Month: June 2024

The most recent and best listening opportunities available in podcast form in 2024. Review.

We’re halfway through 2024, so it’s time for a roundup of the most recent and best listening opportunities available in the form of the podcast. This time, we’ve got everything from nostalgic rewatching to journeys into the darkness of the human mind to interrogations of history. You’ll find well-known favorites with new seasons, like Slow Burn and Long Shadow, plus some debuts onto the scene in the form of neat packages, like Three. 

So peruse our list, and get ready to spend the second half of the year inside your latest obsession. 

1. Again With This

A great rewatch podcast enables a listener to engage with their nostalgia, while also making sure they don’t take it too seriously. Again With This is hosted by Tara Ariano and Sarah D. Bunting, co-creators of Television Without Pity and Previously.TV; this podcast returns us to the days when our TVs brought us the weekly magic that was Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place, and most recently, Dawson’s Creek. Ariano and Bunting revisit every episode with an unflinchingly shrewd eye toward the details we either never noticed or pretended we didn’t see (i.e., the felonious relationship between young Pacey Witter and his teacher). Prepare to see the blush fall off the rose of your youth, and get ready to laugh boisterously in public. 

How to listen: Again With This is available on Spotify.

2. The Secrets We Keep

Is there something you’ve never told anyone? What would it take for you to reveal that secret? In this five-part series from New England Public Media, host Karen Brown talks to folks about the secrets they have around topics considered taboo, including abortion, money, and sexuality, and how keeping their secrets has impacted their lives, especially for those who come to occupy the political stage. Here’s a podcast that can help us feel less alone as we ask ourselves the question: Do we ever have a responsibility to tell our secrets?

How to listen: The Secrets We Keep is available on Spotify.

3. Three

On July 6, 2012, 16-year-old Skylar Neese disappeared into the woods in Wayne Township, Pennsylvania, across the state line from her home in Star City, West Virginia. In December 2012, Neese’s best friend, Rachel Shoaf, confessed that she, along with Neese’s other best friend, Sheila Eddy, had stabbed Neese to death that night in July. Created and hosted by journalists Justine Harman and Holly Millea, Three is a 10-episode series about the events that led up to Neese’s murder. Harman and Millea interview Skylar’s family and close friends, as well as investigators on the case, about the chilling dynamic at the heart of this teen triangle — and how it reached its sinister pinnacle. 

How to listen: Three is available on Spotify.

4. Radio Rental

Remember, if you can, the sound of a videotape sliding into a VCR (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, here you go). If that sound makes you feel nostalgic and ready to watch some movies that will make your blood curdle, do yourself a favor and listen to this horror-comedy podcast. In it, Terry Carnation (Rainn Wilson) is the owner of Radio Rental, an ’80s video store that houses a collection of strange, scary, and true stories told from the point of view of the people who experienced them. In each episode, Carnation narrates the goings-on inside the store — sometimes there’s a void; sometimes a creepy little girl; almost always his very vocal cat, Malachi — setting the scene for tales of the macabre. So grab your fanny pack, get comfortable in your beanbag chair, and don’t forget to rewind. 

How to listen: Radio Rental is available on Spotify.

5. How to Know What’s Real

What are the things we’ve come to believe? Why do we believe them, even if and when we know we’re constantly confronted with false information every second of the day? Join The Atlantic‘s Andrea Valdez and Megan Garber as they investigate how our brains process avalanches of disinformation and how we can become more critical. They tackle the idea of “prebunking,” how not to perpetuate the spread of bad information, the role of emotion in getting us to click that link, and how your Vanderpump Rules addiction could be impacting your real-life relationships. In a world where we don’t always know what to believe, Valdez, Garber, and their expert guests are here to give us the tools to read between the lines. 

How to listen: How to Know What’s Real is available on Spotify.

6. Hidden Brain

Hidden Brain is a podcast about human behavior — namely, why we do the things we do, even when we can’t explain them. Host Shankar Vedantam dives deep into loneliness, trying too hard, feeling empty, balking when it comes to political conversations, and more. Every episode is a clever and comforting opportunity to glimpse the reasoning behind our most common, and complicated, experiences of being humans. 

How to listen: Hidden Brain is available on Spotify.

7. Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there were 134 mass shootings in the first four months of 2024. In the most recent season of Long Shadow, host Garrett Graff contemplates how we got here. Starting with the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, Graff traces the origins of the Second Amendment, the rise of the NRA and its response to widespread gun violence, as well as the impact on a generation of kids who were raised with lockdown drills. This season will surprise you, as it answers questions you didn’t know you had about guns in the U.S. and why, when it comes to keeping each other safe, we can’t seem to get out of our own way. 

How to listen: Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust is available on Spotify.

8. Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs  

“Hope is getting your ass kicked and getting back up,” says California State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, setting the tone for the latest season of Slate’s Slow Burn. Host Christina Cauterucci and her guests take a close look at the Briggs Initiative, the first-ever referendum on gay rights. The 1978 ballot proposition sought to ban gays and lesbians from working in California public schools, igniting the burgeoning violence against the LGBTQ community and inspiring generations of activists in a fight for their jobs, their chosen families, and their futures. 

How to listen: Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs is available on Spotify.

9. Second Sunday

Second Sunday is a podcast that illuminates the universal inside the particular. Hosts Darren and Esther delve into the experiences of being queer inside the Black church. Every episode features a guest with perspective on how to hold complicated ideas and feelings. How do you not only stay, but flourish, in places where you aren’t accepted for who you are? When do you hit the eject button, if ever? How do we take care of ourselves? In season two, Darren, Esther, and their guests examine what it looks like to explore faith outside of a traditional church setting, with creative voices imagining identity and religion beyond rigidity. 

How to listen: Second Sunday is available on Spotify.

10. Embedded: Supermajority  

The latest season of Embedded, NPR’s documentary podcast, takes us to Tennessee, where host and reporter Meribah Knight follows three conservative moms as they confront the state legislature after the 2023 shooting at The Covenant School, only to learn that the very same political structures that have seemingly been on their side for years actually have no interest in helping them. As we know, politics and identity go hand in hand, and this season will go on to reveal what happens when events make us question who we are, what we believe, who we can trust, and how we can make change. 

How to listen: Embedded: Supermajority is available on Apple Podcasts.

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A list of the best movies from the 1980s and where to watch them now.

Cowabunga, dudes and dudettes! Let’s slide on our favorite scrunchies and some totally tubular leg warmers and, like, head to the mall to veg out with a new movie! 

Oh, wait. All of the malls are now decrepit shells where only the rats live? That’s not so cowabunga. Well, we’ll make due with this bitchin’ list of movies from the 1980s that can currently be found on streaming. Just don’t forget those leg warmers. They always come in handy. 

1. The Breakfast Club

As Andrew McCarthy’s recent documentary Brats (now streaming on Hulu) made extremely clear, you can’t make a list of 1980s movies without including ones that star The Brat Pack and/or were directed by John Hughes. Of course, The Breakfast Club fulfills both of those criteria with flying colors. Setting into stone the high school archetypes that every high school movie since has been grappling with in, The Breakfast Club showed us what happened when “The Jock” (Emilio Estevez), “The Nerd” (Anthony Michael Hall), “The Basket Case” (Ally Sheedy), “The Criminal” (Judd Nelson), and “The Princess” (Molly Ringwald) all stopped being polite and started getting real while trapped together in Saturday detention. As they slowly learn to see one another’s common humanity beyond the roles that they’ve found themselves pigeonholed into, the film is achingly sincere — just like most high school kids are. Just ignore the world’s worst make-over sequence (justice for Sheedy!), pump your fist in the air, and don’t you forget about them. 

How to watch: The Breakfast Club is now streaming on Netflix.

2. Heathers

The yin to The Breakfast Club‘s yang, director Michael Lehmann’s darkest of dark comedies riffs on all of the types that the John Hughes movies defined, only with any lingering sincerity torn asunder by blistering satire. As the proto-Mean Girls, Heathers sets itself right within a clique of the school’s most popular girls — the titular Heathers — who are so vicious they could’ve made “tough guy” Judd Nelson curl into a ball and weep in ten seconds or less.

Winona Ryder stars as Veronica, who at the film’s start is circling the periphery of the Heathers, not quite sure she belongs. She is named Veronica, after all. Because, yes, the Heathers are all named Heather; there’s Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty), Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk), and savage queen bee Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), the illustrious wordsmith behind immortal lines like, “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw.” 

Enter bad boy J.D. (Christian Slater doing his absolute best Jack Nicholson), who turns Veronica’s indecision into action — specifically the action of homicide, as he begins offing the Heathers and their dipshit jock boyfriends one by one, with savagely hilarious results. We often (somewhat facetiously) say that they can’t make movies like this anymore, but it truly is difficult to picture a mainstream comedy about teens murdering one another now that the gun lobby’s allowed our schools to turn into actual Battle Royale recreations. So, go enjoy this one!

