The 10 Greatest Detective Movies of the 21st Century, Ranked

Some of these detective movies aren't just among the best of the 21st century, but of all time. They are the masterpieces in the filmographies of their respective filmmakers. Even those that aren't still rank highly for fans, and they all have something unique to offer: puzzles to piece together, killers to catch and mysteries to solve. These detective movies do it better than any others that have come out this century.

10 'Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows' (2011)

Guy Ritchie's duology of Sherlock Holmes films has often been overlooked and underappreciated. They certainly take some liberties with Arthur Conan Doyle's detective, but the character had already been adapted many times before and was certainly due his own blockbuster franchise. Both films are entertaining, fast-paced mystery romps that benefit from Ritchie's kinetic visuals and the chemistry between Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law. Of the two films, it's the second, A Game of Shadows, that's more accomplished, benefiting from the lessons learned on the first and featuring a far more compelling villain.

Following up on the tease of the first film, the sequel finds Holmes (Downey) on the trail of criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), while Watson (Law) prepares for his impending nuptials. After the unfortunate fridging of Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), the duo links up with fortune-teller Madame Simza (Noomi Rapace) to solve a mystery with the stakes set at world war. Pulling influence from several Doyle stories, the film benefits from the inclusion of characters like Holmes' brother Mycroft (Stephen Fry) and Moriarty himself.

9 'Prisoners' (2013)

Part revenge, part detective thriller, Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners is both brutalizing and captivating, offering an emotionally wrought drama that still offers the tantalizing thrills of an intriguing mystery. Aaron Guzikowski's script, which had appeared on the 2009 Black List, went through multiple rounds of development before Villeneuve became attached, making it the breakthrough film for his Hollywood career. The film finds an interesting balance between Villeneuve's visual-driven storytelling and the pulpier, noirish elements of the screenplay.

After two young girls go missing on Thanksgiving, the plot bifurcates into two parallel tracks. One follows father Keller (Hugh Jackman), who goes on a personal rampage looking for answers, while the other follows Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), who investigates the deeper mysteries surrounding the abduction. It's an interesting split of genre elements, and both Jackman and Gyllenhaal give vastly different performances on either side, the former a frayed bundle of exposed nerves and the latter tightly coiled. It's a combination of vengeful violence and police procedural, all under the umbrella of dread covered in Roger Deakins' fog-filled cinematography.

8 'The Secret in Their Eyes' (2009)

The Secret in Their Eyes is an Argentinian detective thriller, one of many mystery films that expanded the borders of the genre and brought international influence into it in the 21st century. Directed by Juan José Campanella and based on the novel La pregunta de sus ojos by Eduardo Alfredo Sacheri, who co-wrote the film's screenplay, it's heavy with the political and historical subtext of its setting, while still operating as singularly effective without prior knowledge. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language and inspired a lackluster Hollywood remake.

The non-linear narrative follows agent Benjamín Espósito (Ricardo Darín), whose investigation into a rape and murder is complicated by personal conflicts and political corruption. The details of the investigation are almost subservient to the cumulative effect it has on the protagonist, whose failure to keep his personal promise to bring the killer to justice leads to the film's shocking climax. Highlighted by a chase sequence in a football stadium combining a long continuous shot with some pretty seamless CGI, The Secret in Their Eyes has all the necessary elements of a mystery thriller but underlaid with political themes and a more devastating emotional character arc.

7 'Marshland' (2014)

Like The Secret in Their Eyes, the Spanish detective thriller Marshland is given weight thanks to its political undertones and subplot. Alberto Rodriguez has built a career out of thrillers with political subtext and has been nominated for multiple Goya Awards for Best Director, winning for Marshland. Even if most Western viewers won't have a solid frame of reference to fully appreciate the film's grounding in the history of Francoist Spain, Rodriguez gives enough context to make it impactful.

Pedro (Raúl Arévalo) and Juan (Javier Gutiérrez) are detectives assigned to investigate the disappearance of two teen girls in a rural town in Spain that's situated on marshes. The detectives differ in their approaches, and as their investigation deepens, so too does their personal divide. That investigation also exposes uglier levels of corruption, drug smuggling, and sexual exploitation within the marshland community. Often recommended for fans of True Detective due to the dynamic between the detectives and the rural setting, Marshland hasn't had as wide a reception from Western audiences but is well worth the time of any fan of dark mystery thrillers.

6 'Shutter Island' (2010)

Martin Scorsese is more synonymous with cinematic representations of criminals who commit crimes than he is with the detectives who solve them, but Shutter Island was his first proper detective thriller. While the film's twist ending certainly draws into question whether it could literally qualify as a detective movie, for the majority of its runtime it does present as such. Based on the gothic pulp noir novel by Dennis Lehane, the film is an exercise in genre for Scorsese, who pays homage to filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and Val Lewton.

Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are U.S. Marshals called to the titular island in Boston Harbor to investigate the disappearance of a patient from the mental hospital located there. The investigation has Daniels questioning the motives of those who run the facility and, eventually, his sanity. Whether you see the twist coming in Shutter Island or not is missing the point. There's a simple pleasure in sitting back and enjoying Scorsese cutting loose after his Oscar win to create the most incredible kind of cheap thrills.

5 'The Nice Guys' (2016)

Unlike Scorsese, the majority of Shane Black's career has been preoccupied with detectives. The guy likes a gumshoe, and he's never made a detective better or funnier than The Nice Guys. Set in Los Angeles in the '70s and featuring a pair of hilarious performances by Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, the movie is Black at his best. Whether it's the best detective movie of the 21st century is debatable, but it's definitely the funniest.

Private eye Holland March (Gosling) is investigating the disappearance of a porn star, which causes his path to cross with enforcer Jackson Healy (Crowe). The two go from antagonists to partners when the young woman who brought them together goes missing, and they team up to find her. The Nice Guys is chock-full of banter, gunfights and criminal conspiracies, as would be expected in a Shane Black film, but what really puts it over the top is the chemistry between Gosling and Crowe. The two actors seemed like an odd pairing at the outset of the film's production, but Black found a goldmine of untapped comic potential between them.

4 'Knives Out' (2019)

The whodunit experienced a bit of a resurgence near the end of the 2010s, but Rian Johnson really reinvigorated and subverted the subgenre with Knives Out, which spawned an acclaimed trilogy. Giving Daniel Craig a colorful new character to succeed his tenure as James Bond, the film applied old-fashioned mysteries to modern sensibilities. All three of Johnson's murder mysteries have slyly satirized the contemporary political climate. While that approach may ultimately make the films feel less relevant over time, they all still tell compelling, entertaining mysteries that are a joy to rewatch.

This inaugural film introduces the Southern fried sleuth Benoit Blanc (Craig), who is anonymously contacted when famed mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) dies of an apparent suicide. The truth of his death is already known to the audience and to his nurse, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), but Johnson has a few tricks up his sleeve. Knives Out features a star-studded cast of suspects, but the spotlight is all Craig's when he's on screen. Blanc continues the grand tradition of cinematic detectives and, hopefully, Johnson will continue to give the character more mysteries to solve.

3 'Memento' (2000)

Christopher Nolan's breakthrough neo-noir thriller Memento gave fans something new in the genre, not in the elements of its mystery but in how that mystery unfolds. The film is non-linear but in a fashion that puts viewers directly into the head of its protagonist, who suffers from anterograde amnesia and can't form new memories. Memento progresses in reverse chronology, with flashback scenes that progress in forward chronology, meaning that every scene proceeds without the knowledge of what preceded it.

Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is a former insurance investigator whose wife was murdered in an attack that also left him with his memory condition. He relies on Polaroids and tattoos to keep track of clues in his quest to find the man who attacked him and his wife. The sequencing of events in the film keeps you constantly engaged, forcing you to retroactively reckon with every clue and what it could mean before being given the context for it. Memento put Nolan on the map as a filmmaker, and while most critics focused solely on the narrative device, its careful construction is only one piece of its immaculately crafted puzzle.

2 'Zodiac' (2007)

More than any other detective film of the 21st century, Zodiac does not rely on its mystery being solved. Inspired by the real-life Zodiac Killer and based on the nonfiction books chronicling him by Robert Graysmith, this David Fincher thriller isn't interested in manufacturing a Hollywood thriller out of the facts. Instead, it plunges deep into those facts alongside its real-life characters who become just as obsessed with the killer. The film not only perfectly captures the era of the killings through thorough recreations, but also the true-crime obsessiveness that would become even more prevalent in the culture after the film's release.

Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle when the Zodiac sends his first letter. Thus begins his obsession, which later extends to journalist Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and police detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). The film then chronicles the subsequent decades of developments and setbacks in the case, and ends without any definitive answer. Zodiac is a detective film, a newspaper film, a serial killer film, but most importantly, it's about the obsession that drives those who try to solve mysteries.

1 'Memories of Murder' (2003)

Director Bong Joon Ho once listed Zodiac as one of the ten greatest films ever made in a Sight and Sound poll. That's considerable high praise considering Bong himself directed a film that rivals it as the greatest detective film of the 21st century. Memories of Murder is similarly based on a real-life serial killer, and while he was eventually convicted in real life, at the time of the film's production his murders were still unsolved. That lends the film the same kind of haunting quality that hangs over Zodiac, but it's also a distinctly South Korean film and features the same kind of genre fluidity that has defined Bong's career.

After murders shake a rural community, local detective Park (Song Kang-ho) teams up with city detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung). Their investigation spans years of failures of both men and the institutions they are forced to rely on. Memories of Murder offers a portrait of the changing political landscape of South Korea through the '80s and the effect it has on the investigation, as well as the toll the investigation takes on the two detectives. It's a film with a heavy atmosphere that's broken only by momentary beats of absurdity, and it ends with a singularly haunting and heartbreaking final shot.