Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like The Secret Agent:
One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a movie of firsts that never feels tentative. It is his first modern-set feature since Punch-Drunk Love, his first collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, and his first film of this scale, reportedly in the $130 to $175 million range. What is not new is the command. From the first explosion to the last chase, this is PTA in full control, turning a feverish political thriller into one of 2025’s most purely thrilling big-screen experiences.
Read our full review of One Battle After Another
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
The Seed of the Sacred Fig, winner of the 2024 Cannes Special Jury Prize, stands out as a top international feature film of the year. The story spans multiple genres, evolving significantly as it unfolds. The movie captures modern-day Iran during heightened tensions between citizens and the government, blending family drama with a tense, high-stakes thriller. Director Mohammad Rasoulof handles ambitious themes, and the film’s extended runtime and detailed storytelling bring cohesion to its complex ideas.
The Brutalist
Throughout December, expect to see many outlets anoint Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist as the best film of 2024. It’s epic. It’s wildly accomplished. And it knows it. The movie’s operatic opening crescendos into a visually striking image of the Statue of Liberty flipped upside down—an arresting symbol that mirrors the film’s poster. It’s the kind of bold, declarative start that announces a filmmaker fully in command of their craft.
Killers of the Flower Moon
In Martin Scorsese’s epic crime drama, Killers of the Flower Moon, we are transported back in time to the early 1920s, to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, a land drenched in blood and oil. Adapted from David Grann’s best-selling book of the same name, Scorsese’s take on this dark chapter in American history takes us on a thrilling, if occasionally meandering, journey that showcases the director’s distinct cinematic style while exploring a unique angle on the source material.
Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer is undoubtedly one of the best movies directed by Christopher Nolan, who puts any doubt to rest that he wouldn’t be capable of capturing a story of this magnitude. Cillian Murphy gives an iconic performance that intensifies each moment rolling along this breakneck biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Incendies
Incendies is an often compelling cinematic experience fueled by powerful performances, particularly Lubna Azabal’s tentpole portrayal of Nawal. It may not quite be Denis Villeneuve’s best movie, but it serves as a worthy introduction for one of the industry’s brightest filmmakers to the big stage.
Eddington
Ari Aster’s Eddington is a jagged political mirror—scattershot with ideas, audacious in tone—and somehow plays like a slow-burn powder-keg farce that detonates exactly when it means to. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival to chilly early notices, the film was quickly read as opportunistic, a movie “profiting” off COVID lockdowns and the George Floyd protests rather than meaningfully engaging with them. But taken on its own terms, Eddington is a bracingly self-reflective work: an American fever dream about paranoia, doomscrolling, and the grifters who materialize when anxiety becomes a commodity.
It Was Just an Accident
It Was Just an Accident is the rare political thriller that feels both ruthlessly focused and quietly devastating, the kind of film only Jafar Panahi could make. Working inside a premise that plays like a classic suspense setup while functioning as a clear rebuke of state brutality, Panahi turns a slender 104 minutes into a study of moral vertigo. His own history shadows the movie at every turn. The director of This Is Not a Film and Taxi was imprisoned, banned from filmmaking, and censored by the Iranian regime, and that lived experience sharpens every cut, every silence, every hesitation.
Parasite
Every few years, I revisit Parasite and find myself wondering if I’ve been underrating it. It’s a movie that feels so omnipresent in conversations about the best movies of the 21st century that it’s easy to take its greatness for granted. But every rewatch reminds me exactly why Bong Joon-ho’s international juggernaut remains one of the most important films of the last decade—both as a razor-sharp thriller and a scathing critique of class dynamics that continues to feel disturbingly relevant.
There Will Be Blood
Calling this a canonical masterpiece is almost redundant, yet revisiting Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood still feels shockingly alive, starting with Daniel Day-Lewis, whose Daniel Plainview might be the defining screen portrait of American ambition curdled into misanthropy. From the wordless, pickaxe-and-broken-bones prologue to the baptism humiliation and the “I drink your milkshake” finale, Day-Lewis maps a soul corroded by competition until there is nothing left but the will to dominate.
READ MORE: The Secret Agent (2026), Movies Like One Battle After Another