How to watch: Heathers is now streaming on Prime Video.

3. Something Wild

Vastly underrated within director Jonathan Demme’s impressive oeuvre, this 1986 arthouse favorite stars Jeff Daniels as Charlie, a snooze of a New York investment banker who desperately needs to undo his tie and let loose a little. Enter the most manic of manic pixie dream girls, a black-bobbed Melanie Griffith as Audrey, who lightly kidnaps him, jumps his rattled bones, and takes him on a wild road trip across Long Island. (Long Island? Seriously? Yes, just Long Island.) Turns out Audrey is sort of, kind of being hunted down by her sinister ex Ray (a very scary and also hot Ray Liotta). And somehow Demme threads together light screwball comedy with genuine thriller elements, and still sticks an improbable landing. Sexy, funny and legitimately wild stuff.

How to watch: Something Wild is now streaming on Tubi.

4. Cruising

Set in New York City’s gay leather scene, William Friedkin’s 1980 serial killer thriller drew understandable controversy when it was released, as it riled those understandably hungry for positive gay representation in cinema. However, in today’s post-Will & Grace world, there’s been plenty of gleaming-teeth positive gay representation. So it’s a little easier to see beyond Cruising‘s seediness to its visceral virtues. Friedkin crafted one heck of a scary ride with Cruising, which sees Al Pacino play a detective going undercover into NYC’s BDSM scene to catch a crazed maniac who’s brutally — and I do mean brutally — murdering gay men. 

Cruising is fully immersive in its time and place, immortalizing bars like the Eagle’s Nest and the Hellfire Club forever; save pornography, nobody was peering into these places circa 1980. Where else were mainstream audiences learning about the hanky code, much less fisting? The tension between terror and desire comes across palpably by Friedkin; the film feels less homophobic to me than it does a dissection of homophobia. It’s very much a portrait of its exact moment’s mindset. And the eeriness of it immediately presaging the AIDS crisis adds yet another level of darkness. 

How to watch: Cruising is now streaming on The Criterion Channel.

5. 48 Hrs.

While Eddie Murphy’s other ’80s buddy cop movie, Beverly Hills Cop, turned out to be the more successful franchise, financially speaking — indeed, 2024 has a fourth entry on tap, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F — I’ve always been Team 48 Hrs. myself. Directed by genre legend Walter Hill (Warriors) and co-starring Nick Nolte at his hilariously gruffest, 48 Hrs. sees San Francisco cop Jack Cates (Nolte) forced to team up with fast-talking convict Reggie Hammond (Murphy) in order to catch Hammond’s old partner in crime, one bad dude named Ganz (James Remar).

Considered by most to be the buddy cop movie that invented (or at least popularized) the genre still going strong today, Nolte and Murphy share a monstrously infectious chemistry in these roles. Hill delivers a genuinely action-packed vehicle that gives Murphy free range to flex his comedic chops, turning it into a simultaneously comic romp for the ages. It’s the perfect mix.

How to watch: 48 Hrs is now streaming on Paramount+.

6. Working Girl

Mike Nichols’ effervescent 1988 romantic-comedy stars Melanie Griffith (her again!) as Tess, a Staten Island Gal Friday who’s tired of being used and abused by the high-powered Manhattan execs that she toils under. Quitting one job because she keeps getting manhandled, Tess thinks she’s struck gold when she lands a gig working for a woman; unfortunately, that woman is the ruthless climber Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver, brilliant), whose betrayals manage to cut even deeper.

When Katharine breaks her leg on a business skiing trip and is trapped overseas while she recovers, Tess takes over in her absence and works her own damn way up the ladder. That the big shot Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford at peak hotness) just happens to be standing at the top of said ladder is a bonus I think none of us could or would refuse. With stellar support from a sleazy hot Alec Baldwin and an epically hair-sprayed Joan Cusack, Working Girl tackles and tears apart the corporate world that was at the heart of so much ’80s culture with a zany vengeance.

How to watch: Working Girl is now streaming on Hulu.

