Crime & Thriller

Caught Stealing is a propulsive crime thriller directed by Darren Aronofsky, adapting Charlie Huston's 2004 cult novel, with Huston himself writing the screenplay. A change of pace for the director of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, it trades his usual psychological anguish for a violent, blackly comic New York crime caper, and gives Austin Butler one of his most purely charismatic roles to date.

Set in the grimy, pre-gentrification New York of 1998, the film follows Hank Thompson (Butler), a washed-up former high-school baseball star turned East Village bartender whose life implodes when he agrees to look after his punk neighbor's cat. The favor drags him into a brutal turf war between Russian mobsters, Hasidic gangsters, and crooked cops, all convinced he is sitting on something they want. Zoe Kravitz plays his girlfriend, with Regina King, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio, and the musician Bad Bunny filling out a sprawling ensemble of hustlers and heavies.

Reviews praised the film's kinetic energy, its needle-drop evocation of late-'90s Manhattan, and Butler's committed everyman performance, even as some judged it a minor entry in Aronofsky's filmography. A modest performer in theaters, it found a far larger audience on streaming, where it climbed the charts as a slick, adrenalized crowd-pleaser. Caught Stealing is streaming on Netflix.

One Battle After Another is writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's explosive 2025 action-thriller, released by Warner Bros. and loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland. It reunites Anderson with a sprawling ensemble and marks his first collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, anchoring what became the most expensive and widely seen film of the director's career.

DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, a burned-out former revolutionary living off the grid until his teenage daughter is abducted, forcing him to reconnect with his old radical comrades for a desperate rescue. Sean Penn is his menacing nemesis, a ruthless military officer, with Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and newcomer Chase Infiniti rounding out the cast. Anderson stages the chase as both a propulsive thriller and a sly commentary on American paranoia and aging idealism.

The film drew some of the best reviews of Anderson's career and became his highest-grossing movie at the box office, before sweeping through awards season to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Praised for its formal daring, its performances, and its blend of suspense and dark comedy, it stands among the most acclaimed releases of the year. One Battle After Another is streaming on HBO Max.

Ethan Hunt's most consequential mission arrives with the weight of franchise history behind it — a two-and-a-half-hour action operetta that functions simultaneously as a standalone thriller and as the culmination of nearly three decades of increasingly elaborate physical filmmaking. Tom Cruise returns as the IMF's indestructible operative for what director Christopher McQuarrie has described as the conclusion of a story arc spanning multiple films, pursuing an artificial intelligence called the Entity across every continent and every environment that can be made to yield spectacular action. The film opens mid-chase and rarely pauses for breath.

The cast includes returning players Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Rebecca Ferguson alongside new additions who complicate Ethan's already complicated moral landscape. McQuarrie's screenplay finds genuine philosophical territory in the question of whether a man defined by his ability to solve impossible problems can solve one whose solution requires him to become something he isn't. The action sequences are extraordinary in the technical sense — Cruise performing stunts at altitudes and speeds that remain genuinely dangerous despite every precaution — but the film's surprising emotional core is what distinguishes it from the franchise's earlier installments.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opened in May 2025 to both critical and commercial success, earning over $700 million globally and widespread acknowledgment that it achieved what franchise conclusions rarely manage — genuine resolution without sacrifice of excitement. Critics praised McQuarrie's control of a narrative whose moving parts could easily become incoherent, and the film's practical stunt work was recognized with multiple technical awards. It streams on Paramount+.

A reclusive gym manager in a small New Mexican desert town falls for an ambitious bodybuilder passing through on her way to a competition in Las Vegas. Their intense romance quickly spirals into violence and crime when Jackie’s past and Lou’s dangerous family collide in ways neither anticipated.

British director Rose Glass follows up her debut Saint Maud with a film that defies easy categorization: part neo-noir, part body-horror, part love story, and part fever dream. Love Lies Bleeding wraps genuine human longing inside a plot of escalating menace, building toward sequences that embrace pure surrealist cinema while never losing sight of its characters’ raw vulnerability.

