Crime Movies Bucket List

Small-time swindlers dress as priests to rob peasants, and one of them tires of it.

A gangster forces a student into prostitution and watches her through a mirror.

A triad and his reckless little brother; Wong's first film, and the most conventional.

Fincher's Lisbeth Salander, with a Reznor score and the coldest Sweden on film.

A deaf man kidnaps a child to pay for his sister's kidney; the first of the revenge trilogy.

The feature cut of Dekalog 5: a murder and an execution, shot through green filters; it helped end the Polish death penalty.

A woman released after thirteen years for a murder she did not commit collects her debts.

A former ballplayer in 1990s New York is handed a cat and the wrong people's problem.

A hitman's routine, his mistakes and his internal monologue, to the Smiths.

Jodie Foster and her daughter locked in a safe room with three burglars outside.

A detective in the Weimar Berlin of 1929; Germany's most expensive series.

Sarah Lund and her jumper hunt a killer over twenty days; the original Forbrydelsen.

A Mumbai policeman and a gangster's prophecy of the city's end; India's first Netflix original.

A 13-year-old arrested for murder, four episodes each in a single take; the British series of 2025.

A body on the Oresund bridge, half in Sweden and half in Denmark; Saga Noren.

Mads Mikkelsen cooks for Will Graham; the most beautiful horror on network television.

Colin Farrell under prosthetics rises through Gotham's underworld after The Batman.

Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez solve murders in their Upper West Side building.

Omar Sy as a gentleman thief in Paris inspired by the Arsene Lupin books; the Louvre heist.

Peter Falk's rumpled detective, "just one more thing", with the murderer shown first.

Benedict Cumberbatch in modern London; the Reichenbach fall and the internet.

Two FBI agents interview serial killers in the 1970s; Fincher's Ed Kemper scenes.

Kate Winslet as a Pennsylvania detective in a town she cannot leave; the hoagie and the accent.

The Shelby gang in 1920s Birmingham with razor blades in their caps; Cillian Murphy.

A US marshal in his Kentucky home county and Boyd Crowder; Elmore Leonard on TV.

A motorcycle club in California as Hamlet; Charlie Hunnam and Katey Sagal.

A maximum-security prison in Emerald City; HBO's first drama and the model for everything after.

A Miami forensics analyst who kills killers; the first four seasons.

The Professor and his Dali-masked crew inside the Royal Mint of Spain; "Bella Ciao".

Nucky Thompson runs Atlantic City in Prohibition; Scorsese directed the pilot.