7. Die Hard 

While the subject of whether or not Die Hard counts as a Christmas movie has proven to be an annual conversation in and of itself, its role as a definitive 1980s action classic has never been in dispute. But in 1988, there was actually a lot of uncertainty surrounding the concept of Bruce Willis as an action star. That smirking dude from Moonlighting? Really? That point of view seems impossible to imagine after decades of Willis proving he’s an ace at action, but this was the age of those big lunks Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Then Bruce came along and changed all of that, so now our action heroes could be human-sized and funny. And thank goodness.

For the first out of what would end up being five turns, Die Hard sees Willis as John McClane, an NYPD detective who finds himself trapped inside the Los Angeles skyscraper where his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia) works after it’s been taken over by a gang of terrorists. The leader of said gang is the man, the myth, the legend Hans Gruber, played by the man, the myth, the legend Alan Rickman, with his own malevolent smirk for the ages. And so McClane fights to save his wife and defeat the terrorists, all while director John McTiernan shoots the claustrophobic hell out of it. And lo! Unto us was born a (Christmas) action classic.

How to watch: Die Hard is now streaming on Hulu.

8. Beetlejuice

You can’t talk about the 1980s without including Tim Burton, who burst out of the gate in 1985 with the comedy classic Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and then went and invented the superhero blockbuster as we’ve come to know it with his Batman movie four years later. Nestled in between those two is what feels much more like a definitive Burton film — perhaps even The Definitive Burton Film — 1988’s weirdo afterlife masterpiece Beetlejuice. 

Winona Ryder (her again!) stars as Lydia Deetz, a teen goth girl who’s just moved out of NYC and into a small town fixer-upper with her artistically inclined parents Charles and Delia (Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara, the one true god). The only problem is the place is haunted by its former tenants, a desperately sweet couple named Adam and Barbara (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) who recently met their sad end in a covered bridge-related car accident. 

Adam and Barbara want these awful people out of their house immediately, but they don’t have much luck haunting them out on their own. So they decide to summon a feisty poltergeist by the name of Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), who’s supposedly really good at this sort of thing. Unfortunately for everybody, Mr. Juice has plans of his own, and soon enough all Hell and its stripey sandworms are breaking loose. Awash in strange and surreal Burton-esque lunacy, Beetlejuice is totes the ghost with the most.

How to watch: Beetlejuice is now streaming on Prime Video. 

9. Manhunter

Five years before Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs would slurp up all of the 1992 Academy Awards with a nice bottle of chianti, director Michael Mann first introduced us — cinematically speaking — to the cannibal psychiatrist to end all cannibal psychiatrists in this 1986 film. And while I can’t and don’t want to knock Lambs, Manhunter is a beautiful and scary beast all its own.

Based on Thomas Harris’ book Red Dragon (which would get adapted into another movie in 2002, as well as play out across a season of the TV series Hannibal), Manhunter stars William Petersen as FBI agent Will Graham, who is on the hunt for a serial killer nicknamed “The Tooth Fairy.” And much like Clarice Starling would eventually have to do, Graham is forced to use the skills of the imprisoned Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (played by Brian Cox, aka Daddy Succession) to help him work the case. 

Only Mann’s third feature film, after Thief and The Keep, Manhunter is a tropical terror show; it feels as if a nightmare has descended upon an episode of Miami Vice. Bonus points for Tom Noonan’s creeptastic turn as serial killer Francis Dollarhyde, one of the scariest ever committed to celluloid.

How to watch: Manhunter is now streaming on The Criterion Channel.

10. RoboCop

If we’re talking about definitive 1980s directors, there’s no way we can’t carve out a space for Paul Verhoeven, who saw right through the glitz of this money-obsessed American decade into its blackest of hearts. Of course, giddy, over-the-top filmmaker that Verhoeven was and still is, he packaged up this messaging in a hilariously mordant satire called RoboCop, a brutal excavation of the decade’s copaganda streak that never stops kicking unholy amounts of ass along the way. 

Peter Weller plays Alex Murphy, an upstanding family man and cop whose goodness gets him blown to literal smithereens while out patrolling the streets of dystopian Detroit. Luckily (or unluckily depending on your perspective) for Murphy, the police department has been outsourced to a tech corporation called Omni, and he wakes up not dead but kinda stuffed into a robotic body, which they’re now testing out as a new way to police the streets. 

Hyper-violent as they come, RoboCop takes all its ideas to such gore-soaked pop extremes that it’s easy enough to find yourself bludgeoned into acquiescence while watching it. But make no mistake, this is a lacerating satire, one that only feels more terrifyingly prescient with each passing year. (Check those robot dogs now patrolling most major cities as the lights in our libraries flicker off.) Like Leonard Cohen, Paul Verhoeven also saw the future, baby, and it was murder.

