Murder mysteries have always intrigued audiences. Their form may change, but the interest stays the same. Decades ago, avid readers tore through the pages of whodunits by Agatha Christie or locked-room mysteries by Edgar Allan Poe, and today they listen to serialized true crime podcasts. There’s always going to be an appetite for mysterious murders, and films have helped to satiate it for many years. Even well into the 21st century, we’re still getting whodunits, true crime classics, and all other manner of murder mysteries.
The last 25 years might not be the most prolific the genre has ever been, but there’s certainly a fair level of quality to the films. Some of the best murder mysteries made since 2001 are among the best ever made, period. They’ve come from some of the most famous living directors, both domestic and international, and they cross over with noir, comedy, and even science fiction. These are the greatest murder-mystery movies of the last 25 years, ranked.
Despite its title, this one isn’t a family-friendly mystery movie. Though it takes inspiration from the likes of Encyclopedia Brown, The Kid Detective is a definitively adult affair about regret, guilt, and redemption. It’s darkly comedic but also profoundly sad, anchored by a terrific lead performance by Adam Brody. It’s easily the most underrated of any murder mystery movie to come out in the last 25 years, and it’s ready for rediscovery.
Abe Applebaum (Brody) was once a child detective and local celebrity. However, he’s since devolved into drug and alcohol abuse as an adult in arrested development. He’s haunted by the disappearance of his childhood best friend, whose case was never solved. When he’s approached by a teen looking to solve her boyfriend’s murder, he sees it as a second chance, but he’s hampered by his amateurish methods. There’s a genuinely enthralling mystery at the heart of The Kid Detective, one that ties into the trauma of its lead character, giving it an unexpected but wholly welcome emotional complexity.
Before Taylor Sheridan became an ego-driven millionaire consumed by his own Yellowstone creation, he was an actor turned surprisingly sharp writer of modern crime classics like Sicario and Hell or High Water. He followed those films up with his directorial debut, Wind River, which carries many of the same themes of his work while integrating an intriguing murder mystery element. Set on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, the film is a neo-Western mystery that addresses the overlooked violence perpetrated against indigenous populations, and specifically indigenous women.
After the body of a young woman is found frozen on the reservation, FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) is called in to investigate. She joins forces with Fish and Wildlife Agent Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), and together the two uncover a larger conspiracy on the reservation. While there are the workings of a white savior complex within the film, it benefits from giving solid supporting roles to indigenous actors and from drawing attention to the violence perpetrated against them. It isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly a more empathetic and believable crime thriller than Sheridan’s most recent Western soap operas.
Dennis Lehane is a novelist synonymous with Boston-based crime thrillers. His work has been successfully adapted to the screen in mystery thrillers from major directors like Martin Scorsese and Ben Affleck. The first filmmaker to tackle Lehane’s work was Clint Eastwood for the emotionally devastating drama Mystic River. Tackling heavy subjects such as sexual abuse and generational trauma, the film was a major comeback for Eastwood as a director and won two Academy Awards for its performances.
Three Boston boys’ lives are forever altered when one of them is abducted and abused by two men. Years later, those boys have grown into vastly different men. Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con turned family man, Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a cop struggling to keep his marriage together, and Dave (Tim Robbins) is still broken by his abduction. When Jimmy’s daughter is murdered, and Dave returns to his wife the same night covered in blood, the mystery opens old wounds and threatens to shatter the lives of all three men. Mystic River is a potent thriller with powerhouse performances and stripped-down direction that makes it a must-watch.
This 2009 Argentinian crime drama is a haunting portrayal of guilt, trauma, and repression with political undertones that uses a non-linear structure to tell an impactful murder mystery involving a decades-old cold case and the cumulative effect it has on one man. Set in two distinct periods, with the main investigation taking place in 1975 and its reckoning over two decades later, in 1999, the film uses the political unrest and violence that occurred between those two points in time in Argentina to inform the frustrations of its characters and the stagnation of their investigation. The Secret in Their Eyes was a dramatic success, winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film, and it inspired a pale imitation remake, but this original is still far more effective and powerful.
In the ’70s, Benjamín Espósito (Ricardo Darín) investigates the assault and murder of a young woman, vowing to her husband that he will find her killer. They quickly target a suspect, but through a combination of professional blunders and political machinations, he goes free and escapes justice. Decades later, Espósito seeks closure from the case, and the film builds to a darkly cathartic ending. The Secret in Their Eyes is a murder mystery where the mystery lies not only in the identity of its killer but also in how one can serve justice in an unjust world.
A satire of the British class system in the early 20th century as well as a darkly comedic murder mystery, Gosford Park is the perfect synthesis of the sensibilities of director Robert Altman and writer Julian Fellowes. Inspired by the writing of Agatha Christie and featuring a stellar ensemble cast that fills out its cast of upstairs and downstairs characters, it’s a gorgeously crafted murder mystery that prioritizes its characters over its plot, but is nonetheless wickedly entertaining. It was Altman’s final masterpiece and one of the best films of the 2000s.
Set on a lavish estate in the English countryside where a group of wealthy guests has collected for a social gathering, tensions are already simmering between them when one of them is murdered. The death exposes secrets among them and increases the divide between the upper-class guests and lower-class staff. The film is handsomely photographed by cinematographer Andrew Dunn, and Altman shot with two cameras running simultaneously to capture spontaneity in his cast. Gosford Park is a classic manor murder mystery made with acerbic wit.
