Movies Like Detective
If you loved Detective's Comedy and Crime 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
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.
Things Change
Jerry, a misfit Mafia henchman, is assigned the low-level job of keeping an eye on Gino, a shoe repairman fingered by the Mob to confess to a murder he didn't commit. But Gino's mistaken for a Mafia boss, and the two are suddenly catapulted to the highest levels of mobster status. Only friendship will see them through this dangerous adventure alive!
Johnny O'Clock
When an employee at an illegal gambling den dies suspiciously, her sister, Nancy, looks into the situation and falls for Johnny O'Clock, a suave partner in the underground casino. Selfish and non-committal by nature, Johnny slowly begins to return Nancy's affection and decides to run away with her, but conflict within his business threatens their plans. As Johnny tries to distance himself from the casino, his shady past comes back to haunt him.
His Kind of Woman
Career gambler Dan Milner agrees to a $50,000 deal to leave the USA for Mexico, only to find himself entangled with fellow guests at a luxurious resort and suspecting that the man who hired him may be the deported crime boss Nick Ferraro aiming to re-enter to the USA.
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.
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff
Lost Caverns Hotel bellhop Freddie Phillips is suspected of murder. Swami Talpur tries to hypnotize Freddie into confessing, but Freddie is too stupid for the plot to work. Inspector Wellman uses Freddie to get the killer (and it isn't the Swami).
5 Against the House
Former war-time Army buddies now students in college decide to rip off a Reno casino.
Johnny Dangerously
An honest, goodhearted man is forced to turn to a life of crime to finance his neurotic mother's skyrocketing medical bills.
More Movies Like Detective
Insomnia
Two Los Angeles homicide detectives are dispatched to a northern town where the sun doesn't set to investigate the methodical murder of a local teen.
Nightfall
An innocent man turns fugitive as he reconstructs events that implicate him for a murder and robbery he did not commit.
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.
Guardian Angels
A sleazy Paris nightclub owner and ex-detective flies to Hong Kong to rescue the young son of a friend murdered by the Chinese mob.
Le Samouraï
After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts, finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him.
Maniac
When a stranger enters a quiet, country town and is seduced by a sensuous married woman he unwittingly finds himself at the centre of a storm of sexual guilt and murder.
The Quiller Memorandum
After two British Secret Intelligence Service agents are murdered at the hands of a cryptic neo-Nazi group known as Phoenix, the suave agent Quiller is sent to Berlin to investigate.
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.
Heartbreakers
Max and Page are a brilliant mother/daughter con team who have their grift down to a fine science. Max targets wealthy, willing men and marries them. Page then seduces them, and Max catches her husband in the act. Then it's off to palimony city and the next easy mark.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with Detective (1985): Comedy and Crime 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 Detective.
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