The 40 Best Thriller Movies of All Time (2024)

Naturally, no list of the greatest thrillers is complete without including the Master of Suspense. But with all due respect to Rear Window and too many other contenders to name, Vertigo was Hitchco*ck’s highest achievement precisely because it felt (and still feels) like a movie that could go anywhere with its blonde in trouble. That it manages to land every zig and zag with such style is a testament to Hitchco*ck’s otherworldly gifts.

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You know John McClane, of course, even if you don’t. But before he was a household name and invincible action icon, Die Hard pulsed with the reliable tick-tock of a Swiss watch, counting down the seconds until everything exploded. It ain’t Christmas without the resolution: “Yippee-ki-yay.”

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One of Orson Welles’s most undeniably entertaining work, the noir thriller Touch of Evil starts with a sinewy unbroken three-minute opening shot and doesn’t let up from there. It’s basically a guidebook on how to do noir filmmaking.

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No, not the completely unnecessary 2011 remake. Sam Peckinpah's 1971 thriller could also adequately be described as a descent into hell that rattled even the most bloodthirsty viewers in its time. The climactic siege with Dustin Hoffman at the center is still hard to stomach. (Unfortunately, the 1971 version is unavailable to stream, but the 2011 is, in case you feel like giving it a shot.)

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There is a scene in Denis Villeneuve-directed action thriller when calm car congestion on the El Paso–Juárez border slowly intensifies into a standoff that ends with dead bodies strewn on the ground and Emily Blunt shaken to her core. And there’s still over an hour left of the movie after that. The anxiety you feel consistently watching the likes of Benicia del Toro, Daniel Kaluuya, and the perpetually menacing Josh Brolin face off against Mexican cartel killers makes the on-screen danger palpable and makes Sicario one of the best thrillers you’ll ever subject your peace of mind to.

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Some might argue that Steven Spielberg has always been too sentimental to truly, well, thrill. Those people may have missed Munich, his later-career espionage masterpiece that takes a morally ambivalent (but always high-octane) view of the Mossad assassinations in retaliation of the 1972 Munich olympics massacre. Alternating between noisy and quiet, in-your-face and reticent, it is never less than devastating.

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You can’t do better than the Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway-starring neo-noir about the California Water Wars. (Yes, they were a real thing.)

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Honorable mentions go out to No Country for Old Men and Fargo, but the Coen brothers laid the groundwork for their acclaimed careers and perfected their own game with this funny-until-it’s-really-really-not crime movie.

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Few directors can thrill you like Guillermo del Toro, and he doesn’t miss a mind-blowing step with Nightmare Alley. With an all-star cast featuring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, William Dafoe, and Toni Collette, this neo-noir psychological thriller exposes the seedy underbelly of carnival life and the endless terror of the life of a grifter toying with people’s connections with themselves and lost loved ones.

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There’s never a bad time to revisit the ultimate ‘90s bank heist movie (maybe the ultimate ever?), which also gave us the ultimate showdown between Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino at their peaks.

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Laugh if you want, but Keanu Reeves perfected a certain style of stilted acting in the 90s in which he seemed to have been dropped into the most improbable scenarios—then just as improbably Keanu’d his way out of them. Bonus points go to Point Break for Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow’s fearsome action directing, and the way in which she seems to delight in the male bodies in violent competition with each other. (Whatever you do, please for the sake of all that’s holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, do not watch the remake no one asked for.)

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Yes, the hype (and the Oscar for Best Picture) is real; Parasite is one of the most scintillatingly daring thrillers you’ll ever watch. Director Bong Joon-ho guides you on a journey of toxic classism and family unity with enough compounding obstacles for the conniving Kim family that something as small as peach fuzz is a secret weapon. You never expect what’s coming next, even if you’ve seen it a dozen times.

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Some thrillers leave us shuddering with the knowledge their climaxes reveal. But the maddening (in a beautiful way) Blowup just leaves us with more questions that keep us up at night, hoping that one more look at the magnified photo in question will solve it all.

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Brian De Palma (Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables) has made friends and enemies throughout his long thriller-centric career. They mostly seem to be enemies these days. But give him this, the director makes exactly what he wants, and this batsh*t studio movie is all of his ideas simmering until they literally explode: an espionage thriller, a YA supernatural-meets-sexual drama, a blood-and-guts horror picture, and an excuse for Kirk Douglas to make dad jokes. Love it or hate it, don’t pretend you’re not entertained.

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Underrated compared to other John Carpenter classics (Halloween, The Thing), Assault on Precinct 13 trades horror for horrific, claustrophobic, and still-too-relevant action involving a police station under siege. If you think you know it's politics going in, you might be surprised.

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Before The Bourne Identity franchise put Matt Damon atop the spy thriller hierarchy at one point in the early 2000s, his ‘90s trip through a pathological deception and identity theft in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Damon’s intoxicating balancing act of identities while galavanting around on lavish trips draws you in to the point you don’t know where the real him starts, and the fake him ends. Charm, heartbreak, and a bit of murder mix together for one of Damon’s finest thrillers.

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If you don’t know what insanity has just taken place after watching David Lynch’s career-defining surrealist mystery, let it linger for a few days. Mulholland Drive is the rare kind of movie that will have you going down mental rabbit holes years later to piece together its puzzle, only to quiet yourself with the crucial word: “Silencio.” If that doesn’t work, just enjoy Justin Theroux’s performance as a buffoonish Hollywood director way out of his depth.

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Less horror-centric than David Fincher’s other masterpiece Seven, Fight Club is no less attuned to the potential (male) brutality that lurks behind every door. In this case, we’re privy to a testosterone-fueled mind game we don’t fully understand until the buildings start dropping.

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Shot in an inky black and white, The Night of the Hunter similarly divides up life for its child protagonists between a potential hopeful future and utter monstrosity. It’s a stark nightmarish drama that still leaves viewers gasping.

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