10 Best Epic Thrillers of All Time

Certain thrillers well and truly avoid overstaying their welcome, since it is a genre where the movies classifiable as such can benefit from being snappy. It keeps the pace fast, when there aren’t really minutes to waste, so you’ve got a bunch of iconic thrillers that clock in with sub-90-minute runtimes, for instance, like Rope, Run Lola Run, and Perfect Blue, plus too many that clock in at under two hours to count.

Epic movies, on the other hand, don’t necessarily waste time, but they tell bigger stories and generally take up more time than your average thriller. Yet there are some great epic thrillers out there, including the ones below, which are some of the very best. There are epics that are thrilling without necessarily being thrillers (like The Lord of the Rings and Lawrence of Arabia), with a movie having to be marked as a thriller on Letterboxd to be included here, just for consistency’s sake.

10

‘The Towering Inferno’ (1974)

Image via 20th Century Studios

Disaster movies tend to benefit from runtimes that aren’t too crazily long, because films about people trying to survive such things are generally straightforward. Something like Titanic works, with a 3+ hour runtime, because a good chunk of that movie isn’t focused on the disaster itself… but still, that movie’s not really a thriller, even with the second half being thrilling. If you want the best disaster movie that does feel like a thriller, and it has an epic runtime at the same time, there’s always The Towering Inferno.

This one’s long because there are a ton of characters in it. The premise itself is simple, since there’s a fire during the opening party for a skyscraper, and people inside the building have to fight to survive while people outside the building try to contain the fire and rescue those inside. It’s very much of its time, since disaster movies like this were all the rage, back in the 1970s, but of that decade’s (many) blockbuster-level disaster movies, The Towering Inferno is the best.

9

‘Dragged Across Concrete’ (2018)

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For reasons that are somewhat hard to understand, Heat doesn’t really get described as a thriller in most of the places you might expect it to (not IMDb, Letterboxd, or Wikipedia), so here’s Dragged Across Concrete instead, which is another heist movie with an epic-length runtime. This one does tend to get labeled as a crime/thriller film, and it’s about two police detectives being suspended and then themselves getting wrapped up in a heist.

What it does thematically is interesting, breaking down the barriers between two groups who are usually on “opposite” sides of the law in some pretty brutal and eyebrow-raising ways. It’s also as violent as you’d expect it to be, with a title like Dragged Across Concrete, and the director (S. Craig Zahler) who was behind the infamously grisly Bone Tomahawk (which is a great Western, to be fair, albeit definitely not something for everyone).

8

‘Spies’ (1928)

Image via UFA

It’s not quite as good as Metropolis, but Spies is another epic-length silent movie by Fritz Lang that holds up incredibly well for something that’s nearly 100 years old. Like how Metropolis was very influential on the sci-fi genres, Spies can be seen as incredibly forward-thinking in the spy and thriller genres, being about complicated relationships between different spies and people tied up (seemingly) with some kind of espionage-related operation.

Spies is about 2.5 hours long, and it’s also non-stop with its general chaos and willingness to thrill. By design, it’s a bit hard to keep up, but it’s also a lot of fun being taken along for the ride, and seeing Fritz Lang do things so much earlier than most filmmakers were able to. Spies is very underrated, much like Woman in the Moon, which was a return to sci-fi for Lang, and another epic-length movie (released just one year on from Spies).

7

‘Blood In, Blood Out’ (1993)

Image via Buena Vista Pictures Distribution

Sometimes, Blood In, Blood Out is referred to by the title “Bound by Honor,” but either way, it stands as easily one of the most underrated epic-length movies of its era. It goes for more than three hours, and it spans over a decade, too, being about three young men who are all wrapped up in gang conflict early in the film, and then experience various changes throughout their lives as the years go on.

Plenty of traditional epics are set many decades ago, or even centuries, and Blood In, Blood Out does feel like a traditional epic in some ways (with how it unfolds and the amount of time covered), but then it stands out by being made about then-recent times, since it covers much of the 1970s and then the first half of the 1980s. It’s mostly a crime/drama film, but also qualifies as a thriller, standing as an ultimately very engaging watch for all of its long runtime.

6

‘One Battle After Another’ (2025)

Since it’s recent, it’s hard to know at this stage whether One Battle After Another will endure and be a genuine classic some years (or decades) from now, but at the moment, it feels like its chances are good. Worst-case scenario is that it becomes a time capsule for the 2020s, but a very comprehensive and unusually accurate one, in terms of the conflict it explores and the general anxiety that it’s willing to depict.

