Best Detective Movies

Detective movies and film noir became synonymous in the 1940s with films like "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Big Sleep." Both classics feature a rogue private eye played by Humphrey Bogart, framed in dramatic shadows, as he plays a daring game of wits with femme fatales and scheming elites.

Rian Johnson's 2005 feature debut, "Brick," is a meta-noir in the tongue-in-cheek style of "The Third Man" that envelopes a bunch of high school kids who all seem to know how to play their archetypal parts. The director has these teens emulating Humphrey Bogart, talking in laconic, pithy bursts which never give away too much of the plot. The stylized conceit feels odd coming from the mouth of babes and is an amusing way to highlight the tropes that have long been the basis of the detective genre.

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In the famous car chase from "The French Connection," a police detective played by Gene Hackman screams down busy New York streets. As he chases a train above, he blasts through red lights at speeds over 90 mph. Disturbingly, almost none of this was staged. Director William Friedkin ("The Exorcist") never closed down the streets for the stunt. The 15-minute scene was shot with no permits aside from a $40,000 bribe paid to a transit official. Friedkin simply goaded a stuntman to go for it and shot the whole thing over his shoulder. The incident has become famous in recent years as one of the most reckless acts of guerrilla filmmaking in Hollywood history.

Fans are still active online, puzzling over the intricate and confusing plot points of "The Big Sleep." It's a testament to the staying power of director Howard Hawks' 1946 adaptation of hard-boiled detective writer Raymond Chandler's novel. Hawks himself was famously so confused by the plot during filming that he called up the author for help, but Chandler was stumped too.

Director Christopher Nolan has no one to blame but himself that his excellent 2002 psychological thriller "Insomnia" is somewhat overlooked. He's just made too many memorably inventive films for this traditional detective story to make an impression.

Roman Polanski's "Chinatown" may be somewhat overrated by the old guard since it emerged from Hollywood's vaunted sudden turn towards experimentation in the 1970s. But this twisty tale of Los Angeles corruption remains worthy of praise, particularly for Jack Nicholson's excellent lead performance. Nicholson never officially retired, but he hasn't appeared onscreen since 2010. "Chinatown," however, is among the best artifacts of his youthful greatness

One of the keys to enjoying "Memento" is to avoid watching it with that irritating subset of cinema-hating trolls whom Alfred Hitchock famously dubbed "the plausibles." This consortium of plot cops isn't interested in the language of film. Interested only in poking holes, they watch movies as superficially as possible. It's particularly aggravating to sit through a sci-fi or fantasy film with one of these critics. There could be winged pigs orbiting Mars at the speed of light, and they'd pipe up with some quibble about how all these swine found such form-fitting space suits.

In 2021, true-crime obsessives seemed to have cause to celebrate when a team of cold case detectives claimed to have finally identified the Zodiac Killer, a mysterious serial murderer who haunted San Francisco in the late 1960s and early 70s. For decades, cryptologists have puzzled over the ciphers this monster first sent to Bay Area newspapers in 1969. There have been many suspects, but the codebreakers claimed to have finally unscrambled the missives, identifying Zodiac as Gary Francis Poste, a supposed rural gang leader who died in 2018.

"The Third Man" from 1949 is often considered the best British film ever made. Joseph Cotten plays Holly Martins, a pulpy western writer who arrives in Vienna to stay with his friend, Harry Lime(Orson Welles). When Martins discovers that Lime has died in a suspicious accident, he must become a citizen-detective to get to the bottom of a complex mystery.

Aside from "Citizen Kane," "The Third Man" is Orson Welles' best role. The difficult auteur-actor certainly lived up to his diva reputation on set. He showed up two weeks late and then flat out refused to shoot a crucial scene. This forced overworked director Carol Reed to later recreate a complex set and shoot around a body double. Reed's grueling production schedule led to an amphetamine addiction as the director struggled to finish his masterpiece on budget.

In The Hollywood Reporter's original 1941 review of director John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon," the film's stylized performances are praised as "strikingly natural." To modern eyes, Humphrey Bogart's fast-talking turn as private detective Sam Spade is anything but naturalistic.

This added subtext deepens "The Silence of the Lambs" and is no doubt part of why a film that is essentially a gruesome horror thriller somehow nabbed five Academy Awards, including best picture and best actress for Foster's outstanding performance. "The Silence of the Lambs" is on the Mt. Rushmore of modern thrillers and deservedly so. It's every bit as engrossing, eerie, and relevant as it was in 1991.

