Home › Films like Chinatown.
Chinatown (1974) is the most perfectly constructed neo-noir film ever made. Every detail is there for a reason. Every scene pulls the mechanism tighter. The ending is inevitable from the first frame even though you cannot see it coming. If you have just watched Chinatown and want more films that operate in the same territory — corruption that goes all the way down, a detective who thinks he understands the world and discovers he understands nothing — these are the films to watch next.
Made the same year. Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who records a conversation he comes to believe is the prelude to a murder. The paranoia of Chinatown translated into pure psychological thriller.
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The classic noir Chinatown was in dialogue with. Mitchum. The fatalism. The sense that events are moving toward an inevitable conclusion regardless of what the protagonist does.
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Shares Chinatown's conviction that the institutions meant to protect us are corrupt. The most cynical ending in American crime cinema.
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The Coens debut is built on the same principle: nobody knows as much as they think they know. The catastrophic gap between what characters believe and what is actually happening.
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If Chinatown is about corruption being unbeatable, No Country is about evil being inexplicable. Both end with the protagonist's defeat.
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The Coens in Hammett territory. Gabriel Byrne. The hat. Prohibition-era crime with a fixer navigating between two mob bosses.
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Both films are about Los Angeles as a machine for destroying people. Both are among the greatest films ever made.
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The Conversation (1974), Blood Simple (1984), No Country for Old Men (2007), and Out of the Past (1947) are the films most similar to Chinatown.
Yes — The Two Jakes (1990), directed by and starring Jack Nicholson. Better than its reputation.