10 great free mysteries you should stream right now

Anchored by three brilliant performances from Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and Jake Gyllenhaal, Zodiac is riveting from front to back, in part because the mystery is never solved. What matters most is the mystery itself and the people tangled in its web.

Featuring one of the best performances of Guy Pearce’s career, Memento is riveting precisely because it’s so mind-bending. It also signaled the obsession with time that would define much of Nolan’s career.

As they work toward identifying a potential suspect, they begin to realize the gravity of the evil they’re dealing with and must work against the clock to stop this killer before they strike again.

Costner and Sean Young are both terrific, but as you might expect, Gene Hackman walks away with the movie.

A great detective yarn that doubles as a surprisingly current meditation on race, In the Heat of the Night follows a Black detective from Philadelphia who teams up with a local police chief to investigate a murder in a small Georgia town. The racism of this police chief courses under the entire film, and the uneasy alliance the two men form is deeply complicated.

Sidney Poitier has never been better than he is  as Virgil Tibbs, and In the Heat of the Night is brilliant in part because it understands that there are many ways a person can be racist, and some are subtler than others. This movie won Best Picture in 1968, and it remains as relevant in 2025 as it was back then.

A classic mystery caper, Charade has so much plotting in it that it can be hard to get your arms around it. The film follows Audrey Hepburn as a woman who falls for a man while on a skiing vacation. And he’s not just any man; he’s Cary Grant! Can you blame her?

When she reunites with that man in Paris and discovers that her estranged husband has been murdered, she learns that her husband hid a vast fortune somewhere following World War II. As allegiances shift, the race to find the missing money continues to unfold, and hilarity ensues.

A faux-documentary, Lake Mungo tells the story of one family’s reckoning after their daughter dies in a suspicious drowning. The family eventually brings in a parapsychologist, and together they learn about the double life their daughter led and all the ways she still haunts them today.

Lake Mungo is a ghost story, but one that features a number of twists and turns as the family at the movie’s center attempts to determine whether they’re actually being haunted or simply being taken in by their own grief.

A mystery movie of a totally different kind, The Lost City of Z tells the true story of Percy Fawcett, a 20th-century explorer who made groundbreaking discoveries in the Amazon. As he continues venturing out into the vast wilderness of the Amazon, he becomes obsessed with the idea that the natives living in the Amazon once had a vast civilization.

Starring Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett, an explorer addicted to the thrill of the unknown, The Lost City of Z is a sprawling epic about one man who believes he can solve an ancient riddle, and is willing to die trying.

Donnie Darko might not, on its face, seem like a mystery movie. Underneath, though, the movie is filled with questions that it will eventually answer. Donnie’s belief that the apocalypse is imminent, and the plane that crash lands in his bedroom all create the image of a world in which the real has blended with the imagined.

Part of the reason the movie has become a classic in the decades since its release is that it slowly begins to solidify what’s real and what isn’t, even as it doesn’t resolve every mystery it presents over the course of its running time.

12 Angry Men is set almost entirely in a single room, and nevertheless feels like one of the more cinematic movies ever made. The film focuses on a jury as they deliberate over a single murder case. While most of the jurors are initially convinced that the man on trial is guilty, a single juror begins to sway others that there’s more to this case than meets the eye.

Featuring a number of legendary actors, including Henry Fonda in the lead role, 12 Angry Men still holds up all these years about the ways that our identities shape how we interpret even the facts in front of our nose.