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Top 10 Best Murder Mystery Movies (2026)

The best murder mystery movies split into two kinds: the ones that hand you every suspect in a single room, and the ones that chase a case for decades. One question settles the rest: how much do you want the ending to resolve? Several of the best ones refuse on purpose, and knowing that going in changes which title you reach for tonight.

Some of these are puzzles you can play along with, complete with a detective who lines the suspects up and explains everything before the credits. Others hand over the answer early and spend two hours on what it costs to prove it. Tone swings hard across the ten, from a farce built on a board game to a Korean procedural that ends without an arrest.

1.Knives Out - by Daniel Craig

Knives Out
Classic whodunit movies run on arithmetic: a fixed set of suspects, one body, and a detective who gets to question every one of them before the credits. A crime novelist turns up dead the morning after his eighty-fifth birthday party, and every relative under his roof had a reason to want it. Rian Johnson stages the interviews in Knives Out as a straight country-house setup, then pulls the floor out about a third of the way in. It is the film that got this whole genre moving again, and it plays fair enough that a first-time viewer can genuinely solve it.
$8.99$9.98-10%
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2.Clue - by Eileen Brennan

Clue
The board game supplied the rooms, the weapons and the color-coded suspects, and the script supplied everything else. Clue shuts six guests and one blackmailer into a New England mansion that keeps losing its lights, with three separate endings filmed and all three included on the disc. Farce speed applied to a locked-house killing is a trick nobody has landed this cleanly since.
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3.Murder on the Orient Express (DVD) - by Albert Finney

Murder on the Orient Express (DVD)
A snowdrift halts the train between stations, and by morning one passenger is dead in a locked compartment with a dozen stab wounds. Sidney Lumet packs the carriage of Murder on the Orient Express with Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman and Sean Connery, then lets Hercule Poirot work through them one interview at a time. Anyone who wants to see where the closed-circle formula was actually set should start here rather than with a remake.
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4.Primal Fear (DVD) - by Richard Gere

Primal Fear (DVD)
Courtroom mysteries move the puzzle from the crime scene to the witness stand, where the answer depends on who gets believed rather than who gets caught. Publicity, not justice, is why Richard Gere's defense attorney takes on an altar boy accused of stabbing a Chicago archbishop. Edward Norton, in his first screen role, then quietly steers Primal Fear somewhere the lawyer never planned to go. The pleasure is watching a courtroom mystery shift the question from who did it to who exactly is sitting at the defense table.
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5.Anatomy of a Murder (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray) - by Arthur O'Connell

Anatomy of a Murder (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
Guilt gets settled early in Anatomy of a Murder: the Army lieutenant admits shooting the tavern owner, which leaves the trial arguing only about why. Otto Preminger handed the score to Duke Ellington, who also turns up on screen to play piano opposite James Stewart. Nearly three hours of cross-examination sounds punishing, and instead it moves faster than most thrillers half its length.
$29.99$39.95-25%
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6.Anatomy of a Fall (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray) - by Sandra Hüller

Anatomy of a Fall (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
A man falls from the upper floor of an isolated chalet, and the only person downstairs was his visually impaired young son. Justine Triet took the Palme d'Or for a film that spends its second half in a French courtroom pulling apart a marriage rather than a crime scene. Viewers who want the answer handed to them will be annoyed, which is exactly why it sits in the head for weeks afterwards.
$29.99$39.95-25%
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7.Zodiac (DVD) - by Robert Downey

Zodiac (DVD)
True-crime murder mystery movies carry a different weight, because the investigation on screen belonged to people who never got a tidy ending. David Fincher treated the Zodiac killings as a paperwork story: warrants that never arrive, handwriting samples that do not match, jurisdictions that will not share a file. The newspaper cartoonist who ends up caring most about the ciphers had no investigative training and lost most of a decade to them. It is the rare murder mystery honest enough to end without a confession, and stronger for refusing one.
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8.Memories of Murder (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray) - by Byun Hee-bong

Memories of Murder (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
Two provincial detectives beat confessions out of the wrong men while a real killer keeps working the rice fields around them. Bong Joon-ho made Memories of Murder sixteen years before Parasite, and the slapstick in the early scenes is what makes the last twenty minutes land so hard. The case stayed open until 2019, and the final shot has aged into one of the most quietly devastating endings the genre has.
$29.99$39.95-25%
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9.Rear Window (DVD) - by James Stewart

Rear Window (DVD)
Sometimes there is no case file at all, just somebody who notices one wrong detail and cannot leave it alone. Hitchcock never once leaves the apartment, so viewers know only what James Stewart can see from a single chair, through one pane of glass, across a courtyard. A photographer laid up with a broken leg watches his neighbors for weeks until one wife stops appearing at her window. Building a murder case out of nothing but sightlines is the most elegant thing he ever did, and it survives a fourth viewing.
$11.99$14.98-20%
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10.Chinatown - by Jack Nicholson

Chinatown
A routine infidelity job in 1937 Los Angeles turns into water rights, a drowned city engineer and a family secret Jake Gittes would rather not have found. Robert Towne's screenplay for Chinatown still gets taken apart line by line in writing classes, and the ending Roman Polanski insisted on is the reason the whole thing lands. Save it for last, because very little made since is this willing to let an answer be bleak.
$19.95$25.99-23%
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Decide How You Want It to End

Pick by how you want the ending to behave: a puzzle solved out loud by a detective, or a case that stays open and stays with you. If you want more of them, the wider mystery film selection is the quicker place to keep looking.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where should someone new to murder mystery movies start?
Start with Knives Out. It teaches the rules of the form while making fun of them, the suspects are easy to keep straight, and nothing in it requires knowing any earlier film. Clue is the natural second, since it runs the same closed-house setup at comedy speed and finishes in about ninety minutes.
Do the older murder mysteries still hold up on a first watch?
The two oldest here are the least dated, oddly enough. Rear Window is essentially one set and one point of view, which is a structure modern thrillers still copy, and Murder on the Orient Express moves through its suspects briskly enough that nobody drifts. Anatomy of a Murder is the slower sit of the three, and worth it if courtroom detail is the appeal rather than pace.
Which of these are not in English?
Two. Memories of Murder is Korean, set in a farming province in the 1980s, and Anatomy of a Fall runs mostly in French with a chunk of English woven through it because the couple at its center are from different countries. Both are worth the reading, and the Criterion editions are the ones to have.
What pairs well for a double feature?
Anatomy of a Murder and Anatomy of a Fall are the obvious pairing, sixty-four years apart and built from the same question of whether a jury can ever really know. Run the older one first. If that is too much courtroom for one evening, Primal Fear covers similar ground in far less time and ends on a much sharper note.
Which one rewards a second viewing once you already know the answer?
Chinatown, easily. Every early scene reads differently once you know where it is heading, and the small talk stops being small. Primal Fear works the same way on a rewatch, though the effect is concentrated in a handful of scenes rather than spread across the whole film.

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