Of all the many genres that bless our screens, the thriller is one of the most malleable. Able to be effectively blended with everything from comedy to horror and period drama, the thriller’s only real role is to incite excitement, fear, or tension within a narrative; few directors haven’t made a thriller.
From the nail-biting Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier-led Marathon Man tothe Steven Spielberg-directed masterpiece Jaws, Alfred Hitchcock‘s beloved Psycho to the Academy darling The Silence of the Lambs, some of the very best movies of all time hail from the thriller genre. But what about in recent years? Has the genre proved as successful as it once was in the 20th century? Well, with that in mind, here’s a look at the seven best thriller movies of the last six years, ranked.
7
‘Conclave’ (2024)
Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence wears papal finery while walking away from men in similar attire in Conclave. Image via Focus Features
Of the many types of thriller subgenres, one of the most underrated is religious. The best example of recent religious thrillers comes from director Edward Berger, who followed up on his brilliant All Quiet on the Western Front from 2022 with Conclave, the tale of a high-stakes papacy election led by Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes).
Blending the darkly comic with the philosophical, this adaptation of Robert Harris‘ 2016 novel leaves no stone unturned in its depiction of a very rare and fascinating religious event. However, rather than staying strictly educational, Berger crafts a host of characters that perhaps would feel more at home in Mean Girls than the Vatican. Conclave earned eight Academy Award nominations, picking up just one for Best Adapted Screenplay.
6
‘Weapons’ (2025)
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
There is a fine line between horror and thriller, and it’s blurred perfectly in director Zach Cregger‘s horror smash, Weapons. Set in the aftermath of an entire classroom of children suddenly running off into the night, the film follows several points of view as a distraught community comes to terms with the loss and tries to piece together the puzzle of this terrifying mystery.
A clever, hair-raising thriller that thrives in its most horror-adjacent moments, Weapons is perhaps best-loved for its host of great performances. Although the likes of Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, and more delivered excellent work, it was Amy Madigan who stole the show, eventually winning the Best Supporting Actress prize for her role as Aunt Gladys.
5
‘Decision to Leave’ (2022)
Park-Hae-il as Det. Jang Hae-jun in Decision to Leave
Image via CJ Entertainment
Few films by South Korean director Park Chan-wook aren’t worthy of their place on any list such as this. Almost two decades after he changed the action thriller genre forever with Oldboy, he returned with his 12th film: Decision to Leave. The film follows the investigation of the mysterious death of a husband, with a detective and the man’s wife wrapped up in a whirlwind of deception.
At the heart of the thriller is often frustrating tension that slowly bleeds into knowledge. In Decision to Leave, Chan-wook perfectly turns the dial on the incredible built-up tension, using his veteran knowledge of the genre to craft an unforgettable, nerve-wracking experience that Alfred Hitchcock would be proud of.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Iman (Missagh Zreh) holding a gun in ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’Image via NEON
One of the finest non-English language films of the past six years, The Seed of the Sacred Fig takes the thriller genre to its extreme meta lengths by being filmed in secret over 70 days between December 2023 and March 2024. It is because of this very real suspense that the film is so successful as a thriller, with that tension oozing out of every frame and under the skin of viewers.
A slow-burner that proudly boasts a vital message never more relevant than today, The Seed of the Sacred Fig follows the dangerous world a family is thrust into as a man is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran. A winner of five prizes from the Cannes Film Festival, this clever mystery thriller is as entertaining as it is powerful.
3
‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer (2023)Image via Universal Pictures
After many years of proving to be one of the most ambitious and successful filmmakers of his generation, Christopher Nolan arguably took his filmography to another level with 2023’s Oppenheimer, the biopic diving into the fascinating life of the titular theoretical physicist, known as the “father of the atomic bomb.”
A masterclass in how to use sound in filmmaking, Nolan’s Oppenheimer was so successful it managed to earn just shy of $1 billion despite being a three-hour biopic. Very few filmmakers could entice the world to part with hard-earned cash and spend 180 minutes watching the life of a theoretical physicist.
2
‘The Secret Agent’ (2025)
The Secret AgentImage via Neon
The spiritual and contextual successor to 2024’s I’m Still Here, The Secret Agent isn’t just one of the best thrillers of the past six years; it’s one of the best Brazilian movies of all time. Following Wagner Moura’s Armando as he lies low from the Brazilian dictatorship in the 1970s, the film is both a gripping political thriller and a masterclass in genre-bending, moving from a detailed drama in one moment to a horror B-movie the next.
The winner of the prestigious Best Director and Best Actor prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as four Academy Award nominations, Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s neo-noir masterpiece has the capacity to draw hearty laughter, gasp-inducing shocks, and reduce a viewer to tears all in the space of 161 minutes.
1
‘Anatomy of a Fall’ (2023)
Sandra Hüller as Sandra Voyter, standing outside and looking dismayed in Anatomy of a FallImage via Neon
There is no doubt that, in decades to come, the French crime thriller Anatomy of a Fall will be looked back upon as one of the greatest movies of the 2020s. The tale of a novelist’s life and strained relationship with her visually impaired son during the investigation into her husband’s strange death, this twisting film leaves no stone unturned in its exploration of the subjectivity of truth.
Headlined by one of the finest modern movie performances from Sandra Hüller,Justine Triet‘s Anatomy of a Fall deserves all the high praise it gets. To some, the film is the best courtroom drama of the past decade, and to others, it’s the best of the century so far. Whether you quite agree with these bold statements or not, nothing can deny the sheer unflinching genius of this captivating tale.
