6 Best Detective Movies Released Since 2020, Ranked
I don’t actually want a detective who always knows what he’s doing. Give me the one who misreads somebody. The one who follows the clue for the wrong reason. The one who solves the murder and realizes the answer has made his life worse. Perfect deduction is fun for an evening. Watching somebody discover that intelligence offers absolutely no protection from grief, desire, ego, or shame is where detective stories start getting dangerous.
That has been the great surprise of the last few years. The magnifying glass survived, but certainty did not. A clue can still crack a case. It can also expose a family, reopen something buried for decades, reveal that the detective has been lying to himself, or leave him staring at the person he was supposed to investigate and wishing the evidence would simply disappear.
6 'Enola Holmes' (2020)
Enola Holmes begins when sixteen-year-old Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) wakes to discover that her mother has vanished, leaving behind cryptic clues instead of an explanation. Her brothers Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft arrive with very different ideas about what should happen to her, so Enola escapes toward London, only to become tangled in another mystery involving runaway young lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge) and people who very badly want him dead.
Harry Bradbeer directed the film, and the best thing he does is let Enola’s intelligence feel youthful rather than miniature-Sherlock perfect. She decodes word games, hides money in absurd places, talks directly to us, gets things wrong, and improvises because nobody has yet taught her which kinds of curiosity are supposedly inappropriate. Even the mystery has this lovely rebellious streak. Solving it means recognizing that adults have built entire systems around deciding what a young person’s future should look like. Enola’s real breakthrough is realizing she can investigate her own life with the same seriousness she gives everyone else’s secrets.
5 'The Dry' (2020)
Federal agent Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) returns to the Australian town he fled years earlier after his childhood friend Luke is accused of murdering his wife and child before killing himself. The Dry gives Falk one immediate question to investigate and another one waiting underneath it: what really happened to Ellie Deacon, the teenage girl whose death decades earlier helped drive Falk out of town?
The drought makes the entire place feel guilty. Rivers have become dirt. Farms are failing. Old resentment has had years to bake into something hard. And then Falk receives the message, “Luke lied. You lied. Be at the funeral,” which is such a nasty little way of telling him the past has been keeping records. Robert Connolly, who directed the film, never rushes the town into becoming sinister. People mostly behave like people who remember exactly who Falk was at seventeen. That is worse. Every conversation contains history he cannot escape, and the murder investigation keeps rubbing against a much older question: how much of your innocence survives when everybody around you remembers a different version?
4 'The Kid Detective' (2020)
Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody) used to be the pride of his small town. As a child, he solved stolen bicycles, missing pets, and petty neighborhood mysteries from his own detective office. Now he is thirty-two, drinking too much, still working embarrassingly minor cases, and painfully aware that everyone who once called him a prodigy has moved on. Then Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) asks him to solve the murder of her boyfriend.
Do not let the title fool you. The Kid Detective is funny right up until it decides to become one of the bleakest movies on this list. Evan Morgan wrote and directed it, and he understands that Abe’s whole adulthood is built around a mystery he failed to solve as a child: the disappearance of his friend Gracie. Every ridiculous case since then has been a way of avoiding that wound. So when the murder investigation finally gives him something “real,” he starts behaving like the person he always imagined he would become. The ending then lands with almost no theatrics. Abe sits there and cries. That image wrecked me because solving the case finally makes him a real detective, and he discovers there was nothing remotely glamorous waiting on the other side.
Collider Exclusive · Villain Personality Quiz Which Criminal Mastermind Would Be Your Nemesis? Lecter · Joker · Moriarty · Chigurh
Four of the finest criminal minds ever put on screen. One of them would look at you and see something worth their time. Eight questions decide which one comes for you, why they picked you, and what they would want when they arrived.
🍷Lecter
🃏Joker
♟️Moriarty
🪙Chigurh
01
What would a criminal mastermind notice about you first? Great villains choose their opponents carefully. Something about you got their attention.
02
How do they make first contact? The introduction tells you everything about what is coming next.
03
What do you actually believe about right and wrong? Every nemesis is really an argument about the thing you believe most.
04
What finally gets under your skin? Everybody has a pressure point. Finding yours is the whole plan.
05
They have made their move. How do you fight back? This is the part of the film where the audience finds out who you are.
06
What would they use against you? A good villain never brings a weapon you have not already handed them.
07
What do they actually want from you? The money is never the point. Something else always is.
08
How does it end between the two of you? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who comes for you.
The Case File Is Complete Your Nemesis Is…
Four criminal masterminds. One of them was always going to be yours. Here is who comes for you, why they picked you out of everyone available, and what they want from the encounter.
Hannibal Lecter
Your nemesis does not want to beat you. He wants to know you completely, and he is patient enough to wait for it. The frightening part is how good the conversation is.
- Lecter is the most dangerous kind of opponent: the one who finds you interesting. He never raises his voice, because he has never needed to.
