The 40 Best True Crime Movies of All Time
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In this day and age, true crime is all the rage. On a fundamental level, we’re intrigued by the dark underbelly of society. Or... perhaps we’re simply intrigued by the drama. Either way, true crime allows us to immerse ourselves in the world's most bizarre and devastating tales. As strange as it sounds, that interest has only grown over the years. Recently, true crime has evolved to include novels, television series, and even podcasts—but movies remain the hallmark of great storytelling.
With a little cinematic style, a fascinating news report turns into a gripping film that you can’t look away from. Below, we’ve rounded up the best true crime movies of all time. The list includes Lost Girls's tale of missing women the organized crime saga of The Irishman, and the counterfeit literary drama Can You Ever Forgive Me? Just remember that, you know, many of these stories have a little (read: a lot) of Hollywood flair.
The Irishman
Martin Scorcese’s (extremely) full-length Netflix film The Irishman follows truck driver Frank Sheeran as he gets involved and deeply embedded in organized crime in the 1950s. The epic crime tale is based on 2004 nonfiction book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt.
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Unbelievable
Though technically not a feature film, this Netflix miniseries provides a twisted yet intimate view into the series of rape cases in Colorado and Washington state covered in the 2015 news story, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.” Toni Colette, Merritt Weaver, and Kaitlyn Dever deliver gripping lead performances.
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Lost Girls
Documentarian Liz Garbus’s scripted feature Lost Girls provides a raw telling of one mother’s independent investigation of her daughter’s disappearance. What she uncovers, though, reveals more than she intended when her trail leads to a series of mysterious killings of sex workers.
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All Good Things
Ryan Gosling stars as Robert Durst, the son of a New York real estate tycoon who becomes the suspect behind a series of murders (including that of his wife, played by Kirsten Dunst). Among the film’s acclaim was praise from none other than Durst himself, who agreed to an interview with the film’s director following the film.
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Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Melissa McCarthy stars as Lee Israel, an author whose failing career led her to begin forging letters from successful deceased writers. But a scam can only go so long, and the literary pariah finds herself in a heap of trouble bigger than what led her to start peddling counterfeit letters.
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The Bling Ring
A capstone of true Sofia Coppola directorial style, The Bling Ring is a flashy and deeply vapid snapshot of the Hollywood Hills teenaged crime ring made infamous for breaking into and robbing multiple celebrities’ homes in the late 2000s. If its thumping trailers don’t draw you in, Emma Watson’s performance as a shallow, nihilistic valley girl surely will.
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Reversal of Fortune
Based on Alan Dershowitz’s book, Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case, this docudrama explores the unexplained coma of socialite Sunny von Bülow and its consequential attempted murder trial. Following her husband’s defense against the charges, the film brings a close lens not just to the incident itself, but also to the ambiguities of marriage, wealth, and morality.
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In Cold Blood
Based upon Truman Capote’s non-fiction book of the same name, In Cold Blood tells the true story of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Often cited as an early example of new realism in cinema, the film noire captures the truly cold-blooded nature of two killers in action.
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Foxcatcher
Steve Carrell delivers a transformative performance as John du Pont, a millionaire who develops a fascination with Olympic wrestlers: specifically, brothers Mark and Dave Schultz, played by Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo. The film is a grueling display of toxic masculinity and manipulation, eventually ending in murder.
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Catch Me If You Can
It's not Steven Spielberg's best, but Catch Me If You Can ranks among the director’s more entertaining movies. It tracks Frank Abagnale's rise as a wunderkind conman. Leonardo DiCaprio has never been more enjoyably charming and slimy.
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Zodiac
Zodiac wasn’t necessarily the movie horror fans—or fans of David Fincher’s previous Seven—expected. Instead, it’s a process movie about the people who tried to unmask California’s Zodiac Killer. Studiously researched and impeccably shot, Zodiac turns into something larger and more foreboding than a spate of murders.
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Memories of Murder
Before South Korean director Bong Joon-ho made international thrillers like Snowpiercer and Okja, he crafted this gem of a murder mystery, based on Korea's first serial murders. He brings his signature pitch-black humor to the story of two detectives in over their heads trying to solve the puzzling killings.
