The best thrillers on Amazon Prime Video right now

An adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, No Country for Old Men stars Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, a Texas man who stumbles upon a botched drug deal in the desert. Amidst the devastation sits a big bag of cash ($2 million), which Moss decides to take for himself. But it just so happens that this glorious treasure is the wanted property of one Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a stone-cold hitman hired to retrieve the cash, who just so happens to have a penchant for mowing down locals with a captive bolt pistol. Hot on Llewelyn’s trail, Terrell County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is tasked with tracking down the killer-for-hire before he catches up with Moss. Not only did No Country for Old Men win the Best Picture Oscar in 2007, but the film also bears the unique distinction of being only one of four Westerns to take home the gold. Packed with amazing performances and a nearly scoreless soundscape that puts the focus on the onscreen cat-and-mouse mayhem, movies really don’t get much better than this. 

Thank goodness we don’t have to deal with dragons in our everyday lives, because if it would be anything like Reign of Fire, you can count us out. Starring Matthew McConaughey and Christian Bale (before he was Batman) as an American militant and a British fire chief, respectively, the story follows the teaming-up of both individuals as they prepare to wage war against a legion of once-dormant underground dragons that have resurfaced to burn the world to a crisp. Reign of Fire may not be the greatest film of all time, but its big-budget visuals and set pieces are certainly memorable.

Nope, one of 2022’s best movies, is the third feature film from celebrated writer-director Jordan Peele, and while the horror influences are still present here, Peele does opt for an epic introduction of sci-fi to his cinematic palette. Starring Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as horse-wrangling siblings OJ and Em Haywood, whose family business looks to be in serious trouble after the recent passing of their father, the owner of a farm that raises stunt animals just outside of Hollywood.

After the tragic death, OJ and Em are forced to sell off some horses to a local theme park, but when the sudden emergence of an extraterrestrial life form starts wreaking havoc on the desert community, the brother and sister go all-in on trying to capture evidence of the near-invisible UFO. Delivering another powerhouse picture that proudly pays homage to titans of the genre like Steven Spielberg, Nope is further proof that Peele is an undeniable auteur of modern genre cinema.

In director David Gelb’s The Lazarus Effect, Mark Duplass stars as Frank, a matriculating medical researcher, alongside and Olivia Wilde as Zoe, his fiancé. Together, they have come up with a way to bring the dead back to life. But after a non-approved experiment forces the dean of Frank’s university to put an ax to Frank’s efforts, a freak accident leaves Zoe dead, allowing Frank to use his recent scientific breakthroughs to play God and revive his partner. As one could guess though, the returned Zoe behaves in a much more sinister fashion, post-death. It’s not exactly reinventing the wheel, but The Lazarus Effect manages to chill in a number of compelling ways, and the stellar casting goes a long way toward making this genre pic feel a little more at home.