The 5 best thrillers to watch on Netflix this January

Polygonauts, welcome! We are pleased to present our weekly roundup of top thrillers on Netflix. The Polygon curation team diligently searches the Netflix library to find the most interesting titles.

How do you make a January thriller great? We’re smack-dab in the middle of winter, which means there’s equal amounts of frost, rain, hail, and chilly winds nipping at the backs of our necks as we try to bundle up. We’ve got apocalyptic android action fare, exhilarating racing dramas, thrilling heist epics, and riveting murder mysteries to get your blood pumping during this frigid month.

These are some amazing January viewing ideas.

Den of Thieves

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Image

Year: 2018
Run time: 2h 20m
Director: Christian Gudegast
Cast: Gerard Butler, Pablo Schreiber, O’Shea Jackson Jr.

January’s been a great month to be a fan of Gerard Butler movies. With the highly entertaining and well-titled January blockbuster, Gerard Butler is back! Plane. Mike Colter, Butler’s co-star and we talked about how it was shot and why the film is so much fun.

While you’re in the mood, why not check out arguably the best movie of Butler’s recent string of action outings? This 2018 movie about heists Den of Thieves has been described by many (including myself) as “dirtbag Heat,” and with good reason. You might also like the classic Michael Mann heist movie, it’s set in LA, with a major bank-robbing showdown between cops and robbers. Like Heat, it has a sprawling cast — while not as prestigious as the likes of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, guys like Pablo Schreiber and O’Shea Jackson Jr. give their all. But the star of the show is Butler as the dirty, constantly drunk detective “Big Nick” O’Brien.

Christian Gudegast directs the film, his first as a director of rap music videos. Cliff Martinez’s pounding soundtrack is featured in the movie, which was edited by Joel Cox, a frequent Clint Eastwood collaborator. That brings a professionalism and sheen to this fun thrill ride, which helps elevate it to one of the most memorable heist thrillers of the post-Ocean’s era. This movie was made five years ago. Den of Thieves. —Pete Volk

Emily, the Criminal

Vertical Entertainment

Year: 2022
Run time: 1h 37m
Director: John Patton Ford
Cast: Megalyn Echikunwoke, Theo Rossi and Aubrey Plaza

Emily, the CriminalThis isn’t a thriller like the others. The beauty of the thriller genre is that it encompasses everything from taut, brutal capers to horror movies; it’s about people surviving the apocalypse, psychological or otherwise. Emily, the CriminalThis is a smaller version of the genre, and almost pure drama. It has shades of both the most extreme and particular thrillers, but it is still a very good example of how to write thrillers. As Emily descends into the criminal underworld to help alleviate the crushing burden of student loans, it’s at once a desperate power grab at the end of the world, a caper constantly threatening horrific consequences whether she succeeds or not. Aubrey Plaza is able to change Emily’s appearance, making jadedness a suit of armor. That might not have made much sense in the past. But it is not the only way to go. Emily, there’s little hope for happy endings. Only we can survive. —Zosha Millman

JUNG_E

Image courtesy of Netflix

Year: 2022
Run time: 1h 38m
Director:Yeon Sangho
Cast: Kim Hyun-joo, Kang Soo-yeon, Ryu Kyung-soo

We’re making a rare exception here, as we (ed. note: Pete and Toussaint) haven’t seen JUNG_E yet (but Polygon’s review dug it). But it’s the new sci-fi thriller from the director of Busan to Train, PsychokinesisAnd Hellbound — all of them bangers. It’s easy to get excited by this. JUNG_E.

JUNG_EA researcher in AI hopes to bring an end to the postapocalyptic War by making a legendary robot out of a mercenary. What is the name of that legendary mercenary, you ask? She is her mom. We are all for it. —PV

Pale Blue Eye

Photo: Scott Garfield/Netflix

Year: 2022
Run time: 2h 8m
Director: Scott Cooper
Cast: Christian Bale; Harry Melling; Gillian Anderson

It’s January — which means it’s cold outside, at least for the heartland of North America (climate change-induced seasonal drift notwithstanding). You don’t need some regular-ass, perennial thriller to watch. You already know what you want. A stone-cold, cruel-as-the-depths-of-winter-ass thriller. You’re gonna get that with the new gothic horror mystery from Antlers director Scott Cooper. Christian Bale stars as Augustus Landor, a retired (i.e., too old for this shit) detective who is hired to investigate a rash of brutal murders at the West Point military academy in New York. With the exception of one young, poetically inclined cadet by the name (), no one is willing to assist him.DUN DUN DUUN Edgar Allan Poe. Doesn’t that sound cool (pun half-intended)? Yes, it is. —Toussaint Egan

From our review:

The movie doesn’t have much use for the most meta dimension to the story: the fact that the real Poe helped invent modern detective fiction. (Granted. It could have been exhausting to lean too heavily on that idea. Cooper and Bale seem more comfortable with Landor’s brand of melancholy, informed by the absence of his wife and daughter, as well as some of the odd, unexpected pauses Bale takes in some of his line deliveries. At times, the movie feels like it’s having fun in spite of itself. So it’s perfect, in a way, that Edgar Allan Poe keeps turning up to jolt his own story back to life. —Jesse Hassenger

Rush

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Image

Year: 2013
Run time: 2h 3m
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Brühl, Olivia Wilde

We’re in the brief period between Formula 1 seasons (although Formula E just started, motorsport fans), and the fifth season of Netflix’s To Survive, Drive docuseries premieres Feb. 24. You won’t find a better way to spend your time than by watching the greatest Formula 1 movie ever made.

Ron Howard, who most recently directed and produced the true-crime thriller “The Unknown” Treisteen Lives(Really delivered with RushThe film is a riveting portrayal of motorsport’s excitement and a character study of top-tier athletes. Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl are excellent as racing legends James Hunt and Niki Lauda, Hemsworth perfectly embodying Hunt’s party-animal attitude while Brühl shines as the reserved, hyper-focused Lauda. It’s one of the best sports movies ever made, and there’s no better time to watch it. —PV