Five Action Movies to Stream Now

‘24 Hours with Gaspar’

Stream it on Netflix.

A taut revenge action fable, the Indonesian director Yosep Anggi Noen’s “24 Hours with Gaspar” features scintillating choreography. For years Gaspar (Reza Rahadian) has been searching for his childhood best friend, Kirana (Shofia Shireen), who was kidnapped and sold by her sex-trafficking father, Wan Ali (Iswadi Pratama). To find answers, Gaspar, a detective, works with a fight club owner named Agnes (Shenina Cinnamon), a strategy that works well until the device that helps Gaspar’s heart function is broken in an electrifying fight, eloquently lit to capture the silhouettes of limber bodies swinging to deadly effect. Now he has only 24 hours to live.

The second half of Noen’s film is a heist flick: Gaspar cobbles together an unlikely team to rob Wan Ali’s jewelry store where a legendary black box capable of granting any wish is rumored to reside. The film culminates in a rugged all-out brawl at a fight club, which is crosscut with Gaspar confronting Wan Ali in a fight that’s emblematic of the film’s existential poeticism.

‘Anti-Drug Operation’

Stream it on Hi-Yah!

Spanning 71 minutes, “Anti-Drug Operation,” by the Chinese director Yan Yuchao, packs a big punch in a small package. After the sudden murder of their mother, two young brothers take separate paths: One becomes the drug-busting cop Captain Lin (Li Bin); the other, Lin Lang (Lang Feng), becomes a drug lord. The plot follows the brothers as adults, as Captain Lin tries to save his sibling before the dangerous gangster Zhong Hu (Xiao Mi) — the man who killed their mother — murders him.

Despite their different moral codes, the brothers share a bond that eventually puts both in danger, leading to a major raid. Slowed to the speed of molasses, a scene at a rural narcotics lab becomes a site for high drama. Yan shoots oblique angles that accentuate the fighting power of Captain Lin and Lin Lang to devastating effect.