50 Best Thriller Movies of All Time: Ranked by Critics and Audience Scores

The thriller is one of cinema’s most durable and widely beloved genres, encompassing everything from Alfred Hitchcock’s meticulously crafted suspense masterpieces to modern psychological puzzles that unravel in the final frame. At their best, thrillers do what no other genre manages with quite the same precision: they keep us in a state of heightened attention — heart slightly elevated, mind actively engaged with the question of what happens next — for 90 to 180 minutes of almost involuntary investment.

This ranked list of the 50 greatest thriller films of all time draws on aggregated critical consensus from Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and IMDb alongside historical influence, rewatchability, and the depth of experience they deliver. We have organized the list into tiers to help you navigate what to watch first, alongside what makes each film essential.

Tier One: The Undisputed Masterpieces (Films 1-10)

These ten films represent the absolute peak of thriller cinema — works that defined or redefined the genre, remain as compelling today as on initial release, and are studied by filmmakers as formal templates of what great suspense cinema can achieve.

1. Psycho (1960) — Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s most radical formal achievement begins as a crime drama, murders its apparent protagonist at the midpoint, and pivots into something more disturbing and enduring than any film before it. Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates remains cinema’s most iconic villain, the shower sequence remains the most analyzed scene in film history, and the entire film demonstrates Hitchcock’s total command of audience attention and manipulation. Psycho is not just the greatest thriller ever made — it is among the most influential films in cinema history, period.

2. Vertigo (1958) — Alfred Hitchcock

Named the greatest film ever made by Sight and Sound critics in 2012, Vertigo is simultaneously a suspense film, a psychological horror story, a romantic tragedy, and a complex meditation on male obsession and the construction of identity. James Stewart’s performance against his established screen persona creates an unsettling discomfort the film never resolves. Shot in the hills of San Francisco with Bernard Herrmann’s spiraling score, it endlessly rewards multiple viewings.

3. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) — Jonathan Demme

The only horror-thriller to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (along with Best Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay), The Silence of the Lambs delivers an extraordinary dual character study disguised as a serial killer procedural. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins create one of cinema’s most compelling relationships across a film that has aged not only well but seemingly backwards — appearing more formally assured and emotionally complex with each passing decade.

4. Rear Window (1954) — Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s formally audacious single-location thriller — a photographer with a broken leg watching his neighbors through binoculars and becoming convinced one has murdered his wife — is a masterclass in voyeurism, gender, and the relationship between cinema and spectatorship. Grace Kelly delivers one of the screen’s most seductive and resourceful performances as the love interest who ultimately steals the film’s moral center.

5. North by Northwest (1959) — Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s most purely entertaining thriller follows Cary Grant as a Madison Avenue advertising executive mistaken for a government agent by foreign spies. The crop-duster sequence, the Mount Rushmore finale, and Bernard Herrmann’s driving score make this the platonic ideal of the entertainment thriller — a film that has never been bettered on its own terms of pure cinematic pleasure and suspense.

6. Se7en (1995) — David Fincher

Fincher’s morally devastating serial killer thriller follows two detectives investigating murders staged around the seven deadly sins to a conclusion so memorably bleak it permanently altered audience expectations of how dark a mainstream thriller could be willing to go. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman deliver career-caliber work against a visual palette of perpetual grey rain that has influenced a generation of cinematographers and production designers.

7. The Third Man (1949) — Carol Reed

Graham Greene’s story of an American pulp writer searching for his friend in postwar Vienna delivers one of cinema’s most shocking reveals, the most famous cuckoo clock speech in any film, and a final image of heartbreaking emotional restraint. Orson Welles’ entrance from the shadows to Anton Karas’s zither score is one of cinema’s great unforgettable moments. The definitive postwar noir thriller.

8. Chinatown (1974) — Roman Polanski

Robert Towne’s screenplay and Roman Polanski’s direction combine to produce a neo-noir thriller of incomparable density and desolation. Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes investigates a water rights scandal in 1930s Los Angeles and stumbles into something far more monstrous. The ending remains one of cinema’s most deliberately devastating — the whole film an argument that some evil is too deeply systemic to ever be defeated by individual moral courage.

