12 Awesome Summer 2018 Movies You Probably Missed

9. Searching

John Cho gives the performance of his career in this ingeniously constructed thriller about a father desperately attempting to track down his missing teenage daughter.

Searching takes place almost entirely on phone and laptop screens and unfolds as something of an unconventional detective story, with Cho's increasingly frazzled father digging deep into social media and the Internet in the hope of locating his kin.

It's a stylistic marvel that's also tightly constructed and, from its opening sequence alone, surprisingly affecting. Audiences are likely to be a little more divided on the nuttier third act, but thanks to the persuasiveness of Cho's performance, even some less-plausible moments are easy enough to hand-waive.

Though the "shared screen" genre may well become a cynical me-too dumping ground for low-budget studio filmmaking, Searching is an excellent blueprint for how to get it right.