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.
It’s a good rule for show-runners to follow in the modern entertainment landscape: try and hook viewers within their first five minutes. That might seem short, but so are attention spans nowadays. It is a harsh rule to follow, but it also tells you a lot about the inner makings of a quality thriller. However, Prime Video has a strong record on that front.
The platform has made its name with large-scale action and the Chris Pratt-led, The Terminal List, returned in October with all eight episodes of Season two at once. Reacher is coming off a season four that pulled 66 million viewers in its first 28 days. Fallout has finished filming season three, though it will sadly not arrive in 2027.
Every series here opens with something specific, an image or a scene or a question that sticks. However, the best entries on this list open with small subtleties like a funeral, a birthday party, or even a slice of pie. The genre stretches from spy comedy to a supernatural mystery, but all still bring a stereotypical thriller’s infrastructure of high stakes, tense physical confrontations and an atmosphere of narrative uncertainty.
8
‘Jack Ryan’ (2018-2023)
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Image via Prime Video</figure>
Jack Ryan creates its opening premise on a rather mundane but clever idea, which is that its hero finds the threat in a money transfer spreadsheet. The series opens in Lebanon in 1983, where two brothers dance around their bedroom until bombs fall on their village. The boys grow into the man John Krasiniski‘s Ryan will spend the first season chasing. Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland ask the audience to understand the villain first before meeting the hero. That narrative technique alone brings a moral depth and weight rarely seen in Tom Clancy adaptations for the screen.
Krasinski plays Ryan as an analyst first and an action hero second, which makes his reluctant move into the field believable. Ali Suleiman and Dina Shihabi as his wife, Hanin, get nearly as much screen time as the American characters. That lifts the first season out of the standard spy manhunt procedural. Wendell Pierce gives Ryan’s boss James Greer a rumpled authority that anchors every scene he is in. The series ran four seasons and in the later ones it chased bigger set pieces at some cost to that earlier character work. Although it might settle into a familiar rhythm, the opening hook still lands.
7
‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ (2024-Present)
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Image via Prime Video</figure>
Donal Glover and Francesca Sloane open Mr. & Mrs. Smith with another John and Jane Smith, played by Alexander Skarsgård and Eiza Gonzalez and then promptly kill them off. The scene, of course, winks at the 2005 movie with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie while promising a very different take. Donald Glover’s John and Maya Erskine‘s Jane each sit down for an interview with a faceless agency, where a terminal greets them with a cheerful “hihi.” Jane’s terminal even asks for her nail clippings, a detail that helps to set that dry and strange tone. Hiro Murai directs the pilot with his usual sharp eye for awkward silences and comedic undertones.
Glover and Sloane built each episode structurally around a single idea, much like Atlanta did, which keeps the missions fresh. Erskine and Glover trade awkward banter as each episode turns into a test of their relationship. The first season ran eight episodes and a second season began filming this past April under a new show runner.
6
‘The Terminal List’ (2022-Present)
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Image via Prime Video</figure>
Chris Pratt stars as Navy SEAL Lieutenant Commander James Reece and the show does not waste a second before putting the audience in front of its rather grim circumstances. The Terminal List begins at a funeral, with Reece smashing a SEAL pin into a coffin. This cuts between flashbacks of Reece leading an Alpha Platoon into a tunnel in Syria on a mission that nobody believes in. They go underground searching for a chemical weapons terrorist and walk into an ambush. The explosion that follows kills nearly everyone and Antoine Fuqua‘s (Training Day) slick direction makes the opening sequence feel like a feature film.
Jack Carr‘s novel supplies the revenge plot, and Pratt trades his usual charm for a hollow stare that suits a man who loses everything. Riley Keough plays Reece’s wife, Lauren, and Taylor Kitsch plays his friend Ben Edwards, and they give the family and friendship at the center of the story a real lived-in warmth. A prequel, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, followed in 2025. Season 2 just hit Prime on October 21st and takes Reece across the world. A third season has not yet been confirmed. The show operates as a single-minded thriller though its pleasures narrow after the opening hour.
5
‘Bosch’ (2014-2021)
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Image via Aaron Epstein / ©Amazon / courtesy Everett Collection</figure>
Titus Welliver‘s first scene as the now iconic Harry Bosch was in an undercover car, watching the weather and muttering under his breath about how the rain will wash the city clean. Within minutes, he is chasing a suspect on foot which ultimately ends with a fatal gunshot. Later on in Bosch, he is sitting in a courtroom defending that shooting against a wrongful death suit, while a dog in Laurel Canyon has dug up a child’s bones. The pilot juggles the psyche of Bosch, the trial and a dark cold case without overwhelming you.
