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Papillon poster

Movies that feel likePapillon (1973)

A man befriends a fellow criminal as the two of them begin serving their sentence on a dreadful prison island, which inspires the man to plot his escape.

If you loved Papillon, the closest films we have are Midnight Express (1978), Straight Time (1978) and A Short Film About Killing (1988). All three share Papillon's gritty and contemplative feel, which is what we rank on before quality.

Seen the big three already? The under-the-radar pick below is Blue Collar (1978).

🍅 74% Rotten Tomatoes★ 8 IMDb ↗TMDB ↗dir. Franklin J. Schaffnergrittycontemplative
5 of 12 streaming nowHBO Max · Amazon Prime Video · Criterion Channel

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See it on the Mood Map

If Papillon hit the spot, these will too

Midnight Express poster
Midnight Express
1978 · dir. Alan Parker
🍅 90%★ 7.5drama · crime

Two things both keep coming back to: prison and escape

Billy Hayes is caught attempting to smuggle drugs out of a country. The courts decide to make an example of him, sentencing him to more than 30 years in prison. Hayes has two opportunities for release: the appeals made by his lawyer, his family, and the American government, or the "Midnight Express".

Straight Time poster
Straight Time
1978 · dir. Ulu Grosbard
🍅 82%★ 7.4crime · drama

Both keep coming back to the same thing: prison

After being released on parole, a burglar attempts to go straight, get a regular job, and just go by the rules. He soon finds himself back in jail at the hands of a power-hungry parole officer.

A Short Film About Killing poster
A Short Film About Killing
1988 · dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski
🍅 91%★ 7.9crime · drama

Both land grit and stillness at once

Jacek climbs into the taxi driven by Waldemar, tells him to drive to a remote location, then brutally strangles him, seemingly without motive.

Pixote poster
Pixote
1980 · dir. Héctor Babenco
🍅 94%★ 7.9crime · drama

Gritty crime, and it commits to that

10-year-old Pixote endures torture, degradation, and corruption at a local youth detention center where two of its members are murdered by policemen who frame Lilica, a 17-year-old trans hustler. Pixote helps Lilica and three other boys escape and they start to make their living by a life of crime which only escalates to more violence and death.

Bonnie and Clyde poster
Bonnie and Clyde
1967 · dir. Arthur Penn
🍅 91%★ 7.7crime · drama

Drama with a pulse of stillness, in both cases

In the 1930s, bored waitress Bonnie Parker falls in love with an ex-con named Clyde Barrow, and together they start a violent crime spree throughout the country, stealing cars and robbing banks.

Blue Collar poster
Blue Collar
1978 · dir. Paul Schrader
🍅 96%★ 7.5drama · crime

Both lean on grit more than on crime

Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.

Pickpocket poster
Pickpocket
1959 · dir. Robert Bresson
🍅 93%★ 7.5crime · drama

Contemplative drama in both cases

Michel takes up pickpocketing on a lark and is arrested soon after. His mother dies shortly after his release, and despite the objections of his only friend, Jacques, and his mother's neighbor Jeanne, Michel teams up with a couple of petty thieves in order to improve his craft. With a police inspector keeping an eye on him, Michel also tries to get a straight job, but the temptation to steal is hard to resist.

Duck, You Sucker poster
Duck, You Sucker
1971 · dir. Sergio Leone
🍅 92%★ 7.5westernPrime Video

Contemporaries, and it shows

The difference: Easier on the stillness than Papillon

At the beginning of the 1913 Mexican Revolution, greedy bandit Juan Miranda and idealist John H. Mallory, an Irish Republican Army explosives expert on the lam from the British, fall in with a band of revolutionaries plotting to strike a national bank. When it turns out that the government has been using the bank as a hiding place for illegally detained political prisoners -- who are freed by the blast -- Miranda becomes a revolutionary hero against his will.

Close-Up poster
Close-Up
1990 · dir. Abbas Kiarostami
🍅 89%★ 8.2crime · drama

Cut from the same crime cloth

This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance poster
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
1962 · dir. John Ford
🍅 95%★ 8.1western

Reaching back to the 1960s for it

The difference: Leans harder into western than Papillon does

Questions arise when Senator Stoddard attends the funeral of a local man named Tom Doniphon in a small Western town. Flashing back, we learn Doniphon saved Stoddard, then a lawyer, when he was roughed up by a crew of outlaws terrorizing the town, led by Liberty Valance. As the territory's safety hung in the balance, Doniphon and Stoddard, two of the only people standing up to him, proved to be very important, but different, foes to Valance.

The Wrong Man poster
The Wrong Man
1956 · dir. Alfred Hitchcock
🍅 93%★ 7.4crime · dramaMax

Drama in the same key

In 1953, an innocent man named Christopher Emmanuel "Manny" Balestrero is arrested after being mistaken for an armed robber.

The Young and the Damned poster
The Young and the Damned
1950 · dir. Luis Buñuel
🍅 91%★ 8.2drama · crime

Both are crime through and through

The difference: Made in the 1950s, in a different era of the craft

A group of juvenile delinquents live a violent life in the infamous slums of Mexico City; among them Pedro, whose morality is gradually corrupted and destroyed by the others.

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The best-reviewed films that share Papillon’s defining feeling.