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thriller

Dark Waters – Tod Haynes (2019)

A man walks into a fancy law firm. A massive chemical factory near his land, poisons his land and cattle and he wants something to be done. Initially reluctant, Rob Bilott takes up the case.

For the next decades, Bilott, who started sceptically, sees a growing pile of evidence that a big, local employer willingly pollutes its environment. They even manage to use legislation to their advantage. The more evidence Bilott finds, the more opposition he meets. From the firm that he works for, the chemical factory, even society and his family. Big money destroys everything and nobody is willing to do something against that.

“Dark Waters” tells a story that is sadly no fiction. It is something that plays all over the world, for many years in the past and probably for many years to come. Money not only goes over environment, but even over the health of people. Once super polluting companies have been set up and running, nobody is going to risk damaging the economy in order to prevent further pollution.

A descent old fashion court thriller.

iHostage – Bobby Boermans (2025)

On Tuesday 22 February 2022 a man walks into the Apple Store in Amsterdam trying to take the entire store hostage. The man, completely disappointed by society, requests a gigantic amount of crypto currency and a get-away. This film is based on those events.

What Boermans did well was giving context to the whole event. All but one of the hostages managed to get away from the gun-waving captor. In the first scenes of the film, we get to know this man a little. Also interesting are the scenes shot in the 112 (the European 911) control roam and the entire operation that was set up in no time. One of the busiest squares of Amsterdam had to be cleared because the captor carried explosives. Different units had to be rattled up, brought in position, information needed to be gathered and – partly because the captor explicitly asked for a negotiator – we also have a look into the workings of such a negotiating team.

The film mostly shows the apple store with the two people in it, four people who have fled into a tiny storage room and the main characters of the operation to control the situation.

A fairly simple (yet tragic) event makes a fairly tense thriller movie. The only down part is the typically Dutch ‘underacting’ of most of the actors.

Rebel Ridge – Jeremy Saulnier (2024)

A positive surprise. Clicking through Netflix for something to watch, I found what I thought was an old thriller. It is perhaps a bit of an old style thriller, but it is fairly knew.

The black Terry is driven off his bike when on his way to bail out a nephew. The other party is a police car and soon the money that Terry had in his bag for the bail, is confiscated. Terry has walked into a swamp of a corrupt local law enforcement.

But Terry is not just any commoner, he is an elite mariner who calmly sets out to set right the wrongs of the community where he happened to bike into. Rather than making a hip supersoldier shootout film, Saulnier created a slow thriller with an interesting story, a descent atmosphere and slowly rising tension. Not bad at all.

Enemy Of The State – Tony Scott (1998)

The passing of an actor can be an occasion to pick a film that (s)he plays in. Apparently I have never been a big fan of Gene Hackman (1930-2025) it seems, because most films that I found I had not yet seen.

The main character in this film is Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith), a lawyer who accidentally becomes the enemy of the state. He has to flee from every imaginable government agency. During the proces he runs into Hackman’s character (“Brill”).

A descent action thriller with an alright story putting the finger of privacy problems due to technology. Scott does give the goverment agencies possibilities that I doubt are even at that level today, but perhaps that makes the film still relevant today.

Criminal Intent – Jim Kouf (1997)

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Apparently also known as “Gang Related”, we follow the cops duo Frank (Jim Belushi) and Rodriguez (Tupac Shakur, who had passed by the time this film came out).

The cops have a side job, finding drug dealers, taking their stock or cash and killing them. This is quite lucrative, until they shoot the wrong guy. The rest of the film the two twist and turn trying to cover up their mistake.

The film is a bit of a mix of a court thriller and a cop thriller and makes a descent watch.

Meridian – Curtis Clark (2016)

Weird, this 12 minute short is up on Netflix as a film and as a two episode mini series, but both episodes are the same.

“Meridian” is a film noire style film in which a police officer is sent out to find a mysterious woman who may have witnessed the disappearance of a man. The film is moody and interesting and then suddenly stops as if it was a pilot for a series to come.

Two Distant Strangers – Free & Roe (2020)

Carter wakes up in the bed of a girl he apparently picked up the night before. On leaving the apartment building, he gets picked up over a triviality, gets into a fight with the cop and dies on the spot. Immediately he wakes up again in the same bed.

The concept of reliving a day is not new in film. Just as in other films, Carter tries to evade his destiny by running, not leaving the door, taking other routes, talk to the cop in question, but every time he ends up dead. No matter what he does, the white cop intents to kill the black man. This is exactly the message of this short film (32 min) film, which ends with a long list of black people killed by white cops.

Blackhat – Michael Mann (2015)

Both a Chinese and an American nuclear power plant are attacked by computer hackers. Americans and Chinese work together trying to catch the persons behind the hack and an imprisoned hacker (Chris Hemsworth) is taken aboard the team.

In a descent thriller, hackers are chasing hackers, but of course in the end it are not computer nerds who are after the entire scheme. There are some elements and explanations of which I cannot say if they are credible, but overall “Blackhat” seems like an alright computer thriller. Perhaps the IMdB rating (5.5) that the story and details are not, or no longer, credible.

The Girl In The Spider’s Web – Fede Alvarez (2018)

A new book in the Millenium series put to film, this time immediately as an American film. ‘The girl with the dragon tatoo’ is now played by Claire Foy.

It seems that we are now a few years down the line Lisbeth Salander has become a famous and notorious hacker and one-girl army for hire, hiding in plain sight. She is hired to steal a dangerous piece of software which -if fallen in the wrong hands- could cause a world war.

Of course there are more people after the software and Lisbeth’s past also catches up with her. The story of film are alright.