Eric Overmeyer developed the series with Michael Connelly, and the pilot’s mix of courtroom drama and cold case work set the template for seven seasons. Jamie Hector as partner Jerry Edgar and Mimi Rogers as his fierce opponent in court, Honey Chandler, give the opening hour a sturdy supporting cast. The success of the show led to Bosch: Legacy and opened the door for Bosch: Start of Watch. Start of Watch is the new MGM+ prequel with Cameron Monaghan as a rookie Harry set in 1991 and adds a full reboot of the cast to the franchise. Bosch, much like its lead character, is more patient than explosive and uses that unique approach to its advantage.
4
‘ZeroZeroZero’ (2020)
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Image via Prime Video</figure>
Stefano Sollima opens ZeroZeroZero8 Near-Perfect Prime Video Thriller Serieswith a shock, showing Gabriel Byrne‘s Edward Lynwood wounded on the ground under falling glass and gunfire. The camera then rewinds, and a single cocaine shipment becomes the thread that connects a Calabrian crime family, a Mexican cartel, and a New Orleans shipping company. Sollima directed the first two episodes, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019. Andrea Riseborough and Dane DeHaan play Lynwood’s grown children, who inherit the family business and its dangers. Dehaan’s Chris carries Huntington’s disease, a diagnosis that colors every decision that he makes.
Harold Torres plays Manuel Contreras, a Mexican special forces sergeant pulled toward the cartel he is supposed to fight. Each storyline has its own unique mood, with Janus Metz and Pablo Trapero directing later episodes, which gives the series this relentless international feel. Robert Saviano‘s book about the global cocaine trade supplies the foundation. ZeroZeroZero is the entry most demanding of your full close attention here, yet it is also one of the most rewarding for that reason.
3
‘The Devil’s Hour’ (2022-Present)
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Image via Prime Video</figure>
Peter Capaldi‘s convicted killer Gideon shows up in the very first scene of The Devil’s Hour questioning a bruised Lucy Chambers about whether her life feels like her own. Gideon has an unsettling calm about him that makes every scene feel like a trap. Jessica Raine plays Lucy, a social worker who wakes every night at exactly 3:33 from the same nightmare. In the dream, a woman presses a shotgun under her chin, and Lucy believes the woman is her mother.
The time-bending mystery includes Nikesh Patel as Detective Inspector Ravi Dhillon, who investigates the murders that overlap with Lucy’s life. By the end of the first episode, the detectives find a message scratched on a window that asks where Lucy Chambers is. Tom Moran created the series for Amazon, and the story slides between horror, procedural and family drama fairly seamlessly. Lucy’s son, Isaac, speaks of people nobody else can see, which adds an extra eerie element to every domestic sequence. The Devil’s Hour returned in 2024 for a second season and the first premiered on October 28, four years ago, which makes it a natural pick for this time of year.
2
‘Reacher’ (2022-Present)
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Image via Prime Video</figure>
Alan Ritchson‘s Reacher opens with a man being shot at midnight outside the small Georgia town of Margrave, then beaten and hidden under cardboard. The next morning, Reacher steps off a bus and walks into a diner for a slice of peach pie. He never gets the first bite, since the police burst in and arrest him for the murder. By the time the cuffs go on, a killing and a mystery stranger are already in play.
Ritchson’s physical presence sells the premise alone, and the writing gives him just enough dry humor to keep the character from becoming a full brute. However, the detective who questions him upon his arrest (Malcolm Goodwin), quickly realizes that the giant in front of him sees the case more clearly than his own fellow officers. The show works directly off its simple but effective narrative and precise manner of execution. Season four premiered on August 12th and Prime has already renewed the series through season six. A spin-off, Neagley, released its first season in September.
1
‘Fallout’ (2024-Present)
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Image via Prime Video</figure>
Fallout starts in Los Angeles in 2077 with Walton Goggins in a cowboy hat, performing rope tricks for the kids at a rich family’s birthday party. The great late Nat King Cole‘s “Orange Colored Sky” plays over the sinister radio reports of an impending nuclear war. Adults whisper about the news, a radio crackles, and Goggins’ Cooper Howard, a fading movie star, declines to give the thumbs up that made him famous. Then the sky changes when a mushroom cloud rises over the city and families race for their private shelters as the bombs fall.
Jonathan Nolan directed the first episode, and few openings in recent television have set such a distinct tone so quickly. The same episode introduces Ella Purnell‘s Lucy, a vault dweller whose wedding goes wrong, and the Ghoul, the mutated version of Cooper who gets dug out of a grave. Season two aired from December 2025 into early 2026, and season three has finished filming with Aaron Paul, Manny Jacinto, Emily Mortimer and Thomasin McKenzie joining the cast. Fallout stands out amongst such a talented and crowded field due to an introduction that promises a well-defined and designed universe and the series keeps delivering it.
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