With a new month comes new content on streamers such as HBO Max, Peacock, Netflix, and Paramount+. Here, we will focus specifically on thrillers. Each of those aforementioned major content houses has a slew of catalogue favorites set to debut. Of course, they’re replacing departing content, but even still it’s always nice for subscribers to have new content to either acquaint themselves with or rewatch. From a few bank robbery classics, including one directed by Quentin Tarantino, to one of the more traumatizing serial killer mysteries, here are the best thrillers coming to your favorite streamer in September 2025.
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All of these movies hit their respective streamers on September 1st, so there’s no waiting involved to watch these thrilling favorites. Let’s get started.
7) Inside Man — Netflix
For the most part, Spike Lee is known for helming character-focused dramas. Usually, ones that tackle some incredibly heavy themes. And, to a degree, Inside Man is no different. It just happens to focus on a nail-biter of a bank robbery, too.
Denzel Washington stars as NYPD hostage negotiator Detective Keith Frazier, who is called to calm down a heist that seems to have been planned with extra-sharp intricacy. He soon learns that he’s not dealing with the average bank robber, but rather someone who wants to send a very specific message to a very specific person. The robber will get his diamonds, of course, but equally important is the revelation of some incredibly damaging information. Along with the performances, the internal debate the audience experiences about whether this robbery was actually an ethical thing to do is the best part of the movie.
6) Dog Day Afternoon — HBO Max
Al Pacino is one of the planet’s most well-respected actors for good reason. His performances in The Godfather trilogy, Scarface, The Devil’s Advocate, Heat, Scent of a Woman, and Serpico are all iconic for good reason. And in just his seventh film, Dog Day Afternoon (which marked three classics in a row after Serpico and The Godfather Part II), he delivered what is arguably the best work of his career as Sonny Wortzik.
Wortzik was based on a real person, John Wojtowicz, and Pacino plays every aspect of who this man was with respect. The same could be said of the movie, which was quite respectable for a production that took place in the 1970s. Like in real life, the Sonny Wortzik of the film is a homosexual man in love with a transgender woman who is willing to put his life on the line to rob a bank so he and his love to receive gender-affirming surgery.
This is a heist movie that isn’t as focused on the heist as much as it’s focused on the two men committing the other heist. Who is the other man committing the heist? Sal Naturile, played by Fredo himself, the late, great John Cazale. Cazale’s life was cut short by lung cancer, and, before that time, he starred in exactly five films, all five of which were stone-cold classics. The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, this, and The Deer Hunter. It’s impossible to imagine a better track record because there isn’t one. Like Pacino, he turns in an endearing performance. And, since their work is so remarkable and the film is so set on fleshing out their characters, we feel more tension than the average heist film provides, because we desperately want them to make it out of this thing okay.
5) Seven — HBO Max
If there’s an ending of a thriller better than Seven‘s (more frequently titled Se7en), it’s hard to imagine what that might be. Three years after David Fincher made his directorial debut with the third Alien film, he directed his true first film with this Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman fronted masterpiece. Alien 3 had been such a notoriously poor experience for the auteur it wouldn’t have been surprising had he called it quits then and there. Thank goodness he didn’t, because with Se7en he announced himself as someone who can helm captivating material even when it’s as grim as it can get.
Se7en is the exact type of movie that is best to go into cold. Of course, 30 years later, that’s basically impossible. But if you’re lucky enough not to know this film’s twists and turns, keep it that way, sit down, and watch it. Everything about Se7en works exactly as it should, from the pacing and the performances by Pitt, Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin Spacey to the horrific ambiance that coats each and every crime scene. Se7en is a movie that makes you feel the danger lurking in its deliberately unnamed, rain-soaked city.
4) Hanna — Peacock
For the most part, Saoirse Ronan has stuck with material bound to score awards season love. And while it was never going to score a Best Picture nom, Hanna really isn’t that far off from her more artsy fare. Director Joe Wright (with whom Ronan collaborated on Pride & Prejudice and Atonement) takes the spy material very seriously, without forgetting to inject some high-octane scenes which feel as though they have real stakes.
Ronan stars as the fifteen-year-old title character, Hanna Heller, who has been trained by her ex-CIA operative father to survive any situation ever since she was two. Now, her father sends her on her first mission: to take out a former colleague of his who, not so coincidentally, wants to take them out, as well. But, in the process, Hanna may very well come across some information that shakes her world. Even at such a young age, Ronan proves herself to be as fully capable of punch-throwing and gun-shooting as she already had proved to be a formidable dramatic performer.
3) Knock Knock — Peacock
Eli Roth’s Knock Knock is the exact type of movie bound to slowly accrue a cult following. For one, it teams up Keanu Reeves and Ana de Armas, well before Ballerina (even before their second collaboration, the quite forgettable Exposed).
Knock Knock is essentially a throwback to both erotic thrillers like Basic Instinct and revenge films like The Last House on the Left. There’s even a bit of the random violence of The Strangers thrown in there. We follow Reeves as a married man whose family has departed for a few days. He’s enjoying his time home alone right up until two beautiful young women come to his front door, soaked in rain, with the claim that they’re looking for a party at a nearby house. As he tries to help them find their way, the two women instead take him on a sexual journey that ends up being about a different type of pleasure for his two guests.
2) Reservoir Dogs — Peacock
With a crackling script, air-tight pacing, and phenomenal performances from Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, and the late Michael Madsen, Reservoir Dogs may have very well been the most impressive directorial debut of the ’90s. It’s the exact type of film that announces that a very specific new voice has entered the arena, one that can throw curveballs at the audience that you won’t see until they’re about to hit your cheek, while also working in a genre that has been explored for decades.
Tarantino went bigger and, arguably, bolder after Reservoir Dogs, but there’s still a certain appeal to seeing him play in a more limited playground. Reservoir Dogs did not have a large budget, and that actually ends up being an asset. What we’re watching isn’t particularly cinematic. It’s more like spending time around a group of men who rip on each other, talk music, and rob banks. Speaking of music, Reservoir Dogs announced Tarantino as an auteur with a real ear for which tunes to put where, with a few choice needle drops dispensed throughout. Lastly, the film makes great use of the nonlinear structure, with certain revelations (in regard to Roth’s Mr. Orange) placed perfectly in the narrative to up the already raised stakes to a breaking point.
1) Fatal Attraction — Paramount+
Fatal Attraction was one of the ’80s biggest watercooler talk movies, so it’s no wonder it ended up getting a remake TV series way down the line. It’s also no wonder that the series didn’t last long, even with Lizzy Caplan in the cast. This is the type of narrative that really does feel like a product of the ’80s, with the general topic of a family man being stalked by a “crazy” woman he had a fling with, not quite playing as well today.
Regardless, this is the type of movie that helps explain why the ’80s was the definitive decade for erotic thrillers. There’s a reason why Michael Douglas revisited this territory every now and then with material such as Basic Instinct and A Perfect Murder. However, while he oozes charisma, this ends up being Glenn Close’s movie all the way. She imbues Alex Forrest with sexuality, but also the type of emptiness that makes you believe her escalation of events. Many of her actions are unsettling at best, but at the same time the audience really feels for her, even if they’re big fans of bunnies. Outside the “one last scare” ending (which was a reshoot addition that paled in comparison to the initial, far superior, incredibly bleak conclusion), this is perhaps the apex of the spurned lover narrative.
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