Looking back on an entire year through any lens is hard, and that’s especially true if you love movies. Every year comes with a handful of masterpieces (we’re still not over Anora), a handful of total disasters (ahem, Kraven: The Hunter), and plenty of things that land somewhere in between.
If you’re looking for some of the year’s best thrillers, though, you should know that 2024 was actually a pretty good year for the genre. From Netflix originals to other titles that made it to theaters, here’s a rundown of the seven best thrillers from the past year.
We also have guides to the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
Clint Eastwood is well into his 90s now, and even so, he still seems to have an intuitive sense of how to put together a gripping narrative. Juror #2 tells the story of a regular guy living in Georgia who finds himself selected to serve on a jury for a crime he quickly realizes he might have committed.
As he wrestles with his potential guilt, he also starts to wonder whether he should turn himself in and save an innocent man. If he does, he’ll abandon his pregnant wife and unborn child. Nicholas Hoult leads the cast in this remarkably complicated thriller, which challenges you to question your ethics and asks impossible questions with no easy answers.
You can watch Juror #2 on Max.
What starts as a grounded thriller gradually becomes something more fantastical in Rose Glass’ genre-defying Love Lies Bleeding. The movie follows two women who fall in love with one another in the 1980s, and slowly work to extract one half of them from the criminal life that they have tried to leave behind.
Anchored by rock-solid central performances from Kristen Stewart and newcomer Katy O’Brien, Love Lies Bleeding is stranger and more intoxicating than you might expect. It’s an excellent thriller, but it also works as a bizarre love story with an ending you’ll have to see to believe.
You can watch Loves Lies Bleeding on Max.
Set in an alternate version of modern America that has been torn apart by civil war, Civil War tells the story of a group of journalists traveling to Washington, D.C., to chronicle what are likely the war’s final days.
While the movie doesn’t offer much detail on the politics of the struggle, what it does is create a world where violence is constantly possible, and you’re never certain about whether you can trust the people around you.
You can watch Civil War on Max.
A terrifying, exhilarating riff on The Silence of the Lambs that is a little less straightforward than that movie, Longlegs tells the story of an FBI agent who is tasked with investigating a series of potentially related murders. What she finds instead is something far more unsettling, and personal, than she bargained for.
Featuring a genuinely unhinged Nicolas Cage performance (is there any other kind?) and a permeating feeling of menace throughout, Longlegs is one of the best serial killer movies of the past decade in part because it is genuinely terrifying. The revelations in its final moments may or may not work for you, but you’re likely to be too invested to care.
You can rent Longlegs on Prime Video.
Netflix was on a bit of a tear when it came to making excellent thrillers in 2024, and Carry-On earns its designation as “Die Hard in an airport” much better than any Die Hard sequel. The movie follows Ethan, a young TSA agent, who finds himself being blackmailed by a terrorist who wants him to let a dangerous package go through a security check. As he attempts to foil the terrorists, he finds himself outmatched and struggles to gain an upper hand.
Carry-On may play into plenty of clichés, but the movie is so gripping that you probably won’t care. As Ethan, Taron Egerton makes for a fine everyman hero, and the film generates enough tension to keep you on the edge of your couch for most of its runtime.
You can watch Carry-On on Netflix.
The only movie on this list that is headed toward the Oscars, Conclave is set in the aftermath of the death of the pope, and centers on the cardinal who has been given the responsibility of guiding his colleagues through the election of a new one.
While that may sound like a rather dry premise, Conclave knows how to mix in twists and reveals about its old, Catholic men to keep you hooked. The movie is, in the end, rather salacious and scandalous, a story of old men vying for power that seems entirely beneath the dignity of the position they’re all vying for. Ralph Fiennes heads the impressive cast, and you can see why many people think he deserves the an Oscar for his work. He’s terrific, and so is the movie.
You can watch Conclave on Peacock.
One of the sharpest thrillers not just of 2024 but in recent memory, Rebel Ridge tells the story of a man whose bail money he was bringing to his cousin gets confiscated by the police, and decides to take fairly drastic action after he discovers just how much corruption is happening inside this southern police department.
The movie is equal parts riveting and satisfying, and it’s anchored by a brilliant central performance from Aaron Pierre. Rebel Ridge is a movie about systems of injustice, but it’s also a movie about one guy who just wants to save his cousin and finds himself pulled into a much larger story.
You can watch Rebel Ridge on Netflix.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?