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The Wolf of Wall Street
The best and boldest thing about The Wolf of Wall Street, possibly Scorsese's most indulgent movie, is how fun it makes its crimes look. Scorsese and writer Terence Winter condense fraudulent stockbroker Jordan Belfort's memoir down to basically the most sensational parts, putting you in the headspace of a man who sees other people's money as his own playpen.
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Casino
Scorsese gets four movies on this list, and deserves all of them. Casino is an underrated '90s gangster effort living in Goodfellas'shadow. The cast—Robert De Niro as a low-level mobster making his way up the casino racket (based on Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal) and Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci as the wife and friend who threaten to tear it down—is entirely perfect.
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Summer of Sam
An uncharacteristic movie for Spike Lee, Summer of Sam depicts the effect of the notorious murders of “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz on young men living in The Bronx in 1977. Lee seamlessly weaves the stories together, and John Leguizamo proves he’s a real-deal actor.
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Bully
The twisted, trashy story of South Florida high schoolers who murdered a sadistic friend who had abused them, Bully is a hard one to stomach, but director Larry Clark (Kids) gives the script the no-bullshit delivery it deserves, and Brad Renfro's performance is quietly haunting.
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Dog Day Afternoon
The movie inspired by a Brooklyn robbery solidified Al Pacino's legend, in all its spittle-filled, shouting glory.
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The French Connection
The fictionalized account of New York City detectives who pursue a French drug smuggler is essentially one long, glorious chase scene. But Gene Hackman's performance and the sobering ending give it moral weight.
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All the President's Men
Bless them, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman made journalism hot by embodying Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they followed trails that led them them to connect a Watergate burglary to President Nixon.
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Wolf Creek
One of the great horror movies of the 21st century, Wolf Creek is also the main reason I'm scared to visit Australia. Fictionalizing two different Aussie backpack murderers, it follows three tourists venturing into the Outback who meet a stranger and... well, you know the rest. What separates Wolf Creek from other slashers is its unflinching directness; not since Michael Myers has there been a depiction of a man made of such pure evil.
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JFK
While the assassination of John F. Kennedy remains officially solved, Oliver Stone’s historical drama is such a persuasive conspiracy thriller that it will leave you convinced that something else was at work.
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Anatomy of a Murderer
Jimmy Stewart is as flawless as he ever was wavering between comic and dramatic in the Otto Preminger-directed courtroom drama, based on a novel written by a defense attorney and inspired by one of his cases. Few movies seem to grasp the moral ambiguity of the legal system while also being both realistic and tense.
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The Untouchables
One of director Brian De Palma's best movies is also one of his most conventional: Kevin Costner plays federal agent Eliot Ness, who is trying to nab Al Capone (Robert De Niro). The staircase sequence, inspired by the silent movie Battleship Potemkin, is a mini-masterpiece of suspense.
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F for Fake
Orson Welles’s last, great movie is ostensibly a documentary about an art forger, but it quickly fractures into something else. Welles intrudes on his own narrative to raise questions about the nature of authenticity. It’s his own amusing, exceptionally clever take on postmodernism.
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In the Realm of the Senses
If you watched In the Realm of the Senses without background knowledge, you might wonder what sick nutjob wrote it. But it's based on a Japanese woman who became national myth—a Geisha in the 1930s who strangled her boss/lover in the heat of passion and then, uh, took a souvenir from his body. In the Realm of the Senses artfully abstracts that tale, unfolding in long, largely silent, and sexually explicit takes.
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Badlands
Terrence Malick’s stunning 1973 feature debut gives poetic shape to its inspiration, based on spree killer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend. Sissy Spacek does justice to the dreamy, elliptical voiceover dialogue covering their courtship and crimes.
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Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde is such a singular, monumental movie in American history that it’s as famous as the couple it’s about. Which is only right: Never before had a major movie in the United States addressed criminal and sexual themes so openly and without any heavy-handed judgment. The stark, bloody climax still feels revolutionary.
