Movies That Make You Think — Part 33

Four nights gone wrong: a small-town bag of cash, an all-night race against eviction, a kidnapping that reopens an old case, and a freelancer who treats other people’s tragedies as inventory.

Greedy People (Hulu)

A rookie cop’s first day in a sleepy island town goes sideways when his reckless partner’s bad call leaves a woman dead and a bag of cash up for grabs. Himesh Patel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt anchor a dark comedy where nearly everyone turns out to be one payday away from something ugly, and the body count climbs in proportion to the greed.

Night Always Comes (Netflix)

Lynette has one night to raise $25,000 before her family loses the only home they can afford in a city being priced out from under them. Vanessa Kirby drives a thriller that plays like a tour of American precarity, where every favor, scam, and humiliation gets measured against what a person owes her family — and herself.

The Whisper Man (Netflix)

When widowed Tom’s young son vanishes, the abduction echoes an old serial-killer case — the one his estranged father, a retired detective, put away years ago. Adam Scott and Robert De Niro turn a kidnapping thriller into a story about grief, damaged fathers and sons, and the fear that the worst things run in the family.

Nightcrawler (Netflix)

Lou Bloom parlays a police scanner and a cheap camcorder into a career filming LA’s bloodiest nights for a ratings-hungry news producer — then starts improving the footage. Jake Gyllenhaal’s hollow-eyed stringer is the logical endpoint of “if it bleeds, it leads”: an economy that pays for spectacle and never asks who got hurt producing it.