The best crime movies on Netflix

There is no director more ideally suited to adapt Stieg Larsson’s best-selling potboiler than David Fincher, and not just for the obvious reason that he knows his way around the serial-killer thriller. He’s equally adept at taking unwieldy chunks of exposition—like the lawsuits over the founding of Facebook or the leads (and blind alleys) in the investigation of the Zodiac killer or the gnarled family tree in Larsson’s book—and making it look like cinema of the first order. A typically Fincherian hero—the loner who retreats from family and society to burrow into a project—Daniel Craig stars as a Swedish journalist who seizes the chance to pivot out of highly publicized libel suit and into something new. Christopher Plummer, as the retired CEO of a large corporation, summons Craig to a remote island where he and members of his family live in luxury, and, more often than not, bitter estrangement. Plummer wants Craig to document the family’s history, but the focus of his investigation turns to the disappearance (and likely murder) of Plummer’s grand-niece 36 years earlier. As the case grows more complicated, Craig brings on an unconventional but brilliant research assistant in Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a young woman coarsened by her horrific experiences within the social system. []

Abel Ferrara’s downtown Manhattan is long gone, replaced with sterile, half-filled high rises and wildly overpriced bistros. But there’s still plenty of grit left on the streets of New York City. You just have to travel to the outer boroughs, as directors Josh and Benny Safdie did for their frenetic crime drama Good Time. The film pulses with the energy of the city as manic scumbag Connie (Robert Pattinson, practically unrecognizable in a dirty hoodie and ratty goatee) fumbles his way through a hastily conceived rescue mission after his disabled brother Nick (Benny Safdie) gets arrested at the end of a foot chase following a botched bank robbery. The breakneck pace and scuzzy desperation of Connie’s quest gives the film—which takes place entirely over the course of one night—a certain fun-house quality, enhanced by the delirious close-up cinematography, aggressively stylized lighting, and synthesizer score. The fact that part of it literally takes place in an amusement park doesn’t hurt, either. []

One day, Martin Scorsese will die. That’s a difficult thing to accept—difficult because it will be a staggering loss for film culture, but also pretty hard to even believe. Scorsese, at a very spry 77, was everywhere in 2019: igniting a about what is or isn’t cinema; inspiring so indebted to his style that he should have received royalties; executive-producing two of the on this very list and piecing together a . And yet to watch The Irishman, his gangster opus to end all gangster opuses, is to be constantly reminded of the promise of mortality—his, ours, everyone’s. Make no mistake, this is a remarkably brisk three and a half hours, dramatizing half a century of organized crime through dark-comic confrontations (and an outsized Al Pacino performance) so deliriously funny, they’ve already generated a whole library of memes. But right from his opening shot, a morbid parody of the Copacabana sequence in Goodfellas, Scorsese foregrounds the inevitable. And his film becomes, in its magnificently bleak final stretch, a meditation on the true consequences of the mob life, the ignoble end awaiting men like Henry Hill, Sam Rothstein, and the film’s own protagonist, mafia hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro, weaponizing the sleepiness of his latter-day work into a devastating portrait of moral absence). One of the many ironies of the movie is that it uses distinctly modern means—from de-aging technology to streaming-platform resources—to eulogize a time-honored genre and the careers of the artists who shaped it. But however firmly Scorsese has planted himself on the vanguard, however relevant and vital and, yes, alive he remains as an artist, his latest triumph is a stark acknowledgment of what’s coming. If we’re lucky, The Irishman says, we get to pick out our own coffin. Watching the movie, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Scorsese has picked his. []

Unfolding with the inevitability of a bad dream, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer is Lanthimos’ darkly intense, almost biblical spin on one of those thrillers about a yuppie family terrorized by a vengeful stalker. It’s like Cape Fear by way of The Shining, just in the same absurdist register as all of the Greek director’s trips to the Twilight Zone. To say where the plot goes would be unfair, but it involves a mysterious malady, an impossible choice, and a terrible reckoning. Those up on their Greek tragedy may recognize the outline of Iphigenia’s tussle with Artemis—a dispute that began, hint hint, with a slain deer. But you needn’t know for mythology to recognize a false deity, courting comeuppance by deciding who lives and who dies. []

In Andrew Dominik’s superb revisionist Western , he staged the last days of an iconoclastic gangster with a strong feeling for how his story could take root in the American imagination. Dominik’s follow-up, Killing Them Softly, makes that subtext text, wondering aloud what makes America America, and exploring the greed and avarice that cannot be extricated from the freedom and opportunity that’s supposed to make the country great. While it isn’t unusual for nasty little genre movies like Dominik’s stylish heist thriller to smuggle such themes under the surface, Killing Them Softly makes them startlingly explicit. All the criminal mayhem that composes it—an audacious robbery and the bloody retribution that follows—is mere prelude to a thesis statement, support for a grim assessment of the country on the eve of the 2008 Presidential election. []

Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills, like its predecessor Machete (and the fake trailer between Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse movies that birthed it), concerns itself equally with comedy and over-the-top action, constantly tweaking the dosage so as not to tilt too far in one direction. Machete Kills is gleefully ridiculous, one-upping the first movie’s jokes, blood, and even its massively heightened self-awareness. No matter how Rodriguez would like to pitch it, Machete Kills isn’t really an homage to exploitation movies as much as it’s a parody of them. Its tongue is jammed so far in its cheek that it scans, at least in parts, like an Austin Powers movie, albeit one with multiple beheadings and disembowelings. Which isn’t to say it’s no fun—in fact, it delivers pretty much exactly what it sets out to.

Director Clint Eastwood’s film adapts a Dennis Lehane novel, keeping its careful attention to how place, family, and local customs shape personalities–and how an instant can change all that. Another unspeakable incident, the brutal killing of Sean Penn’s 19-year-old daughter, reunites the childhood friends as men. Heading the investigation, Kevin Bacon discovers that a number of locals have no alibi for the night of the crime, but none more suspiciously than Tim Robbins, whose natural meekness starts to look a lot like guilt. In outline, Mystic River is little more than a standard police procedural, but Eastwood and screenwriter Brian Helgeland follow Lehane’s lead, letting the action play out at a pace which reveals the murder as a community tragedy which crashes the past against the present. The actors match the gravity of their surroundings, Robbins balancing barely concealed anger with unconcealed pain, Penn beautifully capturing a man who’s fought his way into goodness, and Bacon finally finding a role that makes the most of his gift for understatement. It works so well as a showcase for their performances (and those of supporting players Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney, Laurence Fishburne, and relative newcomer Tom Guiry), and as a study of their aluminum-sided world, that the inevitable revelations of the mystery plot almost sidetrack a film that’s more about fragile lives than clues and plot twists. Eastwood knows this, however, and he ultimately lets observations on character, community, and the tidal patterns of tragedy shoulder a burden an ordinary murder mystery never could. []

Fusing the themes of a classic Hong Kong action movie with the mayhem of a modern Indonesian martial-arts flick and enough gore to satisfy fans of extreme, midnight-circuit horror, Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes For Us takes “heroic bloodshed” to a new level of indescribable, gut-splattered ickiness. As is often the case, the symbol of innocence takes the form of a little girl: Joe Taslim is the dangerous killer who’ll stop at nothing to protect her; his  co-star Iko Uwais is the former gangland partner sent to take him down. But the real central conflict in this panorama of death and dismemberment is between the archetypal, coded characters and the heaps of bloodied, chopped-up bodies they leave in their wake. []

Nightcrawler is well worth seeing just for Jake Gyllenhaal’s spectacularly creepy performance. Blinking as little as possible and speaking every line with robotic conviction, he makes Louis the sort of person who discovered early in life that it’s possible to get away with nearly anything so long as one couches one’s words in the right tone, except that he has a truly warped notion of what the right tone is. Even the most obnoxiously persistent door-to-door salesmen have nothing on this guy, who treats everybody he encounters as an obstacle to be politely mowed down with bland verbiage derived from corporate jargon. It’s a mesmerizing turn from an actor who, while frequently quite good, has never really had a breakout role until this one. Nightcrawler gave him a chance to make a lasting impression, and he takes full, fanatical advantage. []

“I’m too cynical to be an artist,” muses a character at around the midpoint of Nocturnal Animals, the second feature by the fashion designer Tom Ford, perhaps winking to the audience of this arch and self-conscious film. For Nocturnal Animals takes dilettantism as a principle; Ford, who previously directed , is a mimic and an unapologetic aesthete, and his liberal adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel operates on the cusp of satire, playing with insincerity and indulgence as it conveys the workings of a reader’s imagination. Its three interrelated stories reflect and obscure one another in equal measure: a Los Angeles drama about the ennui and mores of the modish rich, focused on a gallery owner married to a nearly bankrupt businessman; a violent thriller about a family man seeking revenge against Texas hicks, which is actually a novel manuscript by the gallery owner’s estranged first husband; and a failed romance, set in the early years of the relationship between the former couple, childhood friends from Texas who reconnect in New York. []