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Munich
Steven Spielberg clearly had a lot invested in Munich, his nearly three-hour telling of Israeli spies' revenge against Palestinian terrorists who murdered the country's Olympic athletes in 1972. It was sadly overlooked at the box office, but Spielberg not only brings his mastery of visuals and suspense to his political thriller, but also humanity and scope that sadly many such movies (looking at you, Argo) lack.
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M
The serial-killer genre owes all its debts to German director Fritz Lang’s astounding 1931 movie, which draws on murders in the country around the time and a real Berlin criminal investigator. Portraying an underworld of criminals who are out to catch one of their own in murky black-and-white photography, it’s as scary and thrilling as anything released since.
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A Man Escaped
The classic by director Robert Bresson is about a criminal you can root for, since he’s escaping a prison in Nazi-occupied France (it’s based on the memoirs of André Devigny). As in Bresson’s other landmark works, it’s awe-inspiring to watch how controlled the movie is while also seeming like it could be a documentary.
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Tobe Hooper's '70s grindhouse classic is loosely—very loosely—based on the crimes of Ed Gein. No, Leatherface never existed, which is almost too bad, because he would have made a hell of an America's Most Wanted episode. But Texas Chainsaw is on here because it gets its power from its faked, lo-fi sense of authenticity. It plays out like the most disturbing home video of all time, and was even promoted more or less as such, making a franchise out of the fear that there is always a monster lurking just around the corner of a country backroad.
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Goodfellas
If it's not Martin Scorsese's best movie (and it might well be), then Goodfellas is at least the culmination of what he'd been working toward for years: a time-jumping, ego- and testosterone-filled gangster epic portraying Henry Hill's (Ray Liotta) life in the mafia. It's a movie no one else could have made, and one every other gangster flick will be compared to in the future.
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Scream
Despite becoming a witty horror parody that embraced the genre's greatest tropes, Scream was inspired by The Gainesville Ripper, a real Florida serial killer from 1990 that murdered five college students. The iconic horror flick does little to tell the Ripper's actual story, but it only adds to the film's mythos that such teen killings did take place across the country.
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Monster
Directed by Wonder Woman's Patty Jenkins, Monster won Charlize Theron her lone Academy Award for her portrayal of Aileen Wuornos, a Florida prostitute who robbed and murdered seven male clients back in 1989. Before her execution, she claimed that every homicide was committed in self-defense.
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I, Tonya
Margot Robbie may be best known for portraying the DC comic book character Harley Quinn, but her breakout role in I, Tonya still lands as one of the best performances of her career. From the figure skater's upbringing to Tonya Harding's iconic plot to bash-in rival Nancy Kerrigan's knee before the competition, the 2017 film shows every side of the story.
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Judas and the Black Messiah
The true story of how an FBI informant in the Black Panther Party led to leader Fred Hampton's assassination by law enforcement, Judas and the Black Messiah was as thrilling as it was prescient to the current moment. Even more heartbreaking was that Hampton was just 21 years old when he was killed--over a decade younger than the actor (Daniel Kaluuya) who portrayed him.
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The Black Dahlia
A noir thriller by Scarface director Brian DePalma, The Black Dahlia toned-down the brutal 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short to follow the two detectives tasked with finding the killer. After 75 years and over 150 suspects questioned, her grisly death remains unsolved to this day.
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The Iceman
"The Iceman" cometh in this story of Richard Kuklinski, a New Jersey family man who lived a double life as a hitman for the Mafia. Coming home from "work" every day, he fooled even his own family from uncovering that he killed roughly 100 people and stored them in freezers.
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Fruitvale Station
Following the events leading up to the death of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Black man killed by California transit police, Fruitvale Station was the breakout debut for both director Ryan Coogler and actor Michael B. Jordan. The film also included actual amateur footage of the 2013 shooting--a tragedy seared into the minds of Oakland residents.
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American Gangster
Ridley Scott's American Gangster may be known for its stellar Jay-Z soundtrack, but it also boasts a performance by Denzel Washington as 70's Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas. The explosive film also features an all-star cast of Russell Crowe, Idris Elba, Josh Brolin, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding Jr., T.I., Common, and RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan.
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