Movies That Make You Think — Part 32
17 Aug 2026 Reading time: 2 minutesFour stories about secrets coming due: an affair turned into leverage, a murder the police want to file away, a past acquaintance who won’t stay buried, and an assassin who starts asking the wrong questions.
Derailed (Prime Video)
Charles Schine is a commuting ad executive whose strained marriage and mounting bills make a flirtation with Lucinda feel like the one thing going right — until a violent stranger crashes their hotel room and turns the almost-affair into an extortion machine. Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston play it straight and tense, and the movie keeps asking how many compromises a person will make to keep one secret from detonating everything else.
November Criminals (Hulu)
When a classmate is gunned down and the police write it off as gang violence, high school senior Addison starts pulling threads himself, with Phoebe drawn in beside him. Ansel Elgort and Chloë Grace Moretz ground the amateur investigation in grief and adolescent uncertainty, turning a murder mystery into a story about who gets believed and who gets written off.
The Gift (Prime Video)
A young couple’s fresh start in California curdles when Gordo, a figure from Simon’s school days, keeps arriving with wine, koi, and an intimacy that feels slightly wrong. Joel Edgerton writes, directs, and co-stars in a thriller that keeps reassigning your sympathy, asking whether cruelty from the past ever really expires — and what it costs when someone decides it shouldn’t.
Ava (Prime Video)
Ava Faulkner is very good at killing people for a black ops organization, and increasingly bad at not asking why. When one job’s loose ends make her the target, she heads home to Boston and has to fight her own employers while facing the alcoholic mother, fragile sister, and ex-fiancé she left behind. Jessica Chastain carries both halves of the movie: the brutally efficient operative and the daughter who never figured out how to come back.
