It’s not been a quick road to the top, but Harlan Coben is officially one of the most prominent writers of crime fiction in the world. Coben’s work has become so popular that he was even tapped to narrate a true-crime series, Harlan Coben’s Final Twist, which follows the author as he exposes shocking murder and scandals that peel back layers of deceit. The show premiered in January and was such a huge hit that it was renewed for Season 2, though the release date is unknown at this time. Coben’s first project of 2026 was Run Away, the bingeable crime thriller led by James Nesbitt and Minnie Driver. Run Away didn’t back down from Stranger Things Season 5 when it first premiered on Netflix, and Coben will have a chance to keep the momentum soon with another binge-worthy crime series.

It's been quite some time since Gus Van Santhas been in the spotlight. To many's surprise, the visionary director had been away from the big screen for seven years until his inspiring feature-film comeback, Dead Man's Wire, which opened in a limited capacity in 2025, expanded into theaters early in 2026, and is now on Netflix. Best known for sensitive dramas and sympathetic portraits of societal outcasts, like My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, and Milk, Van Sant seems like an unlikely choice for this biographical crime drama/thriller about a hostage crisis in the 1970s, but the versatile filmmaker returned to his early roots as an indie director making anarchic crime thrillers and pitch-black comedies like Drugstore Cowboy and To Die For. This overlooked film is due for a reappraisal now that it's widely available for all audiences, and, luckily, it features a compelling performance by the star of IT: Welcome to Derry, Bill Skarsgård.

The thriller genre has always been oversaturated. Every year, the box office sees an influx of stories about serial killers, detectives, and wild conspiracies. Now, the problem here is that most of them feel like the same film because they rely on the same formula of constant twists, shock value, and predictable moments designed to keep audiences reacting every few minutes.

There was a time when I genuinely thought nothing would ever top Breaking Bad because almost every episode felt stressful in a way very few shows manage. Walter White (Bryan Cranston) kept making decisions that looked smart in the moment and disastrous five episodes later, which made the tension build naturally instead of feeling manufactured. The transformation of Walter White from high school teacher to ruthless drug lord kept audiences gripped to their TVs for five seasons. The series also stars Aaron Paul, Anna Gunn, Betsy Brandt, and Dean Norris, and it remains in the conversation of the best TV shows of all time.

Spy movies thrive on tension and information, conspiracies and secret identities. Yet they also need to deliver on the action front to truly reel the audience in. The fights and chases have to be genuinely tense, giving us the feeling that the protagonists are in real danger.

One of the great elements of the sci-fi genre that has helped it stay relevant and impactful all these years later is just how easily it is able to not just stand on its own, but actively support other genres and styles of filmmaking. Whether it's sci-fi drama films like Her, sci-fi horror films like The Thing, or even sci-fi family movies like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, nearly every other genre can be merged and amplified with sci-fi elements.

A perfect blockbuster thriller has to satisfy two different cravings at the same time. It needs the clean, big-screen rush of a crowd movie, yet it also needs the tight, nervous pressure of a story that refuses to let the viewer relax. Size alone is useless here. The film has to move, squeeze, surprise, and still give the audience characters worth worrying about.

A thriller earns that 10/10 feeling when the first scene already knows what kind of pressure the movie is going to put on you. The story can be loud, quiet, violent, psychological, procedural, or strange. What matters is control. A great thriller keeps your attention without begging for it.

Thrillers from the ‘90s just hit differently. For some reason, films from that era had a way of crawling under the audience’s skin without needing to rely on hollow twists every 10 minutes or turning everything into franchise bait. They felt darker, stranger, and far more willing to leave the audience with a sense of discomfort.

Waiting for Season 5 of True Detective will require more patience than the limited supply that Marty (Woody Harrelson) had for Rust (Matthew McConaughey). To help time go by, a new series on Max is giving crime fans more of the strange deaths and detective duos that have made True Detective a favorite. Set in Spain, the Spanish-English language When No One Sees Us begins with two seemingly unrelated cases of suicide and a disappearance taking place over a celebration leading to Easter, before clues connect the dots that both investigations might be linked.

Manuel Gual posted a photo:

Madrid 1974: A Retro Spy Comedy Through the Secret Files of a Chaotic Bureaucracy

Description

A cinematic retro series set in a fictional 1974 Madrid, blending spy comedy, bureaucratic absurdity, street chases, secret archives, analog surveillance and vintage Spanish urban life. The images recreate a world of confidential folders, smoky offices, rotary telephones, typewriters, old taxis, crowded markets, railway stations, rooftop antennas, hidden laboratories, newspaper presses and suspicious government corridors. The atmosphere feels like a lost espionage farce from the seventies: serious men in ill fitting suits, anxious messengers, improvised agents, comic confusion, urgent missions and a constant sense that every secret operation is seconds away from becoming a public disaster.

The collection moves between interior and exterior scenes with strong narrative continuity: intelligence offices full of papers, tense investigations, chaotic pursuits through Madrid streets, undercover activity in cafés and markets, and surreal technical experiments in improvised laboratories. Its visual language combines photorealistic period detail with comic exaggeration, creating a nostalgic but dynamic tribute to classic European spy parody, Spanish popular culture and analog detective fiction.

These images have been generated by Artificial Intelligence.

Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Episode 4 of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed