Dirty cops, femme fatales, grinning killers and bone-deep paranoia: Welcome to our ranked list of classic thrillers

When considering the best thrillers ever made, you’ll encounter many different kinds of thrills: from political intrigue and espionage to conspiracy, manipulation, gaslighting, and, of course, lots and lots of crime. As a movie genre, the thriller is also loosely defined – under its umbrella, you’ll find examples of science fiction, horror, heists, action, even comedy, along with the ever-nebulous ‘psychological thriller’ subdivision.

The exact definition of a thriller may be hard to pin down, but you know one when you’re watching one. You’ll feel it, too – in your clammy palms and under your armpits, in your teeth as you grind down the enamel and your restless leg. When done right, a thriller prompts a visceral response more than just about any other genre. Here are a hundred great thrillers guaranteed to make you sit up, widen your eyes and leave your head spinning.

Best thriller movies

100. Wild Things (1998)

Columbia/TriStar

The erotic thriller at its sweatiest, most stylised best, John McNaughton’s Wild Things presents the story of an elaborate, sex-filled long con with lurid abandon. The thrills here are exaggerated and while they may be trashy, they’re also shrewdly executed. Which is all by way of saying: don’t even think about missing the end credits.

The killer moment: Neve Campbell and Denise Richards make out in a swimming pool, in what must be one of cinema’s most rewound scenes. But which one of these high-school girls has the upper hand?

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99. The Stranger (1946)

Nazis in America? No way! Coming off the grand ambitions of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles took his first shot at a pulpy noir, directing and starring as a Third Reicher hiding out in a Rockwellian Connecticut town. (Remember when fascists felt shame and fear?) More or less a personal test to see if he could bring a film in on time and under budget, it’s regarded as minor Welles, but that’s still better than most filmmakers’ best efforts. The climax at the clock tower, featuring some none-too-subtle symbolism, is especially awesome.

The killer moment: Edward G Robinson, as the agent tracking Welles’s fugitive war criminal Franz Kindler, shows Kindler’s shell-shocked new wife (Loretta Young) film of the atrocities he aided in – the first time actual Holocaust footage appeared in a Hollywood movie.

98. The Long Good Friday (1980)

John Mackenzie’s Cockney crime-athon is packed with chances to unleash your best Bob ’oskins impression (‘The Mafia? I’ve shit ’em!’). But thanks to gutsy performances by Hoskins as ambitious gangland fixer Harold Shand and Helen Mirren as his icy moll, it never lapses into cliché, slowly cranking up from blood-splashed character study to strangely affecting tragedy. If Shakespeare grew up in post-war Stepney, Shand could have been his Macbeth.

97. Infernal Affairs (2002)

You know the plot, because Martin Scorsese used it for his Oscar-winning remake, The Departed. As entertaining as that movie is, the Hong Kong original is even better. Tony Leung and Andy Lau play moles: the former, a cop infiltrating a vicious triad; the latter, a criminal rising through the police ranks. Blazing its way through gunplay and excruciating scenes of hazardous undercover work, Infernal Affairs is the thriller fan’s John Woo.

96. The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)

Literature’s Tom Ripley, a con artist, gets captured in René Clément’s Purple Noon, but he murders his way to a grimmer finale in Anthony Minghella’s handsome spin on Patricia Highsmith’s novel. This sun-dappled thriller glimmers with a first-rate cast led by Matt Damon, enviable real estate and a complex gay protagonist (still a mainstream rarity) whose reflection on a polished piano splits apart in a mind-blowing shot. All hail cinematographer John Seale.

The killer moment: Suspicious of the title character, Freddie (Philip Seymour Hoffman, superbly obnoxious) repeatedly pounds on a high-pitched piano key, shredding away at Tom’s patience.

95. Thief (1981)

Michael Mann’s breakthrough noir stars James Caan as an expert safecracker dreaming of leaving the criminal business and going straight, while simultaneously aware that a dream is all it can ever be. Caan gives a tremendous, livewire performance, throwing on a heavy Chicago accent and coming across something like Joe Pesci channelling Ric Flair. Mann, meanwhile, shows off the stylistic trademarks that’d make him one of Hollywood’s coolest auteurs: moody, neon-lit cinematography, icy electronic score (courtesy of Tangerine Dream) and loads of tension that builds toward a violent climax.

The killer moment: on a coffee date with Tuesday Weld, the woman he hopes will drag him out of his life of crime, Caan bares his soul and reveals he left most of it behind in prison. It’s a scene with no big explosions or heisty action, but it’s gripping all the same.

94. Gone Girl (2014)

Deliriously nuts and a treat for fans of the double cross, Gillian Flynn’s 2012 bestseller found the ideal adapting filmmaker in David Fincher, whose doomy way with a thriller proved a ruse in itself. The noose tightens around Nick (Ben Affleck, impressively shifty), a bar owner and former hot-shot journalist whose wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike, revelatory), a minor celebrity, has disappeared from their Missouri home.

The killer moment: Fed up and vicious, Amy coos from the afterlife – or maybe it’s much closer – about the ‘cool girl’ she was required to be.

