15 Killer Crime Movies of the 21st Century

Remade by Martin Scorsese in 2006 as The Departed, the original is still the superior version of the tale; a lean, beautiful, and tense film about a cat-and-mouse game between a gangland mole within the police department and an undercover cop. Winning seven Hong Kong Film Awards and garnering an Oscar nomination, this smart thriller leans into the emotional and moral consequences of undercover work–and trusts its audience to understand the tale without the heavy lifting that The Departed often fell prey to.

Related: 9 Thrilling Crime Movies Streaming on Netflix 

Take the producer of Snatch and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, give him a pre-James Bond Daniel Craig (and Michael Gambon, who had been recently cast as Dumbledore’s replacement), and you’ve got one of the best British crime films that most people haven’t seen. A nameless protagonist on his supposed last job discovers (naturally) that there's higher stakes than he expected. Layer Cake elevates its common premise with stylish menace.

While arguably one of David Cronenberg’s more “approachable” movies, A History of Violence stands out in the array of best thriller movies of all time by making the violence in question incredibly uncomfortable, even for viewers long jaded to movie violence. (See also some of the best uses of sex scenes to establish character you will ever see on film.) 

What happens when you take a film noir detective story—complete with archaic dialogue and plenty of slang—and plop it into a modern-day high school? You get Rian Johnson’s spellbinding directorial debut and one of the all time great crime thriller movies. Johnson spent seven years attempting to get the movie made, and eventually was able to finance the film for under $500,000. Brick is a pitch-perfect cult classic, with a thrilling starring turn from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who has had a role in each of Johnson's films to date.

Related: 10 Classic Film Noir Movies Every Mystery Buff Should Watch 

Shane Black’s love letter to pulp detective novels also manages to be one of the most razor-sharp film noirs of the modern era and one of the funniest buddy comedies ever made. Based on a Brett Halliday mystery, Black took iconic screenwriter James L. Brooks's advice to imagine Jack Nicholson's character in As Good as It Gets in his role in Chinatown. The stars aligned from there: They were able to book Robert Downey, Jr. cheaply after his fall from grace; Black cracked the script; and Val Kilmer's interest in starring in a comedy led to his role as "Gay" Perry.

David Fincher’s masterpiece remains one of the best crime movies based on a true story. Calling to mind the Jodie Foster-helmed The Silence of the Lambs, Zodiac reminds us of the thrilling power of movies (and the price of obsession), while taking us on a mind-bending chase for notorious serial killer the Zodiac Killer. Fincher leaned fully into the 70s era, using actual photos from the Zodiac's police files and later complaining that they could have had "more VW bugs" to really nail the period. 

You can’t really make a crime movie list and not include at least one Coen Brothers title, right? It doesn’t hurt that Javier Bardem made his name playing Anton Chigurgh, one of the all-time great film villains, in this haunting tale. This modern classic is also available on Netflix. 

Related: 8 Chilling Books Behind Your Favorite Thrillers 

By turns hilarious and tragic, Martin McDonagh’s film about two hitmen lying low in Bruges, Belgium isn’t to be missed, featuring fantastic performances from Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and a particularly foul-mouthed Ralph Fiennes. Hell might be an eternity spent in Bruges, but heaven might look something like an afternoon with In Bruges.

Related: 4 Mysteries Set in Secretly Seedy Bruges 

Sure, The Raid is an action classic, but its sequel keeps all that action intact while opening up the palette to create a sweeping generational epic. Think The Godfather, but with lots of people getting kicked, punched, stabbed, and murdered with hammers. An Indonesian film by way of Welsh director Gareth Evans, The Raid 2 blew away American and international audiences alike.

Leave it to Joe Lansdale and Jim Mickle to create a crime saga that’s hilarious and disturbing at equal turns. And if you like this, check out their TV show Hap & Leonard for more of the same, done even better. You can watch Cold In July on Netflix. 

This isn’t Jake Gyllenhaal’s first appearance on this list, but it might be his best work, as he turns in one of the eeriest performances you’re likely to find outside of a horror flick, helped along by Dan Gilroy’s portrait of the nighttime world of Los Angeles.

Related: The Most Exhilarating Thrillers of the Last Decade 

Before Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve directed this searing tale about the war on drugs, which feels just one supernatural occurrence short of being a Laird Barron story put on film.

Shane Black gets the distinction of being the only director to make this list twice, and while The Nice Guys may not be quite as successful as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, it’s a lot more ambitious to make up for it. 

This Netflix original about a woman and her eccentric neighbor who track down the burglars who broke into her home feels like the orphaned sibling of a Coen Brothers classic.

A musical in which the characters listen to the songs rather than sing them may not seem the most likely candidate for one of the best crime movies of 2017, but that’s just because you may not have seen Edgar Wright’s infectious caper flick yet.