture.
Kimi (2022)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: David Koepp
Cast: Zoë Kravitz, Byron Bowers, Rita Wilson
Run Time: 1 hr 29 min
Kimi is another movie by Steven Soderbergh that shows he is one of the best directors ever. It is a masterful modern thriller set in Seattle and starring Zo Kravitz as a tech worker named Angela. The movie does a great job of showing what Seattle is like.
Angela finds out about a cover-up at work, which means she will have to leave the safety of her apartment to find out the truth. What happens next is a very tense situation in which she has to run through the city and avoid many people who want to make sure she stays quiet.
Kravitz is a perfect fit for the role, and she really gets into the fast-paced energy of the movie, which keeps everything running smoothly. All of this leads up to one of the most satisfying and cathartic endings, making this one of the most enjoyable rides you’ll find in a movie. — Hutchinson, Chase
Promising Young Woman (2020)
Director/Writer: Emerald Fennell
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Allison Brie, Jennifer Coolidge, Laverne Cox
Run Time: 1 hr 53 min
Promising Young Woman goes against the usual rape-revenge plot and tells a story that is both empowering and devastating without feeling like it’s being used. Cassie (Carey Mulligan), who lost her best friend Nina, is still traumatised by it.
Some of Nina’s med school classmates beat her up, and she killed herself when the school didn’t punish them. Now, Cassie can’t get over how unfair that moment was, so she spends her night convincing men that she’s too drunk to protect herself.
When they try to take advantage of her, she tells them she’s sober and fights back. Cassie finally goes after the people who helped Nina die after this vigilante-style attack on “good guys.
“She thinks that the only way to really get revenge for Nina is for them to say that they did it. Even though the movie’s ending is controversial and pretty sad, Emerald Fennell gives the genre a much-needed female perspective. Like any good thriller, Promising Young Woman will make you feel uneasy long after the movie is over. — Brynna Arens
Contagion (2011)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: Scott Z. Burns
Cast: Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Jude Law
Run Time: 1 hr 46 min
Before the movie Contagion came out, the world was very different. Steven Soderbergh’s vision of a pandemic has only gotten more accurate as our world has become more like the main part of the movie.
Sociological and scary, it is about a group of people who all have to deal with the chaos of a global pandemic that destroys the world as we know it. All of the actors do a great job, and the story is as interesting as anything you’ll ever see about this subject.
It has a very good pace and is driven by care for its characters. It makes you care about the characters even as it shows a world where emotions are rare. It’s not about story catharsis or fantasy.
Instead, it’s a slow-paced story about what a society does when it’s under a lot of pressure. It is all that this kind of story can be and will continue to be as long as we keep living in a world that is too much like what Soderbergh made up. — Hutchinson, Chase
Memento (2000)
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan
Cast: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano
Run Time: 1 hr 53 min
Memento, one of the first movies that Christopher Nolan wrote and directed, is still a sharp film about history and morality told from the unreliable point of view of a man with short-term memory loss.
The man’s name is Leonard (Guy Pearce), and he has important information about how his wife was killed tattooed on his body so he won’t forget. It is a movie with a story that is broken up on purpose, showing two sets of events happening at the same time.
One moves forward in black-and-white over the course of a few phone calls. The other, in colour, is shown in reverse order, so that key details are revealed slowly and when you least expect them.
It’s a movie that shows how early on Nolan was interested in time and how the mind sees it. It pulls back the curtain on one man’s mind as he decides how he wants to live the rest of his life. — Hutchinson, Chase
Inception (2010)
Writer/Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Michael Caine
Run Time: 2 hr 28 min
Even though it came out more than a decade ago, Inception is still one of the best sci-fi movies we’ve ever seen. It may be Christopher Nolan’s most powerful and moving movie. Cobb is played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
He is in charge of a group of dream thieves who are hired to do some high-concept corporate espionage. Cobb’s team uses their dream-sharing technology to try to plant an idea in the mind of a dying CEO.
Along the way, they travel through several of their own dreamscapes, which are dreams within dreams with their own rules. Inception is the best example of all of Nolan’s favourite things about movies, from the cool visuals to the way time is shown from different points of view.
Along the way, he creates a fascinating world out of the human mind. This makes Inception one of the most interesting and technically impressive science fiction stories of its time. – Haille Foutch
The Little Things (2021)
Director/Writer: John Lee Hancock
Cast: Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto, Natalie Morales, Chris Bauer
Run Time: 2 hr 8 min
Do you ever watch a thriller from the 1990s and think, “They don’t make them like they used to”? If so, you might be interested in The Little Things, a movie that is based on a script from the 1990s.
Like a lot of thrillers from the 1990s, it has Denzel Washington in it. The movie is about two police officers (Washington and Rami Malek) looking for a serial killer.
Jared Leto is also in it as their main suspect, but wouldn’t it be too obvious for him to be the killer if he was cast in that role? Or is it? After all, this was written in the 1990s. Even without the jokes, it’s always fun to watch Denzel Washington act, and this newer movie is no different.
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No Country for Old Men (2007)
Directors/Writers: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald
Run Time: 2 hr 2 min
If you see a suitcase full of cash, you shouldn’t touch it. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) doesn’t listen to this advice, so we have No Country for Old Men, a movie with Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), one of the most terrifying hitmen of all time.
Even after all these years, the Coen Brothers still love to make movies about lovable fools who get into trouble. But by this point, they are seasoned pros, and it really shows in this movie, which has a lot of strong humour and serious themes, but also a lot of bloodshed and suspense.