True crime has become one of the most popular storytelling genres of the modern era. An entire category of podcasts has sprouted up around the genre, and the same goes for documentaries and scripted TV and big-screen thrillers. Like horror inspired meta films like Scream in the ’90s, the genre’s popularity has even influenced the creation of semi-parodic shows like Only Murders in the Building, which follows a trio of characters who are so obsessed with true crime that they transform into amateur detectives themselves.
Recent additions to the genre include Netflix and Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour and Hulu’s Under the Bridge. While it has exploded in popularity over the past 10 years, though, true crime has been around for centuries and has been a popular form of storytelling for several decades now. With that in mind, here are 10 of the best true crime movies.
We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
10. Hustlers (2019)
Anchored by a career-defining performance from Jennifer Lopez, Hustlers is a glitzy, trashy true crime thriller that was rightfully applauded by both critics and general moviegoers alike when it was released in 2019.
Based on a 2015 article about a crew of New York City strippers who conned their wealthy Wall Street clients by drugging them and then maxing out their credit cards, Hustlers has all necessary reality and grit of a true crime thriller, but the style, confidence, and sparkly escapism of a big-time Hollywood production. The conversations surrounding the Lorene Scafaria-directed film have waned a bit in the years since its release, but Hustlers deserves to be remembered as what it is: one of the best true crime movies of our modern era.
Hustlers is streaming now on Hulu.
9. In Cold Blood (1967)
It’d be impossible to make a list like this without including In Cold Blood. Not only is its source material, the Truman Capote-penned 1966 novel of the same name, one of the most seminal pieces of true crime literature ever written, but Richard Brooks’ film adaptation holds a similarly monumental place in film history.
The movie’s sheen of authenticity and its stark, realist black-and-white photography helped set a visual and tonal template for the true crime genre that is still followed by many to this day. In the 60 years since its release, the movie, which explores the real-life 1959 murders of a Kansas family, hasn’t lost an ounce of its chilling power, either.
In Cold Blood is available to rent now on most digital platforms.
8. Catch Me If You Can (2002)
When most people think of true crime, they usually think of unsolved murders, chilling psychopaths, and dogged, determined police detectives. But like every genre, there are many different shades of true crime. That is, perhaps, no better illustrated than by Catch Me If You Can‘s inclusion on this list. The film is based on a purportedly autobiographical novel of the same name by Frank Abagnale, and it depicts his alleged years spent traveling the world committing check fraud and posing as — among other things — a pilot, doctor, and prosecutor.
Leonardo DiCaprio gives one of his most purely charismatic performances as Abagnale, and Tom Hanks is hilarious and heartwarming opposite him as the FBI agent tracking him in this Steven Spielberg-directed crime comedy that is every bit as intriguing as it is light on its feet. It’s an entertaining, breezy alternative to the true crime genre’s often darker and bleaker entries.
Catch Me If You Can is streaming now on Pluto TV and Paramount+.
7. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde is a boundary-pushing thriller about two of America’s most infamous outlaws fittingly starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, two of the most formidable and charismatic movie stars of the 1960s and ’70s. Directed by Arthur Penn, the film plays a bit fast-and-loose with the real facts of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow’s two-year crime spree in the early 1930s, but its simplified version of events allows it to tap into not only its subjects’ appealingly rebellious spirit but also the cold horror of their killings.
The film inevitably doesn’t seem as transgressive now as it did in 1967. However, its shockingly violent edge and — even more importantly — unrelenting interest in the ugliness of its story makes Bonnie and Clyde a surprisingly enduring, thorny piece of American true crime filmmaking.
Bonnie and Clyde is available to rent now on most digital platforms.
6. Fruitvale Station (2013)
Black Panther director Ryan Coogler‘s feature directorial debut is a stirring, heartbreaking work of humanist cinema. Based on the real-life 2009 police shooting of a young Black man named Oscar Grant, Fruitvale Station depicts the final day of Grant’s (played by Michael B. Jordan) life. It is true crime in every sense of the phrase, and yet it does something that is rare within the genre.
It focuses more on the victim at the center of its story than his killers and, in doing so, highlights just how much was lost when he was killed. By centering itself around the humanity of its protagonist and spotlighting the fallout of his murder, Fruitvale Station also manages to touch on a recurring true crime theme — namely, how America’s systems repeatedly fail to protect and take care of the most vulnerable among us.
