Film

Chinatown

Chinatown is a slow-burn, sun-bleached noir where the detective is smart enough to ask the right questions and still too small to stop what he uncovers. Jack Nicholson's Gittes chases an affair and stumbles into a conspiracy about land, water, and power that swallows everyone in it. Gorgeous, unhurried, and deliberately unsentimental — this is pulp with real teeth and an ending that refuses comfort.

TMDb rating4.0

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you like a mystery that cares more about corruption and moral rot than tidy puzzle-solving, and you savor a slow-burn build dressed in sun-bleached period detail.

Skip it if you need plot clarity as you go, since it withholds information and its long, talky stretches can feel like treading water.

What it asks of you: Its 130 minutes unfold at a measured pace, the plot lifting only gradually, and it repays steady attention to who says what and why.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

L.A. Confidential1997

Same city, same rot, three decades later — corruption, cover-ups, and moral compromise dressed up as a glossy, star-studded crime epic with a killer ensemble and a puzzle just as bleak.

But Bigger and splashier, more interested in twisty spectacle than in Chinatown's quiet, creeping dread.

L.A. Confidential poster

The Long Goodbye1973

Altman's shaggy, sun-bleached Philip Marlowe, made the very same year as Chinatown, trades doom for wry exhaustion and turns the detective story into a shrug at a world gone rotten.

But Elliott Gould's Marlowe is deliberately loose and mumbly; if you want tight plotting, this will frustrate you.

The Long Goodbye poster

The Conversation1974

Same year, same paranoid unease about California and power — Coppola's surveillance thriller about a man undone by exactly what he refuses to see.

But Much quieter and more interior — almost no action, and Hackman's character is closed-off rather than charming.

The Conversation poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Chinatown

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

In a Lonely Place1950

Both strip the detective genre down to expose rot in intimacy and institutions rather than solve a puzzle; this is the noir Chinatown was quietly answering twenty-four years later.

Bogart plays a screenwriter suspected of murder in a film less interested in whodunit than in how suspicion corrodes intimacy — the same unsentimental gaze Chinatown turns on love and power.

But No twisty plot to chase — it's a character study, and the pacing is theatrical by today's standards.

In a Lonely Place poster
More like this (8)

The Maltese Falcon1941

John Huston, who plays Chinatown's monstrous villain, directed this genre-defining private-eye picture — watch Bogart's Spade and you'll see exactly where Gittes's swagger comes from.

But Black-and-white studio-era pacing and dialogue-heavy plotting can feel stagey next to Chinatown's naturalism.

The Maltese Falcon poster

Body Heat1981

Lush, sweaty neo-noir that shares Chinatown's appetite for doom but turns the heat all the way up on desire, betrayal, and bad decisions.

But More erotic thriller than mystery — simpler plotting, hornier and less cerebral than Chinatown.

Body Heat poster

Devil in a Blue Dress1995

Denzel Washington as a detective navigating 1940s LA's racial and political fault lines — the same genre engine turned toward a story Chinatown never tells.

But Less structurally airtight; leans on atmosphere and social texture more than a tight mystery.

Devil in a Blue Dress poster

Klute1971

A small-town detective adrift in a corrupt, morally slippery city, anchored by a Jane Fonda performance as unsettled and exposed as Gittes ever gets.

But Slower and more psychological; the mystery plot is secondary to the character study.

Klute poster

Who Framed Roger Rabbit1988

Pure affectionate homage — noir plotting, a washed-up detective, corrupt LA power players, all played for laughs, cartoons, and a genuinely twisty mystery underneath.

But Family-friendly and cartoonish; if you want Chinatown's bleakness, this is nearly its opposite.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit poster

Inherent Vice2014

Paul Thomas Anderson's stoned detective riff, set in the same LA, chasing the same paranoid conspiracies about land and power through a haze of weed smoke.

But Deliberately disorienting plot, shaggy and hard to follow — closer to a fever dream than a mystery.

