31 Best Thriller Movies of All Time - Best Action Movies - menshealth.com
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It’s hard to say exactly what a thriller is, except that it’s something you feel in your bones. They make us jump and give us goosebumps. Technology has helped them along, but the best thrillers have always been the ones that pare things down: always gripping, not too scary or explosive. They’re, in a word, tense.
Every movie on this list, spanning tried-and-true classics and underrated gems, feels like a high-wire act. From Hitchcock’s finest to the origins of John McClane to French kids executing a terror plot, these are movies that keep us bolted in our seats until the end. Steven Spielberg wooed us with family-friendly fare like Jaws that had its jolts, but it was his Munich that really made us aware of the human cost lurking below the blood in the water. Viggo Mortensen defending his family with skills we weren’t supposed to know he had causes our stomachs to churn during A History of Violence. The image of a teenager who suddenly understands the consequences of his criminal actions in Nocturama makes us fear for him, and ourselves. That confrontation with violence—less the end of it than staring down the trigger—is where a thriller lives.
These movies are also visually stunning, frequently morally nuanced, and occasionally quite bloody. Because there’s only so much space, movies that can easily be called horror are excluded (sorry, Silence of the Lambs), but action is fine if it’s adequately propelled by mystery or suspense (hey, Heat!). And one entry per director only (Hitch can’t hog everything). Below, a list of the best thriller movies of all time:
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Vertigo
Naturally, no list of the greatest thrillers is complete without including the Master of Suspense. But with all due respect to Rear Window and too many other contenders to name, Vertigo was Hitchcock’s highest achievement precisely because it felt (and still feels) like a movie that could go anywhere with its blonde in trouble. That it manages to land every zig and zag with such style is a testament to Hitchcock’s otherworldly gifts.
You know John McClane, of course, even if you don’t. But before he was a household name and invincible action icon, Die Hard pulsed with the reliable tick-tock of a Swiss watch, counting down the seconds until everything exploded. It ain’t Christmas without the resolution: “Yippee-ki-yay.”
One of Orson Welles’s most undeniably entertaining work, the noir thriller Touch of Evil starts with a sinewy unbroken three-minute opening shot and doesn’t let up from there. It’s basically a guidebook on how to do noir filmmaking.
No, not the completely unnecessary 2011 remake. Sam Peckinpah's 1971 thriller could also adequately be described as a descent into hell that rattled even the most bloodthirsty viewers in its time. The climactic siege with Dustin Hoffman at the center is still hard to stomach. (Unfortunately, the 1971 version is unavailable to stream, but the 2011 is, in case you feel like giving it a shot.)
Some might argue that Steven Spielberg has always been too sentimental to truly, well, thrill. Those people may have missed Munich, his later-career espionage masterpiece that takes a morally ambivalent (but always high-octane) view of the Mossad assassinations in retaliation of the 1972 Munich olympics massacre. Alternating between noisy and quiet, in-your-face and reticent, it is never less than devastating.
Honorable mentions go out to No Country for Old Men and Fargo, but the Coen brothers laid the groundwork for their acclaimed careers and perfected their own game with this funny-until-it’s-really-really-not crime movie.
There’s never a bad time to revisit the ultimate ‘90s bank heist movie (maybe the ultimate ever?), which also gave us the ultimate showdown between Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino at their peaks.
Laugh if you want, but Keanu Reeves perfected a certain style of stilted acting in the 90s in which he seemed to have been dropped into the most improbable scenarios—then just as improbably Keanu’d his way out of them. Bonus points go to Point Break for Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow’s fearsome action directing, and the way in which she seems to delight in the male bodies in violent competition with each other. (Whatever you do, please for the sake of all that’s holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, do not watch the remake no one asked for.)
Some thrillers leave us shuddering with the knowledge their climaxes reveal. But the maddening (in a beautiful way) Blowup just leaves us with more questions that keep us up at night, hoping that one more look at the magnified photo in question will solve it all.
Brian De Palma (Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables) has made friends and enemies throughout his long thriller-centric career. They mostly seem to be enemies these days. But give him this, the director makes exactly what he wants, and this batshit studio movie is all of his ideas simmering until they literally explode: an espionage thriller, a YA supernatural-meets-sexual drama, a blood-and-guts horror picture, and an excuse for Kirk Douglas to make dad jokes. Love it or hate it, don’t pretend you’re not entertained.
Underrated compared to other John Carpenter classics (Halloween, The Thing), Assault on Precinct 13 trades horror for horrific, claustrophobic, and still-too-relevant action involving a police station under siege. If you think you know it's politics going in, you might be surprised.
If you don’t know what insanity has just taken place after watching David Lynch’s career-defining surrealist mystery, let it linger for a few days. Mulholland Drive is the rare kind of movie that will have you going down mental rabbit holes years later to piece together its puzzle, only to quiet yourself with the crucial word: “Silencio.” If that doesn’t work, just enjoy Justin Theroux’s performance as a buffoonish Hollywood director way out of his depth.