There’s also a good deal of action and excitement here, especially for a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, since he hadn’t really operated in the blockbuster filmmaking sphere before One Battle After Another. It’s high on thrills, and has some great set pieces, so even with the somewhat polarizing subject matter, it doesn’t feel too hard to recommend this movie, thanks to it being so dedicated to delivering spectacle.

5

‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ (2012)

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The runtime might intimidate some people, considering Gangs of Wasseypur is almost five and a half hours long, but it’s split into two volumes, a bit like how a certain epic about killing someone named Bill was also (at least initially) split into two. Put another way, Gangs of Wasseypur feels a bit like watching The Godfather and The Godfather Part II back-to-back, and that’s doable, considering how great those movies are.

Okay, sure, Gangs of Wasseypur isn’t quite as good as The Godfather, but it’s also not that far off, as a gangster epic. It spans a good deal of time like The Godfather saga, and revolves around one crime family seen over generations, with a particular focus on their conflict with another crime family. It’s an epic crime film while also functioning remarkably well as an unpredictable thriller, and then Gangs of Wasseypur also manages to feel pretty action-packed throughout, too.

4

‘Zodiac’ (2007)

Image via Paramount Pictures

As a mystery film, Zodiac’s very heavy and downbeat, though it’s intense and fast-paced enough to certainly work as a thriller at the same time, with the focus here, unsurprisingly, being on the hunt for the Zodiac killer. A few different people find themselves drawn to the case, with one in particular, a cartoonist named Robert Graysmith, getting especially obsessed with finding the elusive killer’s identity, even when the murders themselves seem to stop.

About half of Zodiac plays out how you’d expect it to, and then the other half is more about obsession and uncertainty. It’s a grim and violent thriller for that first half, and then the second half is anxiety-inducing in a different sort of way, finding a good degree of terror and unease in the unknown. On both fronts, Zodiac is riveting, and stands as arguably David Fincher’s most ambitious movie to date, not to mention one of his very best efforts.

3

‘Inglourious Basterds’ (2009)

Image via The Weinstein Company

With the exception of Death Proof, all of Quentin Tarantino’s 21st-century movies have been pretty much epic-length. Well, if you go back to the 20th century, actually, of his three pre-2000 movies, only Reservoir Dogs clocks in at under 2.5 hours. So, okay, sure, he likes making movies that are either epics, or flirt with being epic (like The Hateful Eight, which is long, but pretty claustrophobic and also kind of small-scale for something that’s three hours long).

Anyway, there is one other Tarantino epic that’s arguably more thrilling than Inglourious Basterds, but Inglourious Basterds, nevertheless, really can’t be left off for present purposes. It’s a World War II film about different people fighting back against German forces in Nazi-occupied France, culminating with a movie premiere that allows Tarantino to comment on movie violence while featuring a ton of on-screen violence. There’s a lot to chew on here, beyond the visceral thrills, if you feel so inclined. Otherwise, Inglourious Basterds is still just a blast at a gut level, sustaining tension for more than two and a half hours with surprising ease.

2

‘JFK’ (1991)

Image via Warner Bros.

There’s an argument to be made that JFK is a real mess of an epic, but an even better argument to be made that it’s an enthralling – and sprawling – kind of mess. It is about the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy assassination, with New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison conducting an investigation into the event, and trying to come to terms with certain discoveries he makes. And then there’s the additional challenge of trying to convince other people of some alarming things.

It’s incredibly frenzied, and compelling as a portrait of obsession over a troubling historical event in a similar way to Zodiac. Even if you don’t believe in what JFK (or director Oliver Stone) might believe, JFK remains engrossing as a film about anxiety and the sometimes futile pursuit of the truth, or even just a truth. It moves so ridiculously fast, too, so getting swept up in it all, even with the overwhelming density of things, feels surprisingly easy.

1

‘Kill Bill’ (2003–2004)

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Another Quentin Tarantino epic, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is even more directly about revenge than Inglourious Basterds, since there were more characters in that, and a handful weren’t directly driven by revenge (or not personally driven, necessarily). With Kill Bill, though, that’s pretty much all the Bride seems to want for most of the movie, and yes, most of the movie is then about her getting that revenge.

It’s being counted as one epic here, and that can be done now that Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is more widely available as a single film that stitches the two previously-released volumes together, and makes a few alterations along the way. It’s a grand and continually rewatchable action/thriller film, with stretches of Kill Bill delivering a ton of amazingly choreographed action, and then other stretches being a bit more restrained, building tension and featuring some excellently written dialogue.