Oscar wins for Argo, The Departed, No Country For Old Men, The Constant Gardener, and Michael Clayton, and nominations for Animal Kingdom, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Sicario all point to a renaissance of the dramatic thriller— a genre also consistently generating box office.

This workshop offers a roadmap to this exciting genre, examining the structure, characters, themes and worlds of the studio releases above, as well as independents like Drive, Arbitrage, Predestination, and Nightcrawler. Which elements do these films draw from classic 1970s conspiracy films like Three Days of the Condor, The Conversation, or The Parallax View, and what do they require to make them thoroughly modern?