Compressed sensing (CS) based methods have recently been used to reconstruct magnetic resonance (MR) images from undersampled measurements, which is known as CS-MRI. In traditional CS-MRI, wavelet transform can hardly capture the information of image curves and edges. In this paper, we present a new CS-MRI reconstruction algorithm based on contourlet transform and alternating direction method (ADM). The MR images are firstly represented by contourlet transform, which can describe the images’ curves and edges fully and accurately. Then the MR images are reconstructed by ADM, which is an effective CS reconstruction method. Numerical results validate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of reconstruction accuracy and computation time.