9. Parasite (2019) — Bong Joon-ho

Bong Joon-ho’s genre-defying examination of class inequality in contemporary South Korea won the Academy Award for Best Picture and is the thriller that most seamlessly conceals what it actually is until you are fully inside it. Beginning as a darkly comic heist film, it shifts into something more morally vertiginous and ultimately devastating with a controlled brilliance that makes multiple viewings not just rewarding but necessary to fully appreciate.

10. The Conversation (1974) — Francis Ford Coppola

Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert tormented by what he may have enabled through his work: The Conversation is Coppola’s most personal film, a prescient meditation on privacy, complicity, and the psychological cost of intelligence gathering that predates the mass surveillance age by four decades. A masterpiece of paranoid cinema that becomes more relevant with every passing year.

Tier Two: Essential Thrillers Every Fan Must See (Films 11-25)

• 11. No Country for Old Men (2007) — Coen Brothers. Cormac McCarthy’s nihilistic Texas noir becomes even more viscerally terrifying through the Coens’ formally rigorous direction and Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh — cinema’s most genuinely terrifying antagonist since Hannibal Lecter. The ending’s refusal of conventional resolution remains as divisive and intellectually stimulating as ever.
• 12. Gone Girl (2014) — David Fincher. Gillian Flynn’s marital thriller adaptation achieves the rare feat of rivaling the source novel in psychological intricacy, carried by Rosamund Pike’s extraordinary performance in one of cinema’s most calculating and icily controlled anti-heroine roles.
• 13. Zodiac (2007) — David Fincher. Fincher’s three-hour procedural about the unsolved Zodiac murders is his most mature work — a film about obsession, the limits of certainty, and the human cost of unresolved investigation told with extraordinary discipline and restraint.
• 14. Prisoners (2013) — Denis Villeneuve. Two daughters disappear on Thanksgiving. Hugh Jackman and Paul Dano in devastating performances around the moral question of how far a parent would go — and should go — to save their child, which the film refuses to answer comfortably or simply.
• 15. Knives Out (2019) — Rian Johnson. The most purely enjoyable mainstream thriller of the 2010s, with Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc and an extraordinary ensemble navigating a mystery whose central structural boldness subverts all genre expectations in ways that remain fresh and surprising.
• 16. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) — Roman Polanski. A horror-thriller hybrid in which the terror derives almost entirely from paranoia and gaslighting rather than explicit horror content. What is happening to Mia Farrow’s character may be supernatural or may be conspiracy, and Polanski commits completely to both readings throughout.
• 17. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) — John Frankenheimer. Political paranoia, brainwashing, Cold War dread, and an Angela Lansbury performance of extraordinary malevolence make this the defining political thriller and the film that haunts American conspiracy imagination to this day.
• 18. Oldboy (2003) — Park Chan-wook. A man imprisoned for 15 years is suddenly freed and searches for answers. Oldboy’s final revelation is cinema’s most discussed plot twist of the 2000s and arrives at the end of a film of extraordinary visual invention and moral derangement that still feels genuinely transgressive.
• 19. Get Out (2017) — Jordan Peele. Jordan Peele’s debut uses thriller mechanics to dissect liberal racism with precision and wit that makes it simultaneously one of the most politically important and most formally accomplished American films of the decade. The teacup hypnosis sequence is the 2010s’ best-designed suspense scene.
• 20. Memento (2000) — Christopher Nolan. A man with anterograde amnesia investigates his wife’s murder using tattoos and Polaroid photos, with the story told in reverse chronological order. Nolan’s most formally brilliant achievement and one of cinema’s most elegantly constructed structural puzzles.
• 21. The Usual Suspects (1995) — Bryan Singer. The twist ending that changed thriller cinema’s relationship with audience expectation. Knowing the resolution on second viewing does not diminish but enriches the film, revealing how carefully every detail was planted from the opening frame.
• 22. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) — Tomas Alfredson. John le Carré’s slow-burn Cold War spy novel adaptation rewards patience with one of cinema’s most intellectually satisfying revelations and Gary Oldman’s most controlled and devastating performance across a career full of them.
• 23. Heat (1995) — Michael Mann. Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as detective and master thief in Michael Mann’s operatic Los Angeles crime epic. The central coffee shop scene between them is cinema’s greatest conversation between opposing equals.
• 24. Misery (1990) — Rob Reiner. Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes is one of cinema’s greatest screen villains, and the cat-and-mouse dynamic of Stephen King’s adaptation delivers extraordinary single-location tension through a performance of genuinely unnerving commitment.
• 25. Uncut Gems (2019) — Safdie Brothers. Adam Sandler as a gambling-addicted jeweler in a film of almost intolerable tension that operates as a formal masterpiece of sustained anxiety — the most stressful viewing experience available in mainstream cinema.

