With writer-director Jeremy Saulnier's eagerly awaited action-thriller Rebel Ridge arriving on Netflix, we have some more films that deserve your time.
1) The Night of the 12th (2022)
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A must-see that stops you in your tracks and then rattles around in your mind for days afterwards, The Night of the 12th brings us to the southeastern French city of Grenoble to follow the investigation into the murder of 21-year-old Clara Royer (Lula Cotton-Frapier). As Captain Vivès (Bastien Bouillon), his partner Marceau (Bouli Lanners), and their fellow detectives conduct the interviews, we witness the psychological toll of the case and also confront the questions it asks of them - and us. An iron-grip film from minute one, writer-director Dominik Moll's procedural is punctuated by outbursts of anger and moments of achingly sad candour, belonging in the same exalted company as The Wire, The Night Of, Wind River, and any crime/mystery classic you care to mention. Rarely has the forensic principle "every contact leaves a trace" been so brilliantly realised on the screen - or delivered with such urgency.
2) Don't Breathe (2016)
With Alien: Romulus in cinemas, it's appropriate to champion director Fede Álvarez's 2016 rager. If it's the stuff of nightmares you want, Don't Breathe will give you your money's worth. And then some. Against the wasteland backdrop of Detroit, three teenage thieves (Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Daniel Zovatto) decide to rob a blind Iraq War veteran (Stephen Lang) who, they reckon, is sitting on a fortune. That's the set-up, but to reveal any more plot-wise would spoil your immersion in a movie that has nods to the masters but still manages to deliver real terror from the tropes and has a few tricks up its sleeve too. Even the horror hardcore may discover that Don't Breathe pushes their buttons in ways they didn't expect. There is a gripe about the end, but it's the only letdown in an otherwise brilliant addition to the genre. It's always good to check that you have a few spare bulbs at home...
3) Reality (2023)
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Here's another film that will hook you straight away. Indeed, you may well set a new personal best for holding your breath while watching it. Equally fascinating and frightening, Reality chronicles the real-life events that took place on 3 June 2017. That afternoon, Reality Winner, a 25-year-old translator with the US National Security Agency, was stopped by FBI agents as she pulled into her driveway in Augusta, Georgia. What follows uses the actual transcript from Winner's questioning and takes place largely in one empty room. The sense of apprehension in writer-director Tina Satter's debut feature is overwhelming; The White Lotus and Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney is brilliant in the lead role; and Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis as the two FBI agents make for the best of end-game adversaries. Reality clocks in at just 82 minutes - you'll be worn out as the end credits roll.
4) Green Room (2015)
If you think there used to be a lot more tough stuff on screen back in the day, then Rebel Ridge writer-director Jeremy Saulnier's vision of hell in the Pacific Northwest will have you wiping many a tear from your eye - when you're not clutching the arm rest or buzz-sawing your nails. Our heroes are The Ain't Rights, a punk band who are struggling to make their way back East. The money for their latest gig sounds good, but there's a very big catch: the crowd will be white supremacist skinheads. Green Room is very nasty, but it's also a beautiful testament to the idealism and bravery of youth and a reminder to anyone in life to go down swinging. The one disappointment here is that having pulled a casting masterstroke by getting Patrick Stewart to demolish our image of him as either Captain Picard or Professor Xavier, Saulnier's film needed more scenes with the acting great. That said, if your own misspent youth involved watching Assault on Precinct 13 or Night of the Living Dead on a loop, you'll feel 16 again throughout.
5) Holy Spider (2022)
"It's like a bottomless black hole..." That line from the closing stages of Holy Spider is the perfect summation of this true-story thriller, based on the murders of 16 sex workers by serial killer Saeed Hanaei in the Iranian city of Mashhad between 2000 and 2001. Cannes Best Actress winner Zar Amir Ebrahimi plays Arezoo Rahimi, a firebrand (and fictional) journalist who is dispatched from Tehran to cover the case and squares up to the authorities from the off. Helping her is Sharifi (Arash Ashtiani), a softly-softly local reporter who has been chosen as a contact by the murderer (Mehdi Bajestani) - dubbed "The Spider Killer" by the media and renamed Saaed Azimi here. Be it in rented rooms, homes, or the corridors of power, director Ali Abbasi brings an infamous chapter in Iranian history to the screen as a border-crossing polemic that adds impetus to protests in his home country and gives an education to viewers elsewhere.