How to watch: RoboCop is now streaming on Max.

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The 20 best spicy and satisfying thrillers currently available on Max.

There are times you just need a chill down your spine to shake off the doldrums and know you’re alive.

When this craving hits, nothing satisfies quite like a great thriller. Such suspense-rich movies give us a first-class ticket to journeys wild, winding, and exciting. They invite us to live vicariously through charismatic crooks, on-the-run assassins, vengeance-seeking vigilantes, and twisted souls who thirst for destruction.

If you’re in search of cinema that will rattle your nerves and leave you breathless, we’ve got just the thing. Whether you want something new or classic, fun or frightening, mind-bending or heartwarming, there’s a perfect pick just for you.

Here are the 20 best thrillers on Max now available.

1. M

“M” is the mark of a murderer in this unnerving Fritz Lang classic, which boasts layers of sinister thrills. Released in 1931, this German gem explored the terrors of “stranger danger” way ahead of its time by tracking the crimes of a sneaky child killer. Rather than show kids slaughtered onscreen, Lang employed German Expressionism to imply carnage, thus turning an abandoned balloon into a horrific image. Suspense is wrought not only from the threat that this merciless murderer will strike again, but also from a raging mob’s mounting quest for vigilante justice. With wide eyes and an unsettling screen presence, Peter Lorre made his mark with this role of a revolting fiend. — Kristy Puchko, Film Editor

How to watch: M is now streaming on Max.

2. Kimi

What would you do if you overheard a crime being committed? That’s the curious question that plays at the core of Steven Soderbergh’s 2022 thriller, written by Jurassic Park‘s David Koepp. Named for a virtual personal assistant that recorded audio of a seemingly deadly incident, Kimi stars Zoë Kravitz as Angela Childs, a tech worker whose sharp ear and big heart mean she can’t walk away once the screams play. In tracking down the truth, Angela will face off against corporate greed, mysterious stalkers, and her struggles with crippling agoraphobia. Laced with psychological suspense and a mesmerizing mystery, this thriller will have you on the edge of your seat…and maybe side-eying your Echo. — K.P.

How to watch: Kimi is now streaming on Max.

3. Black Swan

Natalie Portman justly won the Best Actress Oscar for her fiercely committed turn here as lead ballet dancer Nina Sayers, whose tippy-toes aren’t the only thing snapping under the weight of all that stress in writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 psychological thriller. Boxed in by a smothering mother at home (Barbara Hershey) and a handsy artistic director at work (Vincent Cassel at his seductive-slimiest), all it takes is for a rival dancer named Lily (Mila Kunis) to start poking at her for Nina to completely unravel into a heap of black-and-white feathers on the floor. 

With a tone pitched somewhere between Showgirls and The Red Shoes, Aronofsky drags us pirouette-first into the mindset of a dancer’s obsession with achieving athletic perfection, no matter the damage; Nina basically wills her bones to snap into the exact right place or else. All that, plus Winona Ryder chewing the scenery as the Cristal to Portman’s Nomi – such camp, such bliss, such sinister fun.

How to watch: Black Swan is now streaming on Max.

4. Blood Simple

The Coen Brothers made their name right out of the gate with this killer 1984 neo-noir, their very first film. The film stars John Getz as Ray, a bartender at an Austin dive bar who begins having an affair with Abby (Frances McDormand), the wife of his sleazy boss Julian (Dan Hedaya). Enter a private detective named Visser (a classic turn from legendary character actor M. Emmet Walsh), and soon enough everybody’s double-crossing each other and it’s all turning to shit as quick as you can say holy gumshoe. If that plot sounds like the plot of a million noirs that came before it, just you wait. The Coens’ script is as knotty as we’ve now come to expect from the pair, twisting those rote noir conventions into pretzels and then exploding it all outward into a brutality that truly leaves a mark. 

How to watch: Blood Simple is now streaming on Max.

5. The Killing of a Sacred Deer

While there’s a lot of competition for the title of Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos’ nastiest movie, I don’t think anyone would raise a ruckus if you named this 2017 film of his, which stars Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman as a married couple who find their family inexplicably terrorized by Martin (a pre-Saltburn Barry Keoghan).

