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Blue Collar poster

Movies that feel likeBlue Collar (1978)

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.

If you loved Blue Collar, the closest films we have are Straight Time (1978), Pixote (1980) and Green Fish (1997). All three share Blue Collar's contemplative and gritty feel, which is what we rank on before quality.

Seen the big three already? The under-the-radar pick below is R (2010).

🍅 96% Rotten Tomatoes★ 7.5 IMDb ↗TMDB ↗dir. Paul Schradercontemplativegritty
5 of 12 streaming nowHBO Max · Amazon Prime Video · Criterion Channel

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See it on the Mood Map

If Blue Collar hit the spot, these will too

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

Both keep coming back to the same thing: robbery

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.

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

Contemplative and gritty in the same breath

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.

Green Fish poster
Green Fish
1997 · dir. Lee Chang-dong
★ 7drama · crime

Drama built on stillness, twice over

Returning home and finding his town drastically changed, a former soldier falls in with gangsters.

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

Both lean on grit more than on crime

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

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

Contemplative drama in both cases

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

The same preoccupation in both: robbery

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

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

R poster
R
2010 · dir. Tobias Lindholm
🍅 91%★ 7.1crime · drama

Crime with a pulse of grit, in both cases

Imprisoned for violent assault, Rune is placed in the hardcore ward, where his survival depends on quickly learning the prison's parallel world of rules, honor, and obligations.

My Name Ain't Johnny poster
My Name Ain't Johnny
2008 · dir. Mauro Lima
★ 7.2crime · drama

The drama is handled with the same confidence

The true story of João Guilherme Estrella ("Johnny"), a young middle-class bon vivant who became a big-time cocaine dealer in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s.

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

Crime in the same key

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.

The Thin Blue Line poster
The Thin Blue Line
1988 · dir. Errol Morris
🍅 100%★ 7.9crime · documentary

Crime approached the same way

The difference: Sits closer to documentary than Blue Collar does

One night in November 1976, after his car breaks down on a road outside Dallas, Randall Dale Adams accepts a ride from teenager David Harris. Harris is driving a stolen vehicle and, later that night, when Dallas police officer Robert Wood pulls the car over to check its headlights, he is shot and killed. A jury believes Adams is the killer, but stylized reenactments and interviews with key figures, conflicting testimonies and evidence are presented to argue that Adams was framed by a corrupt justice system, ultimately leading to his exoneration.

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

Same era, same wavelength

The difference: Takes it somewhere less contemplative than Blue Collar does

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.

Little Caesar poster
Little Caesar
1931 · dir. Mervyn LeRoy
🍅 96%★ 7.2drama · crime

Both are drama through and through

A small-time hood shoots his way to the top, but how long can he stay there?

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