Thrillers
The Front Row
“Civil War” Is a Tale of Bad News
Alex Garland’s grim political fantasy about secession and violence revolves around a war photographer but has little to say about the making and consumption of news images.
On Television
Donald Glover’s “Swarm” Is a Portrait of the Serial Killer as a Young Stan
The horror-thriller series, which Glover created with Janine Nabers, about a mega-fan’s violent devotion to a Beyoncé-like pop star, succeeds neither as satire nor as psychological study.
The Current Cinema
The Thief as Artist in “Inside”
Starring Willem Dafoe as a stranded art thief, Vasilis Katsoupis’s film pushes the heist genre in the direction of performance art.
The Current Cinema
“Cocaine Bear” and the Problem of High-Concept Plots
Like “Snakes on a Plane” and “We Bought a Zoo,” Elizabeth Banks’s film provides exactly what the title promises. Then what?
The Front Row
Alain Resnais’s “La Guerre Est Finie,” Reviewed: Turning Genre Conventions Into Intellectual Adventure
In the director’s fourth film, he introduced daring cinematic techniques into the familiar format of the political thriller.
Books
How James Patterson Became the World’s Best-Selling Author
His new autobiography adds another title to his enormous stack, but does it deepen the plot?
The Front Row
“Saturday Fiction,” Reviewed: A Hectic Masterwork of Political Paranoia
Lou Ye’s film, set in Shanghai on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack, is a grandly ambitious and stylish thriller.
The Front Row
Steven Soderbergh’s “Kimi” Is a Tech Thriller That Packs a Potent Outrage
The film is built as an ordinary genre piece, but that format disguises its uncommon substance and power.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Black Thought Takes the Stage
The legendary rapper of the Roots turns to musical theatre with “Black No More,” based on a novel from the Harlem Renaissance. Plus, Lee Child on Jack Reacher.
The Front Row
What “Jennifer’s Body” Foretold
The 2009 film, newly available on Amazon Prime, anticipated both the immense power and the aesthetic blind spots of later films such as “Promising Young Woman.”
Georgia Postcard
Stacey Abrams Courts the Republican Suspense-Novel-Reader Vote
Among the fans of Abrams’s new political thriller, “While Justice Sleeps,” are self-described conservatives, who size up the Democratic voting-rights activist as both a Marxist and a budding John Grisham.
The Front Row
Review: “The Woman in the Window” Is Junk with Visual Verve
Joe Wright’s adaptation of the best-selling book is a run-of-the-mill whodunnit with a persuasive vision of psychological chaos.
On Television
The Dizzying Hairpin Turns of “Behind Her Eyes”
It is hard to tell who is warden and who is prisoner, who is crazy and who is sane, and the Netflix show revels in this uncertainty.
The Current Cinema
“Tenet” is Dazzling, Deft, and Devoid of Feeling
Christopher Nolan’s latest film bears the hopes of an industry desperate to get people back in theatres, but grandeur is no guarantee of impact.
Watch
“The Rental,” a Horror Film About Love, Family, and Airbnb
This lean and slick thriller about a casual Airbnb stay gone catastrophically wrong thoroughly scratches the summer slasher-flick itch.
Cultural Comment
Can Christopher Nolan Save the Summer?
The director is sticking to a July 17th in-theatre release date for his thriller “Tenet.”
The Front Row
“The Invisible Man,” Reviewed: A Horror Film of Diabolical Twists and Empty Showmanship
Leigh Whannell’s loose adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic shows a clever attentiveness to the role of current technology in modern life but is almost completely devoid of societal context.
The Front Row
How “Parasite” Falls Short of Greatness
The director Bong Joon-ho’s satirically comedic thriller about the injustice of inequality is an elegantly realized movie that is scripted to the vanishing point.
Page-Turner
In “Afternoon of a Faun,” James Lasdun Mixes Autofiction and Psychological Thriller
The book achieves a state of suspension that is at once fascinating, draining, and dismal—one imagines oneself, along with the narrator, vacillating forever, doubting, arguing both sides.
Profiles
A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions
Dan Mallory, who writes under the name A. J. Finn, went to No. 1 with his début thriller, “The Woman in the Window.” His life contains even stranger twists.