6) Shorta (aka Enforcement) (2020)
A tough-as-nails Danish film with superb performances, Shorta - an Arabic word for 'police' - is a must for fans of Training Day and '71. Mismatched beat cops Andersen (Jacob Lohmann) and Høyer (Simon Sears) are paired up on a day when things are at boiling point. Bull-in-a-China-shop Andersen and long-fuse Hoyer are warned to stay out of the sprawling Svalegarden estate - only to somehow manage to end up right in the middle of it as they arrest teenager Amos (Tarek Zayat). In that moment, when everyone should've just cooled down and moved on, Andersen, Høyer, and Amos's lives change forever. Co-directors Frederik Louis Hviid and Anders Ølholm's feature directorial debut manages to say plenty about the times that we're in while dragging its central trio through the desperate hours, and the twists put it up there with any other contender for the surprise package of recent years.
7) Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
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If you like a film that keeps you guessing until the end - and perhaps beyond - then get yourself into the public gallery for this case. Powerhouse director Justine Triet has kept you a seat beside her. Winner of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar earlier this year, Anatomy of a Fall puts a marriage under the microscope, challenging the viewer not to blink for two and a half hours. In a naturalistic performance that's up there with the best of them, Sandra Hüller plays the author charged with killing her husband at their remote French hideaway. There's excellent support from Swann Arlaud as the old friend defending her and young star Milo Machado Graner as the writer's partially sighted son. "Your father was my soulmate, and I loved him - but how do you prove that?" asks the defendant. It's a line that captures the legal jousts and messy relationships at the heart of this film.
8) The Vast of Night (2019)
For all the drama about Tenet's cinema release back in 2020, the best sci-fi film went under the radar of the masses - but anyone who has seen The Vast of Night won't be long in ordering others to do the same. Andrew Patterson's superb thriller is set in 1950s New Mexico, where things start going bleep in the night during a school basketball game. Teenage DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz) and switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) investigate as sweat pools form on the other side of the screen. On a budget of $700,000, Patterson salutes the masterworks of Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter and classic TV shows The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, but - in his debut feature - also stakes a claim to his own part of the movie universe with a bravura that really is out of this world.
9) Thief (1981)
Director Michael Mann's big-screen debut - his first film was the must-see TV movie The Jericho Mile - set up what was to come in his iconic 80s series Miami Vice and the De Niro-Pacino classic Heat. James Caan plays Frank, the safecracker who has everything locked away until he sees the possibility of a better life with love interest Tuesday Weld. Ah yes, best-laid plans... The top supporting cast includes James Belushi, Robert Prosky, Dennis Farina, and Willie Nelson; the soundtrack by Tangerine Dream adds to the Chicago-centred drama no end, and, to top it all off, Thief has one of the best finales of the 80s. Caan, who died in July 2022, ranked the thriller among his finest two hours. "I've done a hundred and something pictures," he said in an interview to accompany the film's 4K transfer in 2014. "I'm most proud of, I think, if there were two or three pictures, Thief is certainly one of them."
10) Les Misérables (2019)
France's entry for the Best Foreign Film Oscar didn't receive the attention it deserved, but anyone who watches writer-director Ladj Ly's feature debut will do their word-of-mouth duty. The day after France's 2018 World Cup win, rookie detective Stéphane (Damien Bonnard) starts his first shift under the supervision of racist boss Chris (Alexis Manenti) and the strangely aloof Gwada (Djebril Zonga). Their beat is the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil - the area where Victor Hugo wrote and partly set his novel Les Misérables. In the sweltering heat, all the dominoes are about to fall... Les Misérables is brilliantly acted, fast-moving, and a rallying cry for France to live up to its tripartite motto. This corner of Paris - director Ly grew up there - shows the problems of the world over; you could watch Les Misérables with no sound or subtitles and still understand everything said and unsaid. Will you feel hopeful or mired in despair afterwards? That depends on how you view the ending - and what an ending.
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