Shane Black became famous as a screenwriter of buddy action movies like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout. After taking a long career hiatus from Hollywood, he returned to the genre with the comedic neo-noir two-hander Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It stars Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer as an odd couple trying to solve a murder in Hollywood and features Black’s signature quippy dialogue. Despite the punchy dialogue and a pair of pitch-perfect performances, the film wasn’t an immediate success but has since developed a well-deserved cult following.
Harry Lockhart (Downey) is a two-bit thief who stumbles into the Hollywood scene by accident after posing as an actor, leading his path to cross with private eye Perry van Shrike (Kilmer), whom he is supposed to shadow for a proposed movie role. When the two witness a car get dumped into a lake with a body in the trunk, they unwittingly become part of a much larger mystery. Loosely based on the Bret Halliday novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them and inspired by the work of Raymond Chandler, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of the best Hollywood murder mysteries out there, and it trades jokes and bullets with the best of Black’s signature work.
Based on the cerebral short story by Philip K. Dick, Minority Report is a sci-fi noir thriller set in a future where crimes can be predicted and prevented before they’re committed. As the first collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, the film has all the requisite excitement and set pieces you’d expect, but also some very dark undertones in its story of free will versus determinism. It is also famous for its surprisingly accurate predictions of future technology, many of which have become reality since its release.
John Anderton (Cruise) is the head of the Precrime program in Washington, D.C. Using three psychic individuals known as precogs, they have been able to prevent all premeditated murders for several years. When Anderton himself becomes the next accused suspect, he goes on the run to clear his name and solve the mystery of his intended target, which exposes a deeper conspiracy. With a desaturated style evoking classic noir and slick sci-fi action, Minority Report is one of the most entertaining murder mysteries of the 21st century, and it’s only gotten better with age.
Your answers point to the iconic sci-fi hero who shares your instincts, your values, and your particular way of facing the impossible.
You carry a weight most people would crumble under — the knowledge of what you’re capable of, and the burden of what you might have to become.
You lead with instinct, warmth, and an absolute refusal to accept a no-win scenario — because you’ve always believed there’s a third option nobody else has thought of yet.
You are the kind of person who holds the line when everyone else is losing faith — not because you’re fearless, but because giving up simply isn’t something you’re capable of.
You are not reckless, not grandiose, and not particularly interested in being anyone’s hero — you just refuse to stop when it matters.
You have been through fire that would break most people — and what came out the other side is something the world underestimates at its peril.
Rian Johnson helped reinvigorate the whodunit genre with the clever crime comedy Knives Out. As an homage to and subversion of the mystery genre as a whole, the film introduced audiences to gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc, who has since gone on to lead his own franchise. Every entry has been its own entertaining mystery, but the first is still the best. It’s a whodunit that tells you everything about the murder up front, only to continually pull the rug out from under you with increasing hilarity.
When famed author Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) dies by apparent suicide, it seems like an open-and-shut case. In comes Blanc (Craig), the famed detective who has been anonymously summoned to Thrombey’s estate to suss out the real killer. While Blanc is the star of the film, the protagonist is Thrombey’s nurse, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), who is suddenly thrust into the middle of the author’s greedy family when she is named as the sole recipient of his fortune. Knives Out is steeped in social commentary, but that never drags down its narrative or prevents it from being a whipsmart piece of entertainment. It’s led to one of the best franchises of the 21st century, and hopefully audiences will be treated to even further Blanc mysteries.
Bong Joon Ho is one of the most exciting filmmakers to emerge in the 21st century, and he’s delivered modern masterpieces such as Parasite, The Host, and Snowpiercer. Before all those films, he directed the true crime-inspired Memories of Murder. Inspired by the play Come to See Me by Kim Kwang-lim, which itself was inspired by the real-life Hwaseong Serial Killer, the film was produced and released before the actual murders had been solved, which gives it an open-ended mystery that haunts its characters.
In the 1980s, a series of sexual assaults and murders brings together local cop Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) and seasoned detective Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), who conflict over their methods and are equally frustrated by the continual obstructions that impede their investigation. The film offers a keen observation of the culture of South Korea at the time and is filled with a dreary atmosphere amplified by its muted color palette and desaturated visuals. As with all of Bong’s films, it combines disparate tones and genres into a more eclectic whole, and its ending is suitably haunting.
Another true crime classic based on real murders, David Fincher‘s masterpiece Zodiac, differs from Memories of Murder in that its central mystery has yet to be solved, and it also adheres much closer to the facts of its real-life case. While the film is an undeniably enthralling procedural, its power lies not in the capturing of the Zodiac killer, but in the details of the crimes and the time they occurred in. It’s a film of obsession, made by a notoriously meticulous filmmaker, and it’s about as detailed and perfect a crime thriller as has ever been made.
Set in gorgeously recreated San Francisco in the ’60s and ’70s, the film follows cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), journalist Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), and detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) as they individually investigate the killings attributed to the mysterious Zodiac Killer, who taunts them with his letters sent to the city’s newspapers. The film refuses to make its story more palatable through Hollywood invention. There are no car chases or grisly reinventions of the killings, only tense interrogations, harrowing recreations of the crimes based on survivors’ testimony, and one nerve-wracking scene involving a very paranoid man and a basement. Zodiac is a haunting thriller that somehow leaves you feeling gratified with the incompleteness of its murder mystery.
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