Movies That Make You Think — Part 27

Four stories about control slipping away: a psychiatrist pulled into illegal CIA experiments, a politician trying to survive a public scandal, a steelworker hunting for his brother in a collapsing industrial town, and a privileged New Yorker discovering that charm is not the same thing as adulthood.

MK Ultra (Prime Video)

Set during the CIA’s early-1960s MKULTRA experiments, a psychiatrist is recruited to run a secret LSD program inside a rural Mississippi mental hospital. The movie turns scientific ambition into a paranoid ethics test, asking what happens when state power treats human beings like lab equipment.

The Runner (Prime Video)

In the aftermath of the BP oil spill, a Louisiana congressman tries to fight for Gulf Coast residents before a sex scandal wrecks his Senate ambitions. Nicolas Cage plays the politician as a man caught between public service, private weakness, and the compromises that turn conviction into calculation.

Out of the Furnace (Prime Video)

A steelworker in a fading Pennsylvania mill town tries to hold his family together after prison, only to watch his younger brother disappear into bare-knuckle fights and violent debt. It is a grim, slow-burn revenge story about loyalty, economic ruin, and how grief can harden into a weapon.

The Longest Week (Prime Video)

A forty-year-old heir gets cut off by his parents, moves in with an old friend, and immediately falls for that friend’s girlfriend. Under the polished Manhattan comedy is a sharper question about privilege, self-invention, and whether a person can grow up after spending a lifetime insulated from consequences.