Movies That Make You Think: Part 34

Four films about people facing forces bigger than themselves: killers closing in through a wildfire, a threat at an airport checkpoint, a surveillance system operating out of public view, and the remnants of an empire.

Those Who Wish Me Dead (Netflix)

Angelina Jolie plays a smokejumper carrying the weight of past trauma who finds herself protecting a boy from two assassins. With a wildfire spreading around them, getting out alive means confronting both human violence and a landscape that offers no safe hiding place. A survival thriller about responsibility, second chances, and choosing to protect someone when walking away would be easier.

Carry-On (Netflix)

A Christmas Eve shift becomes a nightmare when an airport security officer is coerced into letting a dangerous item through his checkpoint. Taron Egerton faces off against Jason Bateman in a thriller built around an ordinary worker being forced into an impossible decision. Underneath the race against time is a question about how much a security system depends on the person being pressured to look the other way.

Snowden (Netflix)

Oliver Stone dramatizes Edward Snowden’s decision to expose the NSA’s surveillance programs, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the title role. It’s a story about the personal cost of whistleblowing and the conflict between loyalty to an institution and responsibility to the public. The questions it leaves behind are bigger than one person: who watches the watchers, and what does meaningful consent look like when surveillance is secret?

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (Disney+)

The Empire has fallen, but its warlords haven’t disappeared. The New Republic turns to Din Djarin and Grogu to help defend what the Rebellion won. Pedro Pascal returns as the bounty hunter in Jon Favreau’s big-screen adventure, with a premise that raises a familiar question: what does it take to keep an old order from coming back after you’ve defeated it?