- You keep a great deal to yourself and you are careful about what you show. That reserve is exactly the door he would knock on.
- The films understood something other thrillers missed. The horror is not the violence. It is being perfectly understood by the wrong person.
- He would be unfailingly polite about all of it. That is the worst part.
The Joker
Your nemesis is not after money, territory or revenge. He is after a demonstration, and you are the person he has chosen to prove his point on.
- The Joker only picks opponents who believe in something. Your decency is not a defence against him. It is the entire reason he showed up.
- He has no plan you can predict and nothing you can take away, which removes every tool you would normally reach for.
- His whole argument is that you are one bad day away from being him, and you would spend the rest of your life proving him wrong.
- He would call it a magic trick. You would call it the worst night of your life.
Moriarty
Your nemesis respects you, which sounds flattering until you work out what it means. He chose you because nobody else was worth his time.
- Moriarty is the original criminal mastermind, the template every later one borrows from: a mind the equal of the hero's, pointed the wrong way.
- You enjoy being the cleverest person in the room. He is counting on exactly that, and he has already built the room.
- This is the rare nemesis who would be genuinely disappointed if you lost badly. He needs the game to be worth playing.
- It ends the way these things always end. Two people, one problem, and only one way down.
Anton Chigurh
Your nemesis has no personal interest in you whatsoever, and that is precisely what makes him unsurvivable. You are not a rival. You are a stop on the way.
- Chigurh does not negotiate, gloat or explain. He arrives, he asks one question, and the answer was decided long before you opened your mouth.
- You trust yourself to handle things. He is the one problem in the world that has no interest in how capable you are.
- No Country for Old Men rewrote the screen villain by removing the thing audiences quietly rely on: the sense that talking might work.
- Call it. He will wait.
3 'The Batman' (2022)
The Batman drops Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) into his second year as Batman, when Gotham’s mayor is murdered and the Riddler (Paul Dano) begins leaving ciphers, riddles, photographs, and bodies specifically designed to expose corruption throughout the city. Lieutenant James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) treats Batman less like a superhero than a deeply strange consultant who happens to be extremely useful at crime scenes. It’s like watching a dense Batman cartoon film, that’s live-action.
That distinction makes the movie sing. Bruce studies blood patterns. He reconstructs murders. He stares at photographs until something breaks loose. And crucially, he makes mistakes. The whole “el rata alada” trail is not there to prove he is a genius. It proves the Riddler is sometimes ahead of him. Matt Reeves directed the film, and his Gotham feels like a city Batman has been watching without actually understanding. By the time Bruce learns what happened with his father, the Renewal Fund, Falcone, and the city’s institutions, the case has turned inward. “Vengeance” sounded righteous when he was beating criminals in alleys. Then he hears one of the Riddler’s followers use the same word. That is the deduction that actually changes him.
2 'Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery' (2022)
Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) receives an invitation to billionaire Miles Bron’s (Edward Norton) private Greek island, where a group of wealthy friends have gathered for an elaborate pretend murder mystery. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery initially seems like Blanc has wandered into an extremely expensive party game. Then an actual death occurs, and all the cheerful talk about friendship starts looking suspiciously like a collection of business arrangements held together by one rich man.
The funniest thing about Blanc here is how irritated he becomes by stupidity. He wants complexity. He practically needs it. Miles has surrounded himself with people who keep describing themselves as “disruptors,” and Blanc spends much of the movie assuming that somewhere underneath all this wealth must be a brilliant scheme. Rian Johnson directed the film and eventually delivers a wonderful insult to that assumption. Sometimes the answer is obvious because the person responsible really is that obvious. The layers came from everyone else protecting him. That is such a perfect detective-story joke: Blanc’s biggest obstacle is believing the mystery deserves to be smarter than it is.
1 'Decision to Leave' (2022)
Detective Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) begins investigating the death of a man who fell from a mountain, and suspicion quickly settles around the dead man’s Chinese widow, Seo-rae (Tang Wei). Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave should therefore be a story about whether she killed her husband. Very quickly, it becomes a much more uncomfortable story about what happens when the investigator starts wanting a particular answer.
I could watch Hae-jun and Seo-rae observe each other forever. He watches her through surveillance binoculars, studies her habits, records notes, translates her words, and gradually turns police procedure into intimacy. Hae-jun wants to understand Seo-rae because he is a detective. He wants to misunderstand her because he is in love. Even tiny things become unbearable: the voice recordings, the hand cream, the way she uses his own language back at him. And then that ending. Sea instead of mountain. A hole dug in wet sand. Hae-jun desperately searching while the tide keeps erasing what he is looking for. Most detective stories end when the investigator finally sees the truth. Decision to Leave finds something far crueler. Hae-jun understands the woman at the exact moment she makes herself impossible for him to find.
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