8 of the best thrillers to find
1. ON PRECINCT 13
Gangsters in Assault on Precinct 13 hold someone up by gun point
Often imitated but never outdone, John Carpenter’s 1976 crime thriller is one of the tensest 91 minutes ever put on screen. Carpenter’s second feature film (following Dark Star and just two years before Halloween changed everything), the movie follows a police officer (Austin Stoker) and a convicted murderer (Darwin Joston) who team up to defend the titular precinct from a heavily armed street gang.
Made on a shoestring budget of approximately $100,000, Assault on Precinct 13 is a master class of efficient filmmaking, using the closed-in setting of the movie to maximum effect in building tension and staging action sequences. It’s also an early peek at many of the skills that would make Carpenter one of the great masters of genre filmmaking. —Pete Volk
Assault on Precinct 13 is available to stream on Showtime and for free with a library card on Kanopy.
2. BLOOD SIMPLE
The Coen brothers’ 1984 directorial debut, Blood Simple, is a perfect primer for the darkly comic, eccentrically plotted, idiosyncratic body of work they went on to create. A hard-boiled neo-noir crime thriller set in Texas, the film centers on a deadly love triangle between a bar owner, his wife, and one of his employees. When the attempted affair and elopement inevitably spills over into bloodshed, the would-be lovers are implicated in a tangled plot of money and murder. Frances McDormand shines in her performance as Abby, the dissatisfied wife at the heart of the drama, as does M. Emmet Walsh as Loren Visser, the conniving hitman who throws the whole conflict into turmoil in his own selfish bid for a quick payday.
3. COLLATERAL
Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx in Collateral
Michael Mann’s 2004 neo-noir action thriller Collateral is one of the director’s most successful films, grossing more than $220 million worldwide and earning Jamie Foxx a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the 77th Academy Awards. Tom Cruise stars as Vincent, a contract killer whose assignment to assassinate five targets across Los Angeles leads him to take a hostage to drive him from target to target: Max (Foxx), a taxi driver who aspires to start his own business. Collateral’s nocturnal lighting and brilliant cinematography, courtesy of Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron, combine into one of the most hypnotic, memorable portraits of LA’s metropolitan sprawl ever committed to film, and Cruise’s performance as Vincent ranks as one of his best. —TE
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