Deep into Ocean’s 13, the second sequel to the 2001 remake of the 1960 Rat Pack classic Ocean’s 11, there’s a line about how a good con man never repeats a gag. It’s delivered as a throwaway piece of dialogue, but it quietly acknowledges that what good con men can’t get away with, good directors sometimes can. Rebounding from the frothy, bloodless Euro jaunt Ocean’s 12, 13 returns Steven Soderbergh and crew to Las Vegas for a film that isn’t exactly a remake of their first Ocean’s adventure, but isn’t exactly not, either. It doesn’t matter. Ocean’s 11's easy chemistry and effortless style return alongside the let’s-take-down-a-casino plot. In this case, the target is the gorgeous—and fictional—Bank Casino, a spiraling, faintly Asian-themed high-rise run by Al Pacino and his scantily clad aide de camp Ellen Barkin. Having sent Elliott Gould into a coma after cheating him out of his rightful stake in the casino, Pacino rouses the ire of Clooney and his crew, who conspire to take him and his elaborately defended gambling palace down. The pleasure here, as before, comes from watching skilled professionals team up for a job well done. []

S.W.A.T. begins with familiar material–the half-remembered ‘70s cop show of the same name–and makes it feel fresh and vital. The movie stars Samuel L. Jackson as a cocky veteran who commands a S.W.A.T. team headlined by Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez, and LL Cool J. Archetypal cops-who-play-by-their-own-rules, they face a worthy foe in imprisoned French master criminal Olivier Martinez, who offers $100 million to anyone who helps him escape. The offer is taken up by what seems like half the thugs in Los Angeles. Television long ago eclipsed film as the premier forum for police drama, and one of the exciting things about S.W.A.T. is that it offers the best of both worlds, combining the scrappiness of a top-notch detective show with the resources and iconic names of a summer blockbuster. As the team leader, Jackson finds exactly the right tone for the role: a sort of playful cockiness that comes from knowing just how good he is. He’s clearly having fun, but he never winks at the audience too much or allows his performance to devolve into camp. The same goes for the film, which is by turns brawny and agile. Though less fleet-footed in its plot-centered second half, it remains balanced while treading into progressively more ridiculous territory. []

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a U.S. marshal summoned to Shutter Island after a female patient mysteriously disappears. As DiCaprio and his partner (Mark Ruffalo) make inquiries of the patients and staff, they’re baffled first by the seeming impossibility of the woman leaving a locked cell and slipping past security, and second by her escape off a rock that makes Alcatraz look like the county pen. All investigative avenues appear to lead to Ben Kingsley, the Dr. Moreau of this experimental facility, who treats his inmates as patients rather than criminals, but seems to be hiding a darker agenda. For his part, DiCaprio brings his own share of personal baggage: He’s haunted by memories of liberating Dachau, and his wife’s death in an apartment fire. What begins as a simple missing-person procedural slowly morphs into full-on psychological horror, as more disturbing revelations come to pass and the stress on DiCaprio starts eating away at his nerves. Director Martin Scorsese renders his hero’s nightmares in vivid Technicolor flashbacks and dream sequences that insistently bleed into reality and cloud his judgment. Scorsese’s talent for aligning the audience with a single character’s obsession pays off brilliantly as Shutter Island unfolds, and potent single-scene turns by Jackie Earle Haley and Patricia Clarkson draw it further into the darkness. Shutter Island may initially seem like a nerve-jangling genre piece in the Cape Fear mold, but it’s more like Scorsese’s The Shining, a horror show where it’s sometimes hard to tell the haunted from those doing the haunting. []

Mere hours into his first day of training for a position in an elite anti-narcotics branch of the Los Angeles Police Department, Ethan Hawke’s view of the streets begins to change. Specifically, he starts to see them through the hazy, clouded high of PCP-dusted marijuana, a drug forced on him at gunpoint by his potential new boss, veteran cop Denzel Washington. Is Washington giving Hawke a crash course in the realities of his new beat, or simply revealing himself as a bad lieutenant of the worst kind? For much of its run time, Training Day plays directly off this disturbing ambiguity, leading a tour of the thinly guarded border between cops and criminals. Far removed from the innate goodness of most Washington roles, it’s a remarkable performance, landing somewhere between Dirty Harry and Orson Welles’ petty tyrant from Touch Of Evil. A penetrating screenplay by David Ayer helps make it possible. Ayer’s previous efforts (The Fast And The Furious, U-571) never suggested Training Day’s command of characters in moral twilight, and the similarly blossoming director Antoine Fuqua rises to the script’s challenges. Given a showcase for acting and writing, Fuqua brings a relaxed, quietly stylish approach to much of Training Day. As goes the director, so goes his other leading man. Once more apt to deliver a collection of youth-in-rebellion gestures than a performance, Hawke has been developing into a far more interesting actor since The Newton Boys and, especially, Hamlet. His ability to hold his own against Washington says all that needs saying. []