Movies Like Heat: 12 Crime Films That Earn Their Length

This is where Heat starts. Michael Mann's first feature gives you James Caan as a safecracker who wants one big score and a normal life, and cannot have both. You can see Mann working out everything he would perfect fourteen years later. The night city, the code, the quiet talk about who these men are when the work is done.

Watch the diner scene where Caan lays his whole life out on a napkin. It is the seed of every great Mann conversation, including the coffee shop scene in Heat.

Before Mann there was Jean-Pierre Melville, the French director who made crime feel like a religion of cool. Le Cercle Rouge follows a thief, a cop, and a marksman toward one long, almost silent heist. Nobody raises their voice. The film trusts you to watch faces and wait. If Heat felt grown up to you, this is the film it grew up on.

The other Melville you have to see. Alain Delon plays a hit man so disciplined his apartment is a monk's cell. The film is mostly looks, footsteps, and rules. It is the purest version of the lone professional that Heat and a hundred films after it keep chasing. Watch it once and you start seeing it everywhere.

Robert Mitchum, old and tired, plays a small time Boston crook running out of road. There are no heroes here and no big speeches, just men selling each other out to stay free a little longer. Roger Ebert loved how plain and sad it is.

If you like that Heat treats criminals as working men with bills and fear, this is the bone honest version of that idea.

William Friedkin's cop movie is all obsession and pavement. Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle is not a good man, he is a relentless one, and the film never cleans him up. The chase under the train still has not been topped. It is the procedural that Heat's cop side comes from, the idea that the hunt can eat a person alive.

Friedkin again, ten years later, with a counterfeiter and the agents who want him. It is sleazy, stylish, and has a chase that rivals his own French Connection. This one is underseen and should not be. If you want Heat's Los Angeles at its most neon and dangerous, start your car here.

Mann himself, back in Los Angeles at night, with Tom Cruise as a contract killer riding in Jamie Foxx's cab. The whole city glows. Cruise plays cold so well it scares you. This is the closest Mann came to making Heat again, a long night of two men who could not be more different stuck in the same car.

John Frankenheimer, near the end of a long career, made one of the great no nonsense thrillers about professionals who do not trust each other. The car chases through France are real, fast, and terrifying because nothing is faked. If Heat's bank job is your favorite kind of scene, Ronin is two hours of that feeling.

Curtis Hanson turned a thick James Ellroy novel into a clean, vicious story about three cops and a rotten city. Everyone is compromised. The plot is dense but the people are clear. It shares Heat's belief that Los Angeles is a character, and that good and bad are mostly costumes men put on for the day.

Denis Villeneuve's border thriller is Heat's grandchild. The tension is procedural and almost unbearable, built from convoys, silence, and people who will not tell you the truth. Roger Deakins shoots it like a nature film about predators.

Watch the traffic jam at the border with the lights off and your phone in another room. It is one of the most tense scenes of the last twenty years.

Ben Affleck's Boston heist movie wears its love of Heat openly, and earns it. The robberies are tense, the city is specific, and the cops and robbers are caught in the same trap of who they were raised to be. It is the most direct modern heir to Mann, made by someone who clearly watched Heat a hundred times.

We ran this one a couple of weeks ago, and it belongs here too. Brian De Palma and Al Pacino tell the story of a man who swears he is done with the life while the life quietly closes around him. Like Heat, it is really about a professional who cannot step out of his own code. If you missed it, the Grand Central chase is one of the best things in either film's decade.