Martin just shows up one day and happily informs Steven’s family that they will all start going through several horrible stages of illness, all leading to death for everyone if one member of the family isn’t sacrificed. And then we’re forced to watch him sloppily eat spaghetti in a white t-shirt. It’s traumatic! Like a home invasion thriller on a ketamine drip, The Killing of a Sacred Deer feels like what would happen if Michael Haneke had a sense of humor. Truly deranged.

How to watch: The Killing of a Sacred Deer is now streaming on Max. 

6. Clear and Present Danger

Before Tom Clancy’s famed CIA agent Jack Ryan got himself a streaming series starring John Krasinski but after he was played by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October, Harrison Ford tackled the role in two films directed by Philip Noyce — Patriot Games in 1992 and this 1994 thriller. Both are worth your time, and both are streaming on Max, but I’m partial to the second one, which is so thick with ace character actors having a blast in diabolical little roles that you’ll find it dizzying from scene to scene. We’re talking Willem Dafoe, Henry Czerny, James Earl Jones, Anne Archer, and Donald Moffat and those illustrious eyebrows of his. Oh, and keep your eyes peeled Clark Gregg and Benjamin Bratt as hot little babyfaces in uniform. The plot is some typically convoluted nonsense about conspiracies and drug cartels and double- and triple-crosses — it’s all just an excuse for Harrison Ford to furrow his brow and kick some ass. Which is the best excuse there is!

How to watch: Clear and Present Danger is now streaming on Max.

7. It Comes at Night

Terrifyingly intimate and awash with a truly creepy darkness, this thriller from writer/director Trey Edward Shults has acquired an extra level of resonance since its release in 2017. Paul (Joel Edgerton), Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and their son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) live together in a small, boarded-up cabin in the woods. The world around them has been decimated by a horrific disease, and they’ve just narrowly managed to avoid being infected themselves. All’s going well enough — or as well as can be expected, given the whole “deadly global pandemic” thing — until another family (Christopher Abbott, Riley Keough, and Griffin Robert Faulkner) show up, and quickly the suspicions and mistrust between them all becomes too much to bear.

During the first few months of our real-world COVID pandemic, everybody talked about going back and rewatching Contagion and Outbreak, but too few gave this one, the scariest of them all as far as I’m concerned, a chance. Rectify that!

How to watch: It Comes at Night is now streaming on Max.

8. Parasite

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho had been making popular and critical hits in his home country for almost two decades before he made the 2019 class thriller Parasite. But all of that previous success couldn’t have prepared anybody for the phenomenon his latest would become; it raked in over $262 million worldwide at the box office and then danced home with four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.

A nesting doll of get-rich-quick schemes, Parasite is centered on the poor Kim family (including the legendary Song Kang-ho as its patriarch) who become obsessed with bilking the wealthy Park family out of every cent they can. They do this by infiltrating the oblivious Parks as their servants, one by one — until the Parks’ actual servants start taking their revenge, that is. It all comes to a head with weaponized peach fuzz, a biblical rainstorm, and a bloody birthday party from hell. This frazzled tale of the haves versus the have-nots surfed straight to the top of zeitgeist, with good reason. 

How to watch: Parasite is now streaming on Max. 

9. Infernal Affairs

Remade in 2006 by no less than Martin Scorsese as The Departed, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s twisty 2002 thriller stars Hong Kong legends Andy Lau and Tony Leung as a cop-turned-criminal and a criminal-turned-cop who both get themselves in seriously over their heads. The twosome’s clashing machinations to keep their various deeds under cover from the forces out to get them leads to ruin for pretty much everybody. As each one tries to out the other before they get outed first, it’s chaos, beautiful chaos! Every action movie in the past two decades wishes and prays it has some of the expertly wound tension this film sparks off with ease. 

How to watch: Infernal Affairs is now streaming on Max.

10. Funny Games

If you like your thrillers to double and triple underline the meaninglessness of human existence, have we got the movie for you! Austrian director Michael Haneke’s 1997 classic of cinematic despair stars Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe as Anna and Georg, average middle-class parents to young Schorschi (Stefan Clapczynski) who are heading out to their lake house for a relaxing weekend. Their plans go swiftly awry when two strange young men in tennis whites (Arno Frisch and Frank Giering) show up at their door politely asking to borrow some eggs. Neighborly niceties quickly dissolve into a home invasion nightmare, one from which logic and reason have about as good a chance of escaping as does any object that comes too close to a black hole. (The black hole in this instance is Michael Haneke’s heart.)