David Fincher's 1995 noir masterpiece "Se7en" is one of those rare timeless films you can confidently share with younger thriller fans. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as police detectives tracking down an Old Testament-inspired serial killer have such a tense and conflict-ridden chemistry that their contentious bromance blooms right to that legendary twist ending.

Fincher, who filmed Se7en in sunny southern California, dumps a biblical flood of rainwater on his shots, convincingly transforming the City of Angels into a muck-mired Gothic hellscape. This gritty thriller about urban decay was ironically made at the height of America's booming post-Cold War suburban prosperity. It was a triumphantly hegemonic moment that one intellectual prematurely dubbed "the end of history." Maybe that's why some critics initially found "Se7en" needlessly nihilistic. Multiple bleak decades later, Fincher's best film feels downright prophetic.

The title is pretty self explanatory, just looking for some really good detective movies where we're seeing things from the detectives perspective rather then the rest of the characters, I wanna be able to hear the detectives thoughts while he's analyzing whatever mystery or murder he's trying to solve

Ben Affleck directed his brother Casey as Patrick Kenzie, a Boston private detective who, along with his partner/girlfriend Angie (Michelle Monaghan), are hired to find the missing four-year-old daughter of a drug-addicted single mother, Helene (Amy Ryan). Morgan Freeman plays the sympathetic Captain Doyle, who previously lost his own daughter. The case is mishandled, with the child assumed drowned, and Doyle retires, but with the disappearance of another child months later, it becomes clear that the case is not over, and things are even darker than they seemed. Kenzie is so determined to follow the letter of the law that he ends up struggling to do what is right.

Carl Reiner and Steve Martin were a dream team for this 1982 neo-noir collage film, simultaneously honoring and spoofing detective films of the '40s. The plot centers around P.I. Rigby Reardon (Martin), who has been hired by Julie Forrest (Rachel Ward) to find her cheesemaking scientist father. Archival footage has been spliced in, so Martin and others are trading lines with the likes of such noir stalwarts as Humphrey Bogart (The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, In a Lonely Place), Barbara Stanwyck (Sorry, Wrong Number), Joan Crawford (Humoresque), Ray Milland (The Lost Weekend), and many more. The comedy was also notable for being the last film worked on by legendary costumer Edith Head.

Probably the least traditional P.I. film on this list, The Mole Agent is a charming, touching Chilean documentary in which a private investigator has been hired to check out a nursing home, as his client suspects her mother might be suffering abuse at the hands of the staff. The investigator outsources the job to an elderly man named Sergio, who moves into the home to carry out investigations (scenes where the detective is conducting job interviews for the role are delightful), becoming friends with the other residents in the process. Sergio is quickly beloved by all, especially the ladies, and the movie becomes more about these tender connections and the way the elderly are treated than the investigation (although he still carries out his duties).

Dashiell Hammett characters Nick and Nora Charles (based on Hammett's own relationship with Lillian Hellman) were played to such perfection by William Powell and Myrna Loy that the original 1934 film about a society detective and his wife was followed up by four sequels. The elegant pair drink cocktails and trade witty banter while Nick comes out of retirement to investigate a missing person case that segues into murder and blackmail, aided by Nora and their wire-haired terrier Asta. The snappy pre-Code dialogue set the bar high for romantic comedies for years to come.

Richard Roundtree stars as private detective John Shaft in this classic of the Blaxploitation genre, an adaptation of the novel by Ernest Tidyman. Shaft is hot on the trail of Italian gangsters who have kidnapped the daughter of a Harlem crime boss. Although it was not the first Blaxploitation film, it is arguably the most important in its portrayal of Black masculinity, Black power, and race relations. After a number of popular films in the '60s and '70s portraying white private detectives, the decision to make a similar film to specifically appeal to a Black audience was down to director Gordon Parks. The resulting film is rousing and violent, misogynistic but undeniably cool, with a soundtrack by Isaac Hayes capturing the soulful sound of the 1970s.

Oftentimes, detective movies are tough to come by, but great detective movies are even more difficult to find. Adding on to that, there are many streaming services nowadays that could easily point you in the wrong direction. This causes some of these films to fly under the radar and be sunk in the massive pool of streaming movie options. 006ab0faaa