Film

The Seven Five

A breezy, unapologetically entertaining true-crime documentary built almost entirely around Michael Dowd's own gleeful, unrepentant confession of robbing drug dealers while wearing an NYPD badge. It moves like a heist film — fast, funny, morally slippery — letting a genuine monster charm you before the consequences land. Best for anyone who wants their true crime complicit rather than solemn.

TMDb rating7.3

If you liked this

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst2015

Another documentary built around a charismatic, self-incriminating subject who can't stop talking his way toward the truth. Same queasy pleasure of watching someone dig their own grave on camera.

But Slower and more deliberately constructed — less pulpy immediacy, more patient unraveling over six episodes.

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst poster

Cocaine Cowboys2006

Same era, same drug-money euphoria, same use of first-person interviews to make crime look glamorous before the bill comes due. Miami instead of Brooklyn, cocaine instead of cash grabs.

But Less personal — it's an ensemble of dealers and killers rather than one man's intimate confession.

Cocaine Cowboys poster

Serpico1973

The other side of the same coin: an honest NYPD cop trying to survive a department riddled with exactly the kind of corruption Dowd embodied. Pacino at his most furious and alone.

But A straight drama, not a documentary — no real footage, no real Dowd-style grin to the camera.

Serpico poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

On the Waterfront1954

Both are studies of institutional omertà — cops, dockworkers, whoever — where staying silent is the actual crime, decades before Dowd made silence profitable.

Brando's Terry Malloy lives inside the same code of silence and complicity that let Dowd operate for years — corruption as an entire ecosystem everyone quietly agrees not to see.

But Black-and-white, stagey by modern standards, and a courtroom-drama pace that's the opposite of the doc's breathless first-person hustle.

On the Waterfront poster
More like this (8)

American Gangster2007

A dramatized true story of another era's drug empire, with the same fascination for charisma outpacing conscience. Denzel Washington plays the kingpin the way Dowd plays himself.

But Runs longer and plays it straighter — glossier Hollywood filmmaking rather than raw archival grit.

American Gangster poster

The Wire2002

Fiction, but it dissects the same rot — cops who become indistinguishable from the criminals they police — with more patience and moral complexity than any true-crime doc could manage.

But A five-season commitment, and it demands attention that a 104-minute documentary doesn't.

The Wire poster

Dirty Money2018

An anthology series obsessed with the same question Dowd's story raises: how ordinary-looking people rationalize theft on an industrial scale, and what it costs everyone else.

But Each episode is a different case and crime, so you lose the single-character intimacy that makes Dowd's story work.

Dirty Money poster

Narcos2015

If you liked watching institutions get hollowed out from the inside, this scales the idea up to a whole country's police and government being bought by drug money.

But A sprawling dramatization rather than a documentary — Escobar's story told with Hollywood polish, not first-person confession.

Narcos poster

Making a Murderer2015

Another true-crime series that makes you sit with discomfort about who the system protects and who it destroys, told with the same patient access to real people.

But Focused on wrongful conviction rather than criminal bravado — a heavier, angrier watch with no charismatic villain to enjoy.

Making a Murderer poster

The Central Park Five2012

Same city, same era, same NYPD — but from the other side of the badge, showing what corrupted policing did to innocent teenagers instead of what it let a dirty cop get away with.

But A much grimmer, angrier film with no antihero swagger to soften the blow.

The Central Park Five poster

City of God2002

Same engine, different costume: first-person voiceover turning a criminal rise into something thrilling before the moral floor drops out.

The same trajectory — a kid drawn into crime by charisma and opportunity, narrating his own rise with unsettling glee — transplanted to Rio's favelas and told with astonishing visual energy.

But Subtitled, more violent, and set in a completely different country and criminal world with no cops at the center of it.

City of God poster

13th2016

Dowd's story is one grinning symptom; 13th is the disease — the systemic machinery of American policing that made his kind of corruption survivable for so long.

Ava DuVernay's documentary zooms out from one dirty cop to the whole system that made someone like Dowd possible — mass incarceration, race, and policing in America since Reconstruction.

But Far more serious and analytical, with no charismatic rogue to root against — this is history and argument, not confession.

13th poster

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Recommended by

The Shield, L.A. Confidential, Between the Lines, Serpico, Training Day, Prince of the City, We Own This City