Crime Movies That Get Under Your Skin and Stay There

Fincher's obsessive, near-forensic account of the hunt for a killer who was never caught — the dread comes from how much it withholds.

A father takes matters into his own hands after his daughter goes missing, and the film refuses to let anyone off easy, including him.

Two brothers rob banks to save the family ranch from the very bank foreclosing on it — a modern western with real class anger underneath.

Bong Joon-ho's fictionalized take on Korea's first serial killer case, mixing dark comedy with genuine despair at a broken system.

A young Arab inmate rises through a French prison's power structure — brutal, patient, one of the great crime films of its decade.

A teenager gets pulled into his extended family's crime business, ruled over by a grandmother who's scarier than anyone with a gun.

Cops and criminals swap identities inside Boston's underworld — Scorsese having pure genre fun without losing an ounce of tension.

An FBI agent gets in over her head crossing into the drug war's grey zone, shot with a dread that never once lets up.

Two mismatched detectives investigate missing girls in a stagnant post-Franco Spanish marsh town — moody, atmospheric, quietly great.

A cop undercover in the triads and a triad undercover in the police race to unmask each other first — the film Scorsese remade as The Departed, and just as good.

Three childhood friends reunite after tragedy resurfaces old wounds none of them ever actually healed from.

A grieving fiancé hunts down his partner's killer and decides punishment isn't enough — one of the most relentless revenge films ever made.

Four women left with their dead husbands' debts pull off the heist those husbands never finished — a thriller about who gets underestimated.

A hero-worshipping outlaw slowly curdles into an assassin — a Western shot like elegy, unbearably beautiful and unbearably sad.

A drifter's plan for revenge goes wrong almost immediately, and stays wrong — lean, unglamorous, and all the more unsettling for it.

A local private investigator searches for a missing girl in working-class Boston, and finds an ending with no comfortable answer.

A midwife gets pulled into the Russian mob after helping deliver a trafficking victim's baby — Cronenberg at his most controlled and vicious.

An FBI agent and a tracker investigate a death on a Wyoming reservation — quietly furious about a crisis most films ignore entirely.

A teenage girl hires a drunk, one-eyed marshal to hunt her father's killer — the Coens' version out-grits the original.