How to watch: Funny Games is now streaming on Max.

11. Diabolique

At a run-down boarding house in the suburbs of Paris, the headmaster Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse) is cheating on his sickly wife Christina (Véra Clouzot), a teacher at the school, with a younger sexier teacher named Nicole (Simone Signoret). Michel is such an asshole to everybody that the women team up together to murder him, just to get themselves out from under his thumb. But as we’ve seen time and again, such diabolical plans never land simply, and director Henri-Georges Clouzot wrings incredible amounts of tension from this simple premise. Diabolique is a true masterpiece of the genre, although I have a bizarre and perhaps singular soft spot for the 1996 remake, with a camp-tastic Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani. Watch it now and be amazed at how every thriller’s been thoroughly ripping it off ever since.

How to watch: Diabolique is now streaming on Max.

12. The Thomas Crown Affair

1999 was so stacked with cinematic masterpieces that this incredibly entertaining heist film, a remake of the 1968 Steve McQueen picture, doesn’t get nearly as much love as it should. From Die Hard and Predator director John McTiernan, this version stars Pierce Brosnan (in between James Bond movies at the time) as a billionaire who steals a $100 million painting from the Museum of Modern Art, and finds an insurance investigator (Rene Russo, burning up the screen) hot on his tail. In more ways than one! 

Facts: This movie is a better Bond movie than any of Brosnan’s actual Bond films. It’s a sexy and thrilling adult-oriented travelogue full of lush locations, action sequences, and gorgeous mountains of killer clothes. And if you’re old enough, you’ll remember all of the embarrassing press over the “nude” dress that the then-45-year-old Russo rocks in a memorable dance scene in the movie — because in 1999 it was apparently mind-boggling for a 45-year-old woman to be viewed as sexually desirable? Thank goodness we can all see how silly that was now.

How to watch: The Thomas Crown Affair is now streaming on Max.

13. The Assistant 

Although the name “Harvey Weinstein” is never uttered in this 2019 #MeToo horror film from writer/director Kitty Green, it doesn’t have to be. It’s clear that Weinstein (and all of the many Weinstein variants out there) is the monster behind its door, each of them using their power to prey on any woman within pawing distance. The great Julia Garner stars here as Jane, a young woman on the verge who we follow over the course of a single day in her duties as an assistant at a film production company in lower Manhattan. 

Present and mindful enough to witness the horrifically inappropriate behavior her boss is engaging in but low enough on the totem pole that nobody will listen to her when she tries to speak up, The Assistant is a troubling study of complicity, one that unnerves in its every frame.

How to watch: The Assistant is now streaming on Max.

14. Cujo

The 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s book about a rabid Saint Bernard is monstrously simple, but all the more effective for that. Director Lewis Teague (who also did the King adaptation Cat’s Eye) spends the vast majority of Cujo‘s 90-minute runtime focused on Donna (Dee Wallace) and her son Tad (Danny Pintauro), who are trapped in their increasingly hot car with a dwindling amount of food and water — all the while, Cujo is foaming at the mouth just on the other side of their car window, eager to tear them apart. It’s as lizard-brained basic a survival tale as they come.

How to watch: Cujo is now streaming on Max.

15. The Hitcher 

In The Hitcher, ’80s twink C. Thomas Howell plays Jim, a young man tasked with delivering a car across the country. But Jim makes the rookie mistake of picking up a hitchhiker, and one who looks like Rutger Hauer at that. He doesn’t actually just look like Rutger Hauer – he is played by Rutger Hauer! Even scarier. Nothing good has ever come from the presence of Rutger Hauer. Giving Jim the hilarious fake name of “John Ryder,” the hitcher torments Jim up and down the deserted roads of Texas, eventually dragging a sweet little diner waitress named Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh) into the melee too. Bodies pile up left and right, and it all leads to a truly shocking climax — one that could’ve been avoided if silly old Jim had just obeyed the road’s Golden Rule: “Avoid all Rutger Hauers.” Well, now he knows.

How to watch: The Hitcher is now streaming on Max. 

16. The French Connection

Famed for its legendary car chase through the streets of New York City, this 1971 police thriller from director William Friedkin stars the great Gene Hackman as the detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, one of his most iconic roles. Doyle is on the hunt for French drug-runner Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) who’s smuggled a shit ton of heroin into the country walled up inside of a fancy automobile. Although nobody will be mistaking this for a John Wick movie (and thank goodness for that) The French Connection is still very nearly 104 straight minutes of chase sequences leading into more chase sequences, with Doyle hot on Charnier’s tail in an increasingly panicked fashion, all while Hackman gives us a complicated, messy hero sweating and swearing across the margins.

