Movies Like Not on My Watch
If you loved Not on My Watch's Crime and Drama storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.
★ Top Picks

A Thousand and One
Struggling but unapologetically living on her own terms, Inez is moving from shelter to shelter in mid-1990s New York City. With her 6-year-old son Terry in foster care and unable to leave him again, she kidnaps him so they can build their life together. As the years go by, their family grows and Terry becomes a smart yet quiet teenager, but the secret that has defined their lives threatens to destroy the home they have so improbably built.

Polisse
Paris, France. Fred and his colleagues, members of the BPM, the Police Child Protection Unit, dedicated to pursuing all sorts of offenses committed against the weakest, must endure the scrutiny of Melissa, a photographer commissioned to graphically document the daily routine of the team.

The Damned Don't Cry
Fed up with her small-town marriage, a woman goes after the big time and gets mixed up with the mob.

Gangsters
Franck Chaievski and Nina Delgado are two undercover detectives of a French special force trying to identify two corrupts members of the Paris Police Force. Franck is pretending to be a gangster and Nina a prostitute living with him, and involved in a robbery of a fortune in diamonds, having seven deaths and some injured persons.

Paris by Night
Police commander Simon Weiss, head of the division that supervises Paris’s demi-monde, starts out on his nightly tour of bars, discos and strip clubs, making sure once again that the owners don’t bend the rules too far. Weiss knows he’s between a rock and hard place: it’s obvious that criminal gangs run rampant in his special domain, and even more obvious that they’re protected by higher-ups in the department.

White Heat
A psychopathic criminal with a mother complex makes a daring break from prison and then leads his old gang in a chemical plant payroll heist. After the heist, events take a crazy turn.

The Stranger
In 1930s Algeria, the daily life of an indifferent Frenchman is shaken by the death of his mother and a fateful encounter on a beach.

Saint Omer
A novelist attends the trial of a woman accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter by abandoning her to the rising tide on a beach in northern France. But as the trial continues, her own family history, doubts, and fears about motherhood are steadily dislodged as the life story of the accused is gradually revealed.
More Movies Like Not on My Watch

The Big Combo
Police Lt. Leonard Diamond vies to bring a clever, well connected, and sadistic gangster to justice all the while obsessing over the gangster's girlfriend.

Street Flow
Noumouké, from the suburb of Paris, is about to decide which brother's foot steps to follow - the lawyer student Soulaymaan or the gangster Demba.

American Skin
A Marine veteran working as a school janitor tries to mend his relationship with his son after a divorce. When his son is killed by a police officer found innocent without standing trial, he takes matters into his own hands.

A Gang Story
After growing up in a poor gypsy camp, Edmond Vidal, aka Momon, has retained a sense of family, unfailing loyalty and pride in his origins. Most of all, he has remained friends with Serge Suttel, with whom he first discovered prison life - for stealing cherries. The two of them inevitably got involved in organized crime. The team they formed, the Ganf Des Lyonnais, made them the most notorious armed robbers of the early 1970s. Their irresistible rise ended in 1974 with a spectacular arrest. Today, as he nears 60, Momon would like to forget that part of his life. He has found peace by retiring from the "business". He tends to his wife Janou, who suffered so in the past, and to his children and grandchildren, all of whom have great respect for this man of simple and universal values, so clear-headed and full of kindness. But then Serge Suttel, who has disowned nothing of his past, comes back into the picture.

The Enforcer
A noir thriller set in Miami, the film follows an enforcer who discovers his femme fatale boss has branched out into cyber sex trafficking, putting a young runaway he’s befriended at risk. He sacrifices everything to save the young girl from the deadly organization he’s spent his life building.

Cleveland Abduction
A single mother becomes Ariel Castro's first kidnapping victim, and finds herself trapped in his home with two other women for 11 years.

Shaft
Cool Black private eye John Shaft is hired by a crime lord to find and retrieve his kidnapped daughter.

Mildred Pierce
A hard-working mother inches towards disaster as she divorces her husband and starts a successful restaurant business to support her spoiled daughter.

Stillwater
Bill Baker, an American oil-rig roughneck from Oklahoma, travels to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter, Allison, who is in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, Bill builds a new life for himself in France as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate his daughter.

M
Remake of the 1931 Fritz Lang original. In the city, someone is murdering children. The Police search is so intense, it is disturbing the 'normal' criminals, and the local hoods decide to help find the murderer as quickly as possible.

Johnny Dangerously
An honest, goodhearted man is forced to turn to a life of crime to finance his neurotic mother's skyrocketing medical bills.

Panic
Alex is going through a midlife crisis and it has become a very difficult time for him. His marriage is struggling, he's worried about his son, and his job of killing people for his family has become the most stressful part of his life. He seeks the help of a therapist and meets a woman in the waiting room that he connects with.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with Not on My Watch (2017): Crime and Drama themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of Not on My Watch.
See full details for Not on My Watch (2017)