Kristen Stewart delivers one of her most physically and emotionally committed performances, while Katy O’Brian transforms herself convincingly into a competitive bodybuilder with dreams too big for the desert that surrounds her. Ed Harris and Dave Franco round out an ensemble that gives even the film’s most morally compromised characters their own warped internal logic.

Emilia Pérez is a 2024 genre-defying film written and directed by Jacques Audiard, the French filmmaker behind A Prophet and Rust and Bone. Shot entirely in Spanish — a language Audiard does not natively speak — the film blends Mexican cartel thriller, sung musical, and gender-transformation drama into a single, deliberately hybrid form that resists easy categorization. At its center is a cartel kingpin who arranges her own death, undergoes gender reassignment surgery to begin a new life as Emilia Pérez, and finds that escaping one identity does not erase the moral weight of the other.

The film stars Karla Sofía Gascón in the title role, opposite Zoe Saldaña as Rita Mora, the criminal defense lawyer enlisted to facilitate the transformation and disappearance. Selena Gomez plays the cartel boss's abandoned wife, and Adriana Paz rounds out the principal cast as a woman Emilia connects with in her new life. All four actresses jointly received the Best Actress prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival — an unprecedented collective award that reflected Audiard's insistence that the performances were too deeply interdependent to single out any one of them.

Emilia Pérez received 13 Academy Award nominations — the most of any non-English language film in Oscar history — and won four, including Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldaña and Best Original Song for the number "El Mal." Karla Sofía Gascón became the first openly transgender actress nominated for Best Actress. The film also won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize and became one of Netflix's most-discussed international releases of 2024, praised for its formal boldness and divisive for its approach to its subject matter.

Saltburn is a darkly seductive psychological thriller written and directed by Emerald Fennell, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Promising Young Woman. Set in the summer of 2006, the film follows Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a scholarship student at Oxford who becomes obsessed with the golden, aristocratic Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). When Felix impulsively invites Oliver to spend the summer at Saltburn, the Catton family's sprawling English estate, the visit takes increasingly sinister turns.

The film is a razor-sharp dissection of class, desire, and obsession, drawing comparisons to Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels and Brideshead Revisited. Fennell uses the opulent visual language of the English country house to create an atmosphere of gilded menace, contrasting the easy privilege of the Catton family against Oliver's calculated hunger. Rosamund Pike delivers a scene-stealing performance as Elspeth, Felix's magnificent and oblivious mother, while Carey Mulligan, Paul Rhys, and Archie Madekwe round out the ensemble.

Saltburn divided critics and captivated audiences upon its theatrical release, with Barry Keoghan's performance earning particular praise and award attention. The film's final sequence became a cultural talking point, and its stylized visuals and needle-drop soundtrack lodged it firmly in the cultural consciousness of 2023. Available on Amazon Prime Video, it remains one of the most-discussed films of the year.

Conclave is a 2024 political thriller directed by Edward Berger — whose previous film, All Quiet on the Western Front, won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film — and adapted from Robert Harris's bestselling 2016 novel. The film is set in the days following the sudden, unexpected death of a sitting Pope, as the College of Cardinals is sealed inside the Vatican to elect his successor in absolute secrecy. What unfolds is a story of hidden ambition, institutional power, and buried secrets that turns the ancient ritual of papal election into a taut, suspenseful exercise in moral drama.

The film stars Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence, the Dean of the College of Cardinals responsible for managing the conclave's integrity, who finds himself drawn into an escalating conspiracy as surprising candidates emerge and long-buried truths surface. The ensemble includes Stanley Tucci as the reform-minded Cardinal Bellini, John Lithgow as the politically calculating Cardinal Tremblay, Sergio Castellitto as the ultra-conservative Cardinal Tedesco, and Isabella Rossellini in a pivotal supporting role. Peter Straughan adapted Harris's novel with a screenplay that preserved the book's propulsive pacing while deepening its character work.

Conclave was among the most acclaimed and commercially successful prestige releases of 2024, earning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2025 Oscars. The film grossed over $100 million worldwide against a modest budget, and Berger's direction was praised for bringing the intellectual precision of a chess match to the emotional stakes of a political thriller. Critics celebrated the film's craftsmanship — its cinematography, score, and performances — as a masterclass in classical filmmaking applied to a genuinely contemporary story.