Movies like Sicario

Steven Soderbergh braids the drug war through a dozen lives — a judge appointed drug czar whose own daughter is using, DEA agents, a cartel wife, cops on both sides of the border — in colour-coded strands that never quite meet. It refuses a hero and refuses a win.

It is the ancestor of Sicario's whole worldview: the drug war as a self-sustaining machine that grinds everyone, where each crackdown just moves the problem down the line. Both are less interested in winning the battle than in the people caught in its gears.

The Coens drop a satchel of cartel money, an unstoppable killer and a bewildered old sheriff into the Texas borderlands, where the violence has simply outrun everyone's ability to understand it. Spare, patient, and without hope.

It shares Sicario's sense of a Southwest where evil is systemic and the law is always a step behind — and del Toro's Alejandro is a close cousin of Anton Chigurh, a quiet man who has stopped being a person and become a force. Both look at the border and see an ancient, indifferent violence.

Taylor Sheridan — who wrote Sicario — sends two brothers robbing banks across a dying West Texas to save the family land, with a pair of Rangers on their trail. Every character is sympathetic; the system is the real villain.

It carries the same Sheridan fingerprint: the modern American frontier as a place where institutions quietly crush ordinary people, procedural on the surface and mournful underneath. A gentler cousin of Sicario, but the same ache runs through it.

Sheridan again, now directing: a tracker and a young FBI agent investigate a death on a snowbound Wyoming reservation the law has mostly forgotten. Grief, cold, and a crime rooted in neglect.

It completes Sheridan's frontier triptych alongside Sicario: an outsider stepping into a broken system, procedural bones wrapped around a howl of loss, and violence that lands hard precisely because it is rare and real. Same cold eye, turned to the snow.

Kathryn Bigelow tells the decade-long CIA hunt for bin Laden as bleak procedure — interrogations, dead ends, a woman (Jessica Chastain) hollowed out by the chase — and never once tells you how to feel about any of it.

It shares Sicario's cold-eyed look at the machinery of the war on terror, and the same central figure: a driven professional who gets everything she was after and is emptied by the getting. Process as horror, ambiguity as honesty.

Ridley Scott films Cormac McCarthy's only original screenplay: a lawyer dips one toe into a single cartel deal and discovers the machine does not forgive, in dialogue that keeps stopping to stare into the abyss. Doomy, strange, unloved on release.

It is Sicario's dread distilled: the border underworld as an implacable force, the naive outsider who thinks he can touch it and walk away, and the slow, sick understanding that the decision was made long before he arrived.

David Ayer rides along with two LA patrol cops (Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Peña), all banter and bodycam, as a routine string of stops keeps pulling a thread that leads somewhere far above their pay grade. Intimate, then terrifying.

It shares Sicario's ground-level view of the drug war reaching up from the street, and the same lurch when small players accidentally brush against a cartel's true reach. Warmer and more human than Sicario — right up until it isn't.

Amat Escalante's austere Mexican drama watches an ordinary family destroyed after a teenage romance brushes against stolen cartel drugs, in long, plain takes that refuse to look away. A deep cut and a hard sit.

It shows the cost Sicario mostly keeps at arm's length — the civilians the machine chews up as a matter of routine. Same conviction that cartel violence is weather rather than plot, and the same flat refusal to soften any of it.

Gerardo Naranjo follows a young woman chasing a beauty pageant in Tijuana as a cartel swallows her whole, using her one errand at a time until there is no way back out. Kinetic and suffocating.

It is Sicario seen from the position of the powerless: not the agent with a gun but the civilian handed an impossible situation and told to comply. Same machine, same indifference — experienced from inside its grip rather than above it.

Matteo Garrone braids five strands of the Neapolitan Camorra — a timid tailor, a delivery boy, two idiot kids playing gangster — into a portrait of organised crime as an economy that quietly owns everyone in the frame. No bosses to root for, no exit.

It shares Sicario's core idea exactly: crime as a total system, indifferent and self-perpetuating, in which the individual is simply labour to be spent. A different country and a different mob, but the same cold truth about the machine.