If the Watch With Us team had to pick our favorite movie genre, it would probably be thrillers.
We just can’t get enough of hard-boiled noirs, riveting mysteries, deranged psychological thrillers and action-packed crime dramas.
Thankfully, you can find all these kinds of movies and more on streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Prime Video.
This March, Watch With Us wants to highlight the five best thrillers you can watch on streaming right now — we also ranked them by Rotten Tomatoes score, just for fun.
Our picks include the Liam Neeson thriller Taken and the neo-noir classic L.A. Confidential.
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5. ‘Taken’ (2008) — Hulu
Rotten Tomatoes score: 60 percent
Retired CIA officer Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) attempts to build a closer relationship with his teenage daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), taking her to a concert where he oversees security and ends up protecting the pop star Sheerah (Holly Valance) from a knife attack. When Sheerah offers to give Kim vocal lessons, Bryan’s “good dad card” seems to be building points, but when he allows Kim to travel to Paris with her friend (Katie Cassidy), both girls are abducted by a group of men. Bryan warns them that he will resort to deadly methods if the kidnappers don’t comply, but they ignore his warning. That was their first mistake.
Taken is the film that kick-started Neeson’s foray into “action dad” cinema, but it’s this first film that is easily the best of the bunch. With “I have a very particular set of skills” becoming an iconic quote in the movie lexicon, Taken is a fun and slick action thriller that still packs a decent punch in 2026.
4. ‘The Killer’ (2023) — Netflix
Rotten Tomatoes score: 85 percent
A hitman known as the Killer (Michael Fassbender) is a meticulous and highly detailed professional, priding himself on his strict routine and deadly accuracy. When he stakes out a Parisian hotel for the wealthy target (Arliss Howard), he ends up missing his shot and accidentally shoots the target’s dominatrix (Monique Ganderton) instead. How could this hit have gone so wrong? Suddenly questioning his own mind and now hunted down by his handlers, he finds himself embarking on an epic quest for vengeance when his girlfriend, Magdala (Sophie Charlotte), is implicated in his folly.
Director David Fincher‘s welcome return to feature film is as taut, tense and efficient as its lead character. Fassbender portrays the titular Killer with suave intensity and a samurai mindset, and Fincher infuses the lean, mean thriller with a calculated iciness that cuts to the bone. The hitman subgenre of crime movies is hugely overstuffed, and Fincher’s iteration manages to take familiar tropes and give them a refreshing style and simplicity.
3. ‘Mikey and Nicky’ (1976) — HBO Max
Rotten Tomatoes score: 88 percent
In a run-down Philadelphia hotel, gangster Nicky Godolin (John Cassavetes) phones his best friend Mikey Mittner (Peter Falk), a fellow gangster, in desperate need of help. When Mikey arrives, he finds Nicky in a dire state, where he explains that there’s a hit out on him for stealing from his boss, mobster Dave Resnick (Sanford Meisner). Mikey tries to console his friend and help him get it together, and the two end up setting out on an all-night odyssey through the city as Nicky becomes increasingly unhinged and terrified for his life.
Mikey and Nicky is hands-down the best “tragic bromance” movie of all time, a tour de force directing and acting triumph by way of filmmaker Elaine May and her stars, the legendary Cassavetes and Falk (also friends in real life). Mirroring the intensity and spontaneity of Cassavetes’ own filmmaking style, May directs the film with a frenzied, emotional bravura that underscores the script’s preoccupations with the folly of masculinity. Fans of Uncut Gems would do well to check this one out.
2. ‘Memories of Murder’ (2003) — Tubi
Rotten Tomatoes score: 95 percent
In the 1980s, two mediocre police detectives named Park (Song Kang-ho) and Cho (Kim Roi-ha) are assigned to a double homicide case, but they have no idea that the crime they’re about to investigate marks the emergence of the first serial killer in South Korean history. When the perpetrator ends up striking several more times, evoking the same patterns and hallmarks, the detectives are stumped, unnerved and understand they are dealing with something they’ve never seen before. With only the basic tools and skills available to them, Park and Cho set out to arrest the twisted killer.
Based on the real-life case of Lee Choon-jae, Memories of Murder is a quiet masterpiece from Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho‘s repertoire; less flashy than films like Snowpiercer or the Best Picture-winning Parasite, but no less a riveting and expertly crafted work of art. Bearing an uncanny similarity to Fincher’s Zodiac (Memories actually predates the latter by four years), the movie is an effective crime procedural with singular directorial command and a compelling, serpentine narrative.
1. ‘L.A. Confidential’ (1997) — Prime Video
Rotten Tomatoes score: 99 percent
Following decades of publicized corruption, the LAPD tries to rehabilitate its image in 1953, with three very different detectives attempting to unspool the conspiracy at the center of a string of murders at an all-night diner. Detective Lieutenant Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce) is still living in the shadow of his highly respected detective father, whose murder years ago remains unsolved. Detective Sergeant Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is a clout-seeker who regularly feeds information to the tabloids. Meanwhile, the erratic Wendell White (Russell Crowe) uses highly unorthodox methods to get confessions out of suspects due to his traumatic past.
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L.A. Confidential is much more than an homage to classic film noirs, as its preoccupations with the interiority of its characters betray a richness in psychology that many of the great noirs have sorely lacked. In addition to the film’s dense thematic interests, it’s also a brilliantly acted yarn that proved that then-little-known actors Pearce and Crowe were movie star material. Atmospheric, textured, complex and still highly entertaining, L.A. Confidential is studio filmmaking at its smartest.