Fruitvale Station is streaming now on Max.
5. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Few filmmakers have spent as much time exploring the moral cost of crime than Martin Scorsese. In 2023, he did so again in Killers of the Flower Moon, which explores the serial killing of multiple members of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma that was carried out by their greedy white neighbors. The three-hour epic unflinchingly lays bare the racist, institutional evil that allowed its central murders — as well as countless other unimaginable crimes throughout America’s history — to not only happen but go practically unpunished.
Even by his standards, Scorsese’s film hits such a deeply sad register that you are left feeling the full, inescapable weight of the crimes depicted in it. In one of his most inspired directorial flourishes, Scorsese then ends Killers of the Flower Moon with an epilogue that acknowledges both the inherently problematic nature of true crime and the role he has played in the entertainment-ification of real-life tragedy, all while still finding a way to use the the film’s genre as a vehicle to make one last, heart-wrenching point.
Killers of the Flower Moon is streaming now on Apple TV+.
4. Spotlight (2015)
Both a true crime thriller and a journalism drama, 2015’s Spotlight is one of the more measured and methodical films on this list. Directed in a brilliantly understated fashion by Tom McCarthy, the Best Picture winner details a Boston Globe team’s efforts to expose the Catholic Church’s systematic covering up of instances of sexual abuse perpetrated by numerous priests.
The stories that the Boston Globe published as a result of this real-life investigation rightly earned the paper the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003, and McCarthy’s film does an exceptional job of highlighting both the importance of its true crime story and the tragedy of the crimes that its professional subjects exposed to the world. It also just so happens to feature one of the best ensemble casts of the 2010s.
Spotlight is streaming now on Starz.
3. Goodfellas (1990)
This list easily could have featured even more Martin Scorsese movies than it already does. In an effort to highlight other films, though, we’ve chosen to limit his presence in this collection to the previously mentioned Killers of the Flower Moon and his 1990 masterpiece Goodfellas.
Inspired by the real-life rise and fall of mobster Henry Hill, Goodfellas captures the allure, chaos, depravity, and emptiness of a life of crime with such exacting detail and style that watching it is ultimately one of the most exhilarating experiences you’ll ever have as a moviegoer. Like all of Scorsese’s best films, it’s a drama made with a startlingly clear eye — one that sees the allure and price of sin so plainly that it has no problem striking the perfect balance between entertainment and dramatic profundity.
Goodfellas is available to rent now on most digital platforms.
2. Memories of Murder (2003)
Sixteen years before he made his Oscar-winning international hit Parasite, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho made arguably his greatest film, 2003’s Memories of Murder. Loosely based on South Korea’s first confirmed case of serial killings, the film follows an odd-couple pair of police detectives who become obsessed with finding the man responsible for a recent string of rapes and murders.
Over the course of their investigation, both detectives unravel in different ways — one loses his act-first-question-later bravado; the other his steely calm. By the time it has reached its haunting ending, Memories of Murder has movingly illustrated the lasting marks that evil can leave, as well as how the pursuit of the truth is one that a person can never turn away from once it has gotten their hooks into them.
Memories of Murder is streaming now on Tubi.
1. Zodiac (2007)
This is it. If there is one true crime film to recommend above all others, it is Zodiac. David Fincher‘s 2007 masterpiece is a titanic work of American filmmaking — an epic thriller that pulls double-duty as both an obsessive piece of re-creation and minute detail and a psychologically rich piece about obsession.
It is a painstakingly well-crafted film about the real-life Zodiac murders, as well as the investigations — both official and not — into the never-captured killer responsible for them. Along the way, Fincher not only brings the horrifying evil of the Zodiac Killer’s crimes into the open but also reveals the full, expansive web of red herrings, viable suspects, and dead-end clues that grew in the wake of the murders themselves.
Zodiac, in other words, explores a key truth about true crime itself, which is that the denial of justice and the hunger for it are equal reasons why the genre remains so popular and so appealing to so many. Those aspects, of course, and the urge to understand evil, which is, perhaps, the one desire Zodiac wisely doesn’t try to satisfy.
Zodiac is streaming now on MGM+.
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