Tier Three: Outstanding Thrillers Worth Every Minute (Films 26-40)

• 26. Mulholland Drive (2001) — David Lynch. Lynch’s most cinematically coherent dream-logic thriller follows a car crash survivor and an aspiring actress through a Hollywood mystery that gradually inverts and swallows its own reality in ways that reward patient, interpretive engagement.
• 27. L.A. Confidential (1997) — Curtis Hanson. Three LAPD officers investigate a diner massacre in 1950s Hollywood and uncover systemic corruption in one of neo-noir’s most elegantly structured and performed scripts.
• 28. Blood Simple (1984) — Coen Brothers. The Coen Brothers’ debut introduces their moral universe fully formed: a Texas bar owner hires a private detective to kill his wife and her lover, and nothing goes according to plan. Still one of the most accomplished debut features in cinema history.
• 29. Sicario (2015) — Denis Villeneuve. Emily Blunt as an idealistic FBI agent drawn into a CIA operation targeting Mexican cartel leadership, discovering that moral clarity is a luxury the war on drugs cannot afford. Villeneuve and Roger Deakins’ cinematography is breathtaking throughout.
• 30. Nightcrawler (2014) — Dan Gilroy. Jake Gyllenhaal as a driven sociopath who discovers his natural talent is filming crime scenes for local news — a character study and media satire of terrible clarity and one of the decade’s most compelling antihero performances.
• 31. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) — David Fincher. Fincher’s American adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s thriller is among the most technically accomplished mainstream films of the decade, with Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander as one of cinema’s greatest recent character creations.
• 32. Diabolique (1955) — Henri-Georges Clouzot. A school-set French thriller about a wife and mistress who murder the tyrannical headmaster they share — until the body disappears. Hitchcock called Clouzot his greatest rival, and Diabolique justifies that assessment completely.
• 33. Blow Out (1981) — Brian De Palma. A B-movie sound man accidentally records a political assassination. De Palma’s most accomplished thriller: technically extraordinary, politically cynical, and devastating in its conclusion — a distillation of American disillusionment that has aged beautifully.
• 34. 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) — Dan Trachtenberg. John Goodman’s performance as a prepper who may have saved two strangers from catastrophe — or may be holding them captive — is one of the decade’s most unsettling character performances in a film of extraordinary tonal control and sustained ambiguity.
• 35. A Simple Plan (1998) — Sam Raimi. Three men find a crashed plane with $4 million inside and agree to keep it. The slow dismantling of their ordinary lives through escalating moral compromise is profoundly unsettling and criminally underseen by mainstream audiences.
• 36. Caché (Hidden) (2005) — Michael Haneke. A Parisian TV host receives mysterious surveillance tapes of his home — Haneke’s thriller about guilt, privilege, and the crimes of colonial history that refuses all conventional closure and demands active engagement from its audience.
• 37. Enemy (2013) — Denis Villeneuve. Jake Gyllenhaal discovers his exact double in a film that refuses straightforward explanation and functions most powerfully as psychological metaphor about repression and duality — Villeneuve’s most formally audacious and interpretively rich work.
• 38. Wind River (2017) — Taylor Sheridan. An FBI agent and wildlife officer investigate the murder of a young Native American woman on a Wyoming reservation. Sheridan’s most emotionally concentrated and thematically ambitious screenplay, set against landscape photography of stark, devastating beauty.
• 39. Three Days of the Condor (1975) — Sydney Pollack. Robert Redford as a CIA analyst who returns from lunch to find everyone in his office murdered, launching a paranoid conspiracy thriller that captures the post-Watergate mood of institutional betrayal with extraordinary precision and lasting relevance.
• 40. Marathon Man (1976) — John Schlesinger. Dustin Hoffman as a graduate student entangled in a Nazi war criminal’s hunt for hidden diamonds, featuring cinema’s most quoted dental horror scene and a performance of genuinely harrowing vulnerability.