93. Run Lola Run (1998)

“Run Lola Run”

Berlin makes an unforgiving industrial backdrop in Tom Tykwer’s techno-scored time twister. Lola (Franka Potente) needs to find a fortune in 20 minutes or her petty criminal boyfriend gets the chop. Cue three wildly different scenarios that play out like a cross between a video game, an infinitely more gonzo Sliding Doors and a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ story. There’s even a Simpsons homage to it, which you can’t say about many low-budget Euro-thrillers.

The killer moment: Lola’s first attempt at boyfriend-rescuing ends very badly.

92. Gaslight (1944)

There’s a reason why the concept of gaslighting is forever potent: The image of emotional abuse presented in this film is viscerally uncomfortable. Charles Boyer is the viciously manipulative husband; Ingrid Bergman plays his victimised wife; and the audience is left desperately hoping for the cycle of mind games to finally end.

The killer moment: ‘Are you trying to tell me I’m insane?’ Bergman asks Boyer, crawling out of her skin and lunging for a real answer. It’s the film’s dark psychological predicament in a single line.

91. The Ipcress File (1965)

Swinging London must be partying elsewhere than in this paranoid spy film, transplanted from the pages of Len Deighton’s novel with the help of a jazzy John Barry score. Behind it all was James Bond producer Harry Saltzman, who gave us Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer, the antithesis of 007. He’s an insubordinate trickster and womaniser (okay, so not completely different), but he wears glasses and – shocker of shockers – cooks. He’s also the deeply cool central cog in this magnificently calibrated espionage thriller.

The killer moment: The brainwashing sequence is a trippy foreshadow to a similar scene in The Parallax View.

90. Play Misty for Me (1971)

 

Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut is a potent portrait of obsession. Characteristically cool, he plays Dave, a California DJ dealing with an increasingly unhinged fan-turned-hookup-turned-stalker (Jessica Walter). The dark impulses on display make for an intriguing contrast with the sun-dappled, ultra-’70s aesthetic; the device of the single-minded madwomen, pushing the thrills close to horror, would prove highly influential.

89. Animal Kingdom (2010)

This Melbourne-set crime thriller packs all the energy of an early Scorsese picture, while bringing something fresh and distinctively Aussie to the genre. David Michôd’s feature debut has its roots in the real-life slaying of two cops in the late ’80s, and those incidents’ recreation is just one of the bursts of violence in a movie that carefully picks its moments for maximum shock. Caught in the middle is wide-eyed innocent Joshua (James Frecheville), wondering who he can trust in the clan of criminals he’s been adopted into. The answer? No one, least of all Jacki Weaver’s Smurf, a matriarch of real menace.

88. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Over five decades, the James Bond franchise has morphed from Cold War thrills to globe-trotting action, via whatever the heck Moonraker was. This instalment, the best of the Roger Moore days, is a fantastically entertaining breakwater between those two phases: escapist fun before the gadget-drenched silliness to come. Special props go to Ken Adam, the production designer charged with creating an oceanic evil lair on a Pinewood backlot.

87. King of New York (1990)

In some key way the crux of Christopher Walken’s spooky, stilted persona, Abel Ferrara’s louche gangster picture has come to occupy a central piece of NYC iconography. Walken plays Frank White, a vacant-eyed coke lord who, immediately upon release from prison, resumes his high-flying lifestyle – and idle mayoral aspirations – from a headquarters at the swank Plaza Hotel.

The killer moment: We all know Walken can dance, but you haven’t seen how weirdly electric and menacing he can be until you’ve seen his flapping bird.

86. Misery (1990)

Believe it or not, kids, but in the days before social media, if you wanted to lob an unsolicited critique at an artist, you had to hope their car would overturn outside your house, and that they’d be too injured to run away. Kathy Bates is frightening, funny and sad as Annie Wilkes, a lonely woman who pulls her favourite romance writer (James Caan) from a snowy wreck and ‘nurses him back to health’, with the slight caveat that he write his next book her way. Rob Reiner’s Stephen King adaptation edges up to camp at points, only to get smashed by sudden, shocking violence.

85. In the Cut (2003)

Meg Ryan is cast intriguingly against type in director Jane Campion’s dark spin on the erotic thriller. As Frannie, a teacher who becomes entangled with a detective investigating a series of murders, Ryan is basically the opposite of a cute rom-com heroine, and Campion creates a world of sexual menace, thick with violence yet never played for exploitation.

84. Night and the City (1950)

 

Hounded out of the U.S. by the ‘reds-under-the-bed’ brigade, filmmaker Jules Dassin plied his trade on the other side of the Atlantic in the ’50s. Hollywood’s loss was Europe’s gain as he made his two greatest movies there: the seminal heist flick Rififi and this London noir featuring a career-best turn from the perennially underrated Richard Widmark. Sheened in sweaty desperation, Widmark’s hustler Harry Fabian is an antihero for the ages as he weaves a web in the criminal underworld so tangled, he eventually becomes caught in it.

83. Kill List (2011)

Ben Wheatley’s DIY debut Down Terrace was a blast, but nothing could have prepared us for his second feature. Like a DVD-bin thriller given a massive jolt of quality, Kill List takes the basic elements of low-rent Britcrime-bickering hit men, a shady aristo crime boss, dreary suburban locations – and transforms them into art. With its improvised dialogue, pin-drop sound design and shocking violence, the result is terrifying, occasionally frustrating and utterly compelling.