Less horror-centric than David Fincher’s other masterpiece Seven, Fight Club is no less attuned to the potential (male) brutality that lurks behind every door. In this case, we’re privy to a testosterone-fueled mind game we don’t fully understand until the buildings start dropping.
Shot in an inky black and white, The Night of the Hunter similarly divides up life for its child protagonists between a potential hopeful future and utter monstrosity. It’s a stark nightmarish drama that still leaves viewers gasping.
If you dug Ryan Gosling’s Drive, you must go back into the archive to take in the more elegant Walter Hill-directed inspiration The Driver. Its chase sequences don’t rival The French Connection; they beat them.
Taxi Driver
Taxi Driver defined a certain era of ‘70s Hollywood movies that refused to pull punches, yet became emblematic across any generation. The hollowed-out eyes of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle making sense of his own (and the world’s) madness tell us everything about why.
If Humphrey Bogart in a sad-scary noir crime mystery that leaves you guessing about the true villainy of any character is your brand—and if it’s not, you should rethink that—you will be more than satisfied by the midcentury perfection of In a Lonely Place. Just cue up a comedy for afterward.
The historical drama covering the terrain of its unhinged couple was largely misunderstood when it came out as an endorsement of violence. Which goes a long way toward pointing up what made it a crucial turning point in Hollywood: Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway leave it up to us to make what we will with their criminals, and understand that whatever your viewpoint, it’s a tragedy for everyone.
With more crossings and double-crossings and hyper-frenetic gunwork than The Departed could handle, China’s Drug War came into the 2010s hot and in many ways still hasn’t been outmatched.
Chinese filmmakers have long been experts at knife-edge crime movies. John Woo transplanted his talents to a successful Hollywood career, but it’s more than worth diving back into one of his best pre-American movies starring Chow Yun-fat and a whole lot of other badasses.
Better Luck Tomorrow
Before he was in charge of arguably some of the best entries in the Fast & Furious franchise, Justin Lin made a name for himself as an indie director with this taught, complex story of high-achieving Asian American youth who turn to violent crime. If it upends all your sociological expectations while jangling your nerves, then it did its job.
Does a gun need to go off or blood be drawn for a movie to qualify as a thriller? Stanley Kubrick’s late-career sexy-demonic masterpiece says no. Tom Cruise trying to pick up the pieces of his life as a nefarious secret-society plot hovers just out of reach is enough.
While it’s totally fair to call Jean-Luc Godard’s savage ‘60s caper social satire, that would be burying the fact that it ends with actual human cannibalism. Also that from the very first shot, the possibility of earth collapsing feels all too real.
The perpetually underrated director Gregg Araki (The Doom Generation, Mysterious Skin) brought his freakiest material to the big screen with this multidimensional, hyper-stylized mystery that uses sci-fi as a template to understand ‘90s Generation X disaffection. If you think you know where it’s headed, it’s way ahead of you.
Laura
Long before David Lynch was obsessing over the murder of Laura Palmer in the Pacific Northwest, Otto Preminger’s brought to the screen the story of a detective who becomes obsessed with another killed Laura—to the point that he seems unable to return to normal life.
French director Robert Bresson was known more for his high drama than his crime-filled plots, but he delivered the goods in the latter department. That’s especially true of Pickpocket, which credibly brings us into the mental space of its thief and his (and our) moral dilemma surrounding his criminal activity.
If you know master Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa for anything, it’s likely one of his movies assigned for film studies like Seven Samurai. But wade into the dark waters of High and Low for a shockingly contemporary-feeling police procedural that will make your blood pressure jump at least a few beats.
Easily one of the most transfixing movies of recent memory, Jonathan Glazer and Scarlett Johansson’s what’s-it walks the line between art film and popcorn entertainment with the best of them. A sci-fi murder mystery stripped down to its most elemental parts, it gradually lures you into its violent trap about as well as Johansson brings a wayward man into her black pool of death.
One of the best movies of any genre from the 2010s, Nocturama rapidly introduces a series of terror plots coordinated in one day in Paris by a ragtag multiethnic group of youths who then hide out in a department store. Made with unsettlingly fizzing style, the French movie asks but never answers thorny questions about capitalism, pop culture, political disaffection, and who gets to control violence and why. If that sounds like a term paper, don’t worry: It’s also hugely entertaining.
Something of an outlier for director David Cronenberg who’s overwhelmingly known for his body horror, A History of Violence resituated the noir thriller in a way that questions the underpinnings of the genre. Even in the early, seemingly tranquil domestic situations, something off-key is always threatening to surface. Then it does with brutal force.
Paul SchrodtPaul Schrodt is a freelance writer and editor who also contributes to Esquire, GQ, Money, The Wall Street Journal, and more.
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