Tier Four: Modern Classics and Essential Hidden Gems (Films 41-50)

• 41. Coherence (2013) — James Ward Byrkit. Eight friends at a dinner party during a comet passing discover alternate reality versions of themselves — a brilliantly controlled science fiction thriller made for $50,000 that demonstrates how premise and performance can substitute entirely for budget.
• 42. The Wailing (2016) — Na Hong-jin. A Korean village policeman investigates mysterious deaths after a Japanese stranger arrives — a slow-burn supernatural thriller of extraordinary ambiguity, tonal range, and sustained dread that represents South Korean genre cinema at its most ambitious.
• 43. Tell No One (2006) — Guillaume Canet. A French pediatrician receives an email suggesting his murdered wife may still be alive eight years after her death — the finest French thriller of the 2000s and one of the most satisfying mystery plot structures in the genre’s history.
• 44. Don’t Look Now (1973) — Nicolas Roeg. A couple in Venice grieving their drowned daughter encounter mysterious figures in a film that creates dread entirely through editing and atmosphere rather than conventional horror mechanics — one of cinema’s most formally inventive thrillers.
• 45. Anatomy of a Murder (1959) — Otto Preminger. James Stewart as a defense attorney in a murder trial — the most intelligent and morally complex courtroom thriller in cinema history, with Otto Preminger’s restrained direction allowing the moral ambiguities to breathe and accumulate.
• 46. Phone Booth (2002) — Joel Schumacher. Colin Farrell trapped in a Manhattan phone booth by a sniper who can see him — a near-perfect single-location thriller that runs exactly as long as its premise can sustain and delivers a tightly controlled experience of escalating claustrophobic dread.
• 47. The Hunt (Jagten) (2012) — Thomas Vinterberg. Mads Mikkelsen as a kindergarten teacher falsely accused of child abuse in a small Danish town — one of the most quietly devastating thrillers of the past decade and Mikkelsen’s finest screen performance before Hannibal made him internationally famous.
• 48. Prisoners (2013) is listed above — replacing with: Klute (1971) — Alan J. Pakula. Jane Fonda’s Oscar-winning performance as a call girl targeted by a killer, and the first entry in Pakula’s paranoia trilogy — one of New Hollywood’s most sophisticated explorations of surveillance, power, and female agency.
• 49. The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) (2006) — Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. An East German Stasi officer surveilling a playwright and his actress partner begins to be changed by what he witnesses — the most emotionally profound political thriller of the 2000s and an argument for art’s capacity to transform even those complicit in repression.
• 50. Gone Baby Gone (2007) — Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck’s directorial debut is a morally complex Boston missing-child investigation that builds to one of the most genuinely difficult ethical dilemmas in mainstream thriller cinema — a film where the right answer is genuinely unclear and the film has the courage to leave it that way.

Where to Start: Recommended Viewing Order

With 50 exceptional thrillers ranging across eight decades, every era of filmmaking, and multiple national cinemas, the most sensible approach is to begin with the Tier One films you have not yet seen. The Hitchcock canon — Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest — is essential viewing that remains as compelling as when first released. From there, work through Tier Two in whatever order the premises most compel you. The thriller genre rewards deep exploration: the more you watch, the better you understand the craft decisions that separate genuinely great thrillers from competent genre exercises, and the richer your appreciation of each new discovery becomes.

Conclusion

The fifty films in this guide represent the full range of what the thriller can achieve as a cinematic form — from Hitchcock’s formally perfect suspense mechanisms to the morally complex, stylistically innovative modern thrillers that continue to push the genre’s boundaries. Whether you are a lifelong devotee working through gaps in your knowledge or a newcomer looking for an entry point into serious cinema through the thriller’s accessible pleasures, this ranked list provides a comprehensive, rigorously selected guide to the best the genre has ever produced.