Hello Polygonauts! Welcome to our regular roundup of the best thrillers to watch on Netflix, as the Polygon curation team dutifully combs through the streaming service’s library to bring you the good stuff.
What makes a good January thriller? We’re in the middle of winter, which means equal amounts of frost, rain, hail and icy winds batter us as we try to bundle up. We’ve got apocalyptic android action fare, thrilling racing drama, thrilling heist epics, and gripping murder mysteries to get your blood pumping this cold month.
Here are some exciting suggestions for your January viewing pleasure.
Den of Thieves
Year: 2018
Duration: 2h 20m
Director: Christian Gudegast
Pour: Gerard Butler, Pablo Schreiber, O’Shea Jackson Jr.
January was a great month to be a fan of Gerard Butler movies. The king of the January blockbuster is back with his best January film yet, the extremely funny and exquisitely titled level. We spoke to Butler and his co-star Mike Colter about how the action was filmed and what makes the film so damn funny.
If you’re in the mood, why not catch arguably the best film in Butler’s recent action forays? The heist movie 2018 Den of Thieves
The film, former rap music video director Christian Gudegast’s directorial debut, features a pounding score by former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Cliff Martinez and is edited by longtime Clint Eastwood collaborator Joel Cox. It brings professionalism and sparkle to this fun rollercoaster ride that helps make it one of the most memorable robbery thrillers of the post-Ocean’s era. Also, it came out five years ago this week, which means there really isn’t a better time to watch Den of Thieves. —pete people
Emily the criminal
Year: 2022
Duration: 1h37m
Director: John Patton Ford
Pour: Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Megalyn Echikunwoke
Emily the criminal is not a thriller like some others on this list. The beauty of the thriller genre is that it encompasses everything from tight, brutal capers to horror films; It’s about people surviving the apocalypse, psychologically or otherwise. Emily the criminal is on the smaller side, almost more pure drama. And yet it contains shades of every type of thriller narrative here, the genre being both the most distant and the most specific. As Emily descends into the criminal underworld to help ease the crushing burden of student loans, it’s also a desperate power grab at the end of the world, a caper that constantly threatens dire consequences, whether she succeeds or not. As Emily, Aubrey Plaza manages to find new shades of her personality by turning indifference into spiked armor. In the past, that could be played for laughs. But with Emily, there is little hope of a happy ending. We can only survive. —Zosha Millman
BOY
Year: 2022
Duration: 1h 38m
Director: Yeon Sangho
Pour: Kim Hyun-joo, Kang Soo-yeon, Ryu Kyung-soo
We’re making a rare exception here that we (editor’s note: Pete and Toussaint) have not seen BOY yet (but Polygon’s review dug it up). But it’s the director’s new sci-fi thriller Train to Busan, psychokinesisand infernal – all crackers. This makes it particularly easy to get excited about it BOY.
In BOY, an AI researcher hopes to end a post-apocalyptic war by cloning a legendary mercenary into a robot. That mercenary? Her mother. Sign us up the heck. —PV
The light blue eye
Year: 2022
Duration: 2h 8m
Director: Scott Cooper
Pour: Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Gillian Anderson
It’s January — which means it’s cold outside, at least for mainland North America (climate change-induced seasonal variation notwithstanding). You don’t need an ordinary, long-lasting thriller to watch. No, do you know what you need? A chilling, cruel-as-the-depths-of-winter-ass-thriller. That’s what you get with the new gothic horror mystery from antler Director Scott Cooper. Christian Bale plays Augustus Landor, a retired (meaning too old for this shit) detective hired to investigate a series of brutal murders at West Point Military Academy in New York. Nobody wants to help him; that is, with the sole exception of a shy young cadet with a poetic bent named (DUN DUN DUN)
From our review:
The film doesn’t do much good for the story’s meta dimension: the fact that the real Poe helped invent modern detective fiction. (Admittedly, leaning too heavily on that idea could have been unbearable.) Cooper and Bale seem more comfortable with Landor’s brand of melancholy, marked by the absences of his wife and daughter, as well as some of the odd, unexpected pauses who have favourited Bale loads some of his liner ships. At times, the film feels like it’s still fun despite everything. So in a way it’s perfect that Edgar Allan Poe keeps coming back to bring his own story back to life. —Jesse Hassenger
hurry
Year: 2013
Duration: 2h 3m
Director: Ron Howard
Pour: Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Bruhl, Olivia Wilde
We’re in the short time between the Formula 1 season (although Formula E has only just begun, motorsport fans) and Netflix’s fifth season Drive to survive Docuseries premieres on February 24th. What better way to while away the time than watching one of the best Formula 1 movies of all time?
Ron Howard (who most recently directed the underrated true story thriller Thirteen Lives) really included hurry, a heartbreaking portrayal of the allure of motorsport and also a profound character study of the different types of personalities that can end up being elite athletes. Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl are excellent as racing legends James Hunt and Niki Lauda, Hemsworth embodies Hunt’s party animal attitude perfectly while Brühl shines as the reserved, hyper-focused Lauda. It’s one of the best sports movies ever made and there’s no better time to watch it. —PV
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