How to watch: The French Connection is now streaming on Max.

17. The Skin I Live In

Although there have been plentiful Hitchockian criminal elements laced throughout legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s films over the years, none have leaned quite so hard into straight thriller territory as does this very strange and frequently horrific 2011 film. Riffing fairly explicitly on the classic 1960 horror film Eyes Without a Face, The Skin I Live In stars Almodovar’s male muse Antonio Banderas as plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Ledgard. When he’s not busy accepting awards for his revolutionary medical procedures, Robert spends his time at home relaxing and grafting human skin onto mice. He also keeps a woman named Vera (Elena Anaya) trapped on his estate so he can practice making her physically perfect. Deeply twisted in psychosexual ways that only Almodovar could dream up, The Skin I Live In should burrow itself right under yours.

How to watch: The Skin I Live In is now streaming on Max.

18. Notes on a Scandal 

Richard Eyre’s 2006 film, an adaptation of Zoë Heller’s novel, veers so hard into pure melodrama at times that it is fine to admit its thriller elements are on occasion undercut by the bigness of the performances and the lurid atmosphere. It often feels more like one of those ’90s trashy thrillers, like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or The Crush — just with Oscar-winning thespians Cate Blanchett and Dame Judi Dench as the ones boiling the bunnies this time. But what delicious bunnies they boil!

Blanchett plays Sheba, the new art teacher at the school where hissing old piece-of-work Barbara (Dench) has long ago resigned herself to a life of cat-clutching bitterness and scorn. The two strike up a tentative friendship, which with great speed transmogrifies into an unhinged obsession on Barbara’s part. Hey, we get it. She’s Cate Blanchett after all. So, when Sheba starts having sex with an underage student, Barbara sees her in — blackmail the pretty lady into loving you! That always works out, right? 

In a long and much-respected career of excellent performances, Dench’s seething turn as a hardened closet case will always and forever be my favorite work of hers. The nastiness of her set-in repression feels like acid pouring from Barbara’s every pore, and oh, how Dench makes it sting.

How to watch: Notes on a Scandal is now streaming on Max.

19. Good Time

Propulsive is a good word for what the Safdie brothers accomplished with Good Time, their 2017 thriller starring Robert Pattinson as a sleazy crook who drags everybody around him into a heap of trouble at every possible turn. Pattinson plays a Queens lowlife named Connie who kicks things off by yanking his brother Nick (Benny Safdie), who is intellectually disabled, out of a therapy session so they can rob a bank together. 

From there, every choice Connie makes leads to awfulness, and yet Connie keeps slipping out of the dire situations he creates like a cockroach making its way through the most invisible of cracks. But as repugnant as Connie is, Pattinson gives what might be his greatest performance to date in the role. The stacked cast includes the late Buddy Duress, a Safdie brothers regular, plus Jennifer Jason Leigh and Barkhad Abdi. This movie is so amped up, it’ll propel you right into a heart attack. 

How to watch: Good Time is now streaming on Max.

20. Ex Machina

Now that artificial intelligence is actually knocking on our doors, demanding it be let in and take over all of our jobs, why not go back and visit Alex Garland‘s 2014 nightmare about a sentient, sexy robot who turns out to be far more than her makers can comprehend? 

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a programmer who’s won the honor of spending a week at the extremely fancy estate of the company’s CEO, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Nathan is a sexy billionaire tech genius (and thank goodness that none of our billionaire tech geniuses actually look like Oscar Isaac, because that would get very confusing about who we should be rooting for) and he’s set up some extra homework for Caleb to do while he’s there. Caleb is going to take part in a Turing test with Nathan’s latest invention, Ava. Part whirring cyborg, part Alicia Vikander, Ava is all honey pot for Caleb.

Trapped inside Nathan’s middle-of-nowhere modern masterpiece of a manse, the threesome — alongside a silent servant named Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) — delves into the scientific theories surrounding human consciousness. The results are shockingly sexy… and deeply dangerous.

How to watch: Ex Machina is now streaming on Max.

UPDATE: Jun. 27, 2024, 2:57 p.m. EDT This list was updated to reflect the current streaming options.

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