Inherent Vice poster

Water & Power: A California Heist2017

Robert Towne fictionalized California's real water wars to write Chinatown's plot; this film shows you the nonfiction version, still unresolved decades later.

The real scandal behind Chinatown's fictional water grab — modern California's drought and the political machinery still quietly deciding who gets to drink.

But It's a straightforward advocacy documentary with no style or suspense — purely informational, occasionally dry.

Water & Power: A California Heist poster

There Will Be Blood2007

Both use California's exploited landscape as a moral crime scene, tracing how greed for resources corrupts everyone who touches it, in wildly different decades and registers.

Swap the detective mystery for an oil epic but keep the subject — a Californian original sin of land, water, and family, where ambition curdles into monstrousness.

But Nearly three hours of slow-building dread with almost none of Chinatown's genre pleasures — arthouse patience, not pulp.

There Will Be Blood poster

People

Cast

Directing

Writing

Production

Recommended by

Macbeth, True Detective, Bosch, There Will Be Blood, The Expanse, Vertigo, Blow Out, Laura, The Third Man, City Hall, Angel Heart, The Parallax View, Blade Runner, Insomnia, Nightmare Alley, L.A. Confidential, Miller's Crossing, Double Indemnity, Citizen Kane, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Le Corbeau, Sunset Boulevard, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Long Goodbye, Lady in the Lake, All the King's Men, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Watchmen, The Big Sleep, Brick, Inherent Vice, The Devil We Know, Kiss Me Deadly, Mulholland Drive, Narc, Nightmare Alley, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Zootopia, The Batman, Stray Dog, Insomnia, Match Point, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, The Man Who Never Was, The Maltese Falcon, The Negotiator, The China Hustle, Blue Velvet, Devil in a Blue Dress, Klute, Water & Power: A California Heist, State of Play, Rango, Body Double, The Big Heat, Batman: The Long Halloween, Part One, Batman: Year One, Batman: The Animated Series, Gotham, Jack Reacher, The Bone Collector, Out of the Past, Simon & Simon, Greed, Citizen X, Killers of the Flower Moon, Rampart, Cop Land, Touch of Evil, Mulholland Falls, The Black Dahlia, The Naked City, Queer As Folk, The Draughtsman's Contract, The Great McGinty, Dead Again, Equus, The Two Faces of January, Night Moves, The Bridge, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Dark Blue, Shock Corridor, Triple 9, Cutter's Way, Sea of Love, Coma, Gilda, Hollywoodland, Sometimes a Great Notion, The Yakuza, The Driver, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, Black Rain, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Lone Star, Deep Cover, Strange Days, Lantana, Touki Bouki, Salt and Fire, The Gauntlet, Anon, Tequila Sunrise, Snake Eyes, April Fool's Day, Fabricated City, Wiseguy, Shadow of the Law, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, The Great Gatsby, Policewoman, Hickey & Boggs, Pride and Glory, Sleuth, Nocturne, Texas Killing Fields, Outland, Rising Sun, Batman: The Long Halloween, Part Two, Hustle, Street Smart, The Burning Secret, The Offence, Pretty Maids All in a Row, The Soft Kill, Against All Odds, Twilight, The Moonshine War, Marlowe, The Little Things, Madame Claude, Jealousy, The Outsider, A Pure Formality, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, A Soldier's Story, The King of Marvin Gardens, In the Electric Mist, Vega$, Lonely Hearts, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, Man with a Camera, Homicide, Butterfly, The Mattei Affair, The Betsy, Broken City, Harper, Rollover, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, Sharky's Machine, Violent City, The Girl Under the Bridge, 10 to Midnight, Nightfall, Night Falls on Manhattan, Eureka, Deception, Ungli, Slam Dance, Nightwatch, Edge of Darkness, Motherless Brooklyn, Gangster Squad, Dark Winds, Gone, Prescription: Murder, Charlie Chan in Honolulu, The Kennel Murder Case, The Public Eye, Winter Kills, The Story of Sin, The Gold Robbers, Maigret, The Big Easy, McQ, True Confessions, Villanelle, Mr. Arkadin