Ben Brewster is a filmmaker, critic, screenwriter, and actor whose work sits at the intersection of film culture, craft analysis, and storytelling.
He is a movie list contributing writer at Collider and a contributing writer for High on Films, where he covers contemporary cinema, independent film, and festival releases with an eye toward narrative structure, performance, and visual language.
Ben is an active film festival participant, having worked with Newport Film, the Nantucket Film Festival and as a screener for the Austin, Boston & Woodstock film festivals.
He brings to that work a programming instinct shaped by years of close engagement with independent and documentary cinema. This comes with a deep investment in the kinds of films that rarely find their way into the mainstream conversation without someone willing to advocate for them.
His background spans documentary and narrative filmmaking, film marketing, and production, including work with award-winning directors. This as well as developing his own indie production company, Lilac Creative Studio, through which he develops and produces original work across fiction and nonfiction forms.
His debut documentary, Diamond in the Rust, is an examination of economic redevelopment and displacement in the Queens area of New York City. The film was recently accepted to the Unisphere Film Festival, the Defense of Democracy Film Festival, and the Urbanite Arts & Film Festival. This would mark his first festival recognition as a director.
In addition to his writing and programming work, Ben hosts Beneath the Bloom, a film podcast exploring the work behind the scenes in cinema, and the struggles one can face to make a movie become a reality. The show reflects the same sensibility that runs through all of his work. A conviction that film is not merely entertainment but one of the most powerful tools human beings have for understanding each other.
Across mediums, his work is driven by a deep belief in film as a communal, transformative art form.
Nocturne landed on Apple TV this Friday, October 30th, with two episodes up front and one more every week until Christmas Day. Liev Schrieber and Zazie Beetz lead the cast, and Stephen Graham plays the serial killer Jurek Walter. It sounds like the kind of series that follows you around for a week between episodes. Yet, ten episodes across an eight-week span is a lot of patience and a long commitment for the average series watcher in 2026. That had me thinking of what Netflix has to offer in comparison to that regard. The big red streamer has perfected the thriller series I can binge in a weekend and has traded on that design since its conception in 2007.
Netflix has a desire to maintain that quick click to the next episode format. It has built a deep shelf of thrillers that wrap in six episodes or fewer, and sometimes they get lost under louder marketing and bigger releases. However, this is the time for them to shine. The summer has long past, and as the US gets deeper into the winter months, everyone is looking for something trusty to rely on for a cozy day of streaming at home.
Every entry is a British production, which fits, since UK television has long favored short seasons plotted like a period piece novel. The five entries below I would handpick for a friend with a free weekend. Stephen Graham links the list to Nocturne, since he co-created and stars in Adolescence. If Nocturne has you wanting more of him, there is no better place to start. The other four give you a mystery, a Harlan Coben puzzle, a famous twist, and a political thriller, so there is a mood for everyone. Each one is a complete story with no cliffhanger ending to keep you from leaving feeling displeased.
5
‘Missing You’ (2025)
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Image via Netflix</figure>
Missing You is the Harlan Coben slot and the shortest Coben series on Netflix at five episodes. Rosalind Eleazar plays Detective Inspector Kat Donovan, whose ex-fiancé disappeared eleven years earlier. His face turns up on a dating app profile, and Kat starts digging into a mystery she thought had buried years ago. Harlan Coben has a favorite type of premise, and the structural set-up of one ordinary photograph overturning someone’s entire life is on full display.
Coben’s Netflix shows work like puzzle boxes, with each episode ending on a kind of small reveal that adds another element to the fractured storytelling approach. The stories run with clues that might look obvious in hindsight, yet Missing You runs at a fast enough pace that the viewer is forced to simply react. Eleazar is the reason to start and the twists and turns are the reason to finish. Anyone who burned through Fool Me Once and wants more of the same should go here next.
4
‘Collateral’ (2018)
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Image via Netflix</figure>
Collateral is the discovery pick, a four-part BBC and Netflix co-production that almost nobody mentions anymore. The show begins with a pizza delivery driver shot dead on a street in London, and Carey Mulligan‘s Detective Inspector Kip Glaspie takes on the case. David Hare wrote all four episodes, and S.J. Clarkson directed them. Hare uses that single shooting to craft sharp dialogue and pull in politicians, clergy and immigrant communities across the city.
Mulligan gives Kip a dry, worn out intelligence that keeps the procedural from going cold. The cast around Mulligan includes John Simm, Billie Piper, and Nicola Walker, each of whom gets a scene that could carry a stage play. Hare treats the killing as a doorway, and every person that Kip questions opens onto a different corner of British life. The BBC made it for BBC Two, and Netflix streams it outside the UK, so most subscribers have never thought to even click on it.
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‘Behind Her Eyes’ (2021)
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Image via Netflix</figure>
Behind Her Eyes has the most talked about ending on Netflix, so spoilers are the enemy here. The series adapts Sarah Pinborough‘s novel and came to Netflix from the producers of The Crown. Simona Brown plays Louise, a single mother who works for a psychiatrist named David, played by Tom Bateman. Eve Hewson plays David’s wife Adele, and Louise slides into a friendship with her that pulls her closer into David’s circle. The three of them circle each other for the subsequent six episodes.
Everyone seems to be hiding something, and the show lets you pick which secret worries you most. Steve Lightfoot adapted the novel for television and handles the last episodes with a nerve that surprised most viewers. Hewson is magnetic as Adele, who drifts through scenes like someone listening to a different conversation. Brown keeps Louise believable as the story continually gets stranger and stranger. Six episodes build slowly and then speed up through the final stretch. Skip the spoiler threads online and block off a night or two.
2
‘Adolescence’ (2025)
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Image via Netflix</figure>
Adolescence follows the arrest of thirteen-year-old Jamie Miller for the murder of a classmate. Phillip Barantini‘s camera never stops moving during production and each of its four episodes was filmed in one single take. Owen Cooper plays Jamie in his first screen role, and Graham plays Jamie’s father, Eddie. The first hour drops you into the arrest and police raid at the family home.
Graham plays Eddie as a man desperately trying to hold his family together in one of the best performances of his career. Both Graham and Cooper won Emmys for their work. The third episode is a conversation between Jamie and a psychologist played by Erin Doherty, and it is by far the hardest hour of the four to watch. Jack Thorne‘s script offers no clear villain to blame or even an easy explanation as to what happened, which is why the discourse is so fruitful afterward. It is also one of the most watched series Netflix has ever released.
1
‘Bodyguard’ (2018)
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Image via Netflix</figure>
Jed Mercurio (Line of Duty), created Bodyguard, and it ran six episodes on BBC One before reaching Netflix outside the UK. Bodyguard grabs you within the first twenty minutes, with a train carriage standoff where David Budd attempts to talk a woman out of an explosive vest catastrophe. Richard Madden plays Budd, a war veteran assigned to protect Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes). Budd has a shaky grip on his own nerves and Budd thoroughly disagrees with much of what Montague stands for, which keeps every scene between them tense.
Madden won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a TV drama, and the series earned Emmy nominations for drama and writing. The show tells one complete story in six hours and the last two are among the most nerve-racking TV that Netflix carries. Mercurio plots like a chess player, setting pieces early and moving them when you stop watching. Hawkes makes Montague ambitious and unsettled at once, which gives Madden something to push against. Mercurio and Madden are back together for Trinity. It runs eight episodes with Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a nuclear submarine officer and Madden as the Secretary of Defense. Watch Bodyguard first and you will be ready for it.
Bodyguard
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