Best movies like In the Heat of the Night

A hard-nosed cop reluctantly teams up with a wise-cracking criminal temporarily paroled to him, in order to track down a killer.

This film relates the story of a tightly connected Afro-American community informally called Colored Town where the inhabitants live and depend on each other in a world where racist oppression is everywhere, as told by a boy called Cliff who spent his childhood there. Despite this, we see the life of the community in all its joys and sorrows, of those that live there while others decide to leave for a better life north. For those remaining, things come to a serious situation when one prominent businessman is being muscled out by a white competitor using racist intimidation. In response, the community must make the decision of whether to submit meekly like they always have, or finally fight for their rights.

Matt Lee Whitlock, respected chief of police in small Banyan Key, Florida, must solve a vicious double homicide before he himself falls under suspicion. Matt Lee has to stay a few steps ahead of his own police force and everyone he's trusted in order to find out the truth.

A man on the run from his own sins, finds himself in a small border town in Texas, impersonating a reverend. The town are quickly drawn to the man's unorthodox sermons, but so is a police chief who has his suspicions.

Jesse Stone and Captain Healy are shot during an unauthorized stake-out in Boston. Meanwhile, a cryptic letter sent from Paradise leads the mother of a kidnapped child to Stone. Though her son was declared dead, she hopes he will reopen the case.

A small southern town has just been rocked by a tragedy: a young woman has been violently raped. The white town fathers immediately declare that the attacker had to be black, and place the blame on Garth, a young black man. Assuming that the men in white sheets aren't intent on holding a fair and impartial trial, Garth takes to the woods as the Klansmen lynching party hunts him down.

A sheriff begins an investigation into the death of a local transsexual after hearing that high ranking politicians may have been involved. Although he is homophobic, his investigation causes him to be rejected by others, forcing him to seek help from the people he once despised.

Private eye Jake Gittes lives off of the murky moral climate of sunbaked, pre-World War II Southern California. Hired by a beautiful socialite to investigate her husband's extra-marital affair, Gittes is swept into a maelstrom of double dealings and deadly deceits, uncovering a web of personal and political scandals that come crashing together.

A young lawyer defends a black man accused of murdering two white men who raped his 10-year-old daughter, sparking a rebirth of the KKK.

Colorado Springs, late 1970s. Ron Stallworth, an African American police officer, and Flip Zimmerman, his Jewish colleague, run an undercover operation to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.

"Dirty" Harry Callahan is a San Francisco Police Inspector on the trail of a group of rogue cops who have taken justice into their own hands. When shady characters are murdered one after another in grisly fashion, only Dirty Harry can stop them.

A man in a gleaming white suit comes to a small Southern town on the eve of integration. He calls himself a social reformer. But what he does is stir up trouble--trouble he soon finds he can't control.

An abused wife heads to California to become a movie star while her nephew back in Alabama has to deal with a racially-motivated murder involving a corrupt sheriff.

No one is safe when seemingly random killings emerge as a deadly pattern intended to usher in the end of the world. A murder victim with the same DNA as Christ. A serial killer mimicking the deaths of the 12 Apostles. Inspector Niemans and a young, rebellious detective team up with a beautiful expert in religion to crack the case before their elusive suspect completes the cycle of terror, paving the way to an even bigger bloody catastrophe.

In a rural town in Louisiana, a black Master Sergeant is found shot to death just outside the local Army Base. Military lawyer, Captain Davenport—also a black man—is sent from Washington to conduct an investigation. Facing an uncooperative chain of command and fearful black troops, Davenport must battle with deceit and prejudice in order to find out exactly who really did kill the Master Sergeant.

Walter Lee Younger is a young man struggling with his station in life. Sharing a tiny apartment with his wife, son, sister and mother, he seems like an imprisoned man. Until, that is, the family gets an unexpected financial windfall.

Mitch McDeere is a young man with a promising future in Law. About to sit his Bar exam, he is approached by 'The Firm' and made an offer he doesn't refuse. Seduced by the money and gifts showered on him, he is totally oblivious to the more sinister side of his company. Then, two Associates are murdered. The FBI contact him, asking him for information and suddenly his life is ruined. He has a choice - work with the FBI, or stay with the Firm. Either way he will lose his life as he knows it. Mitch figures the only way out is to follow his own plan...

When her best friend vanishes during a girls' trip to Croatia, Beth races to figure out what happened. But each clue yields another unsettling deception.

In the post–World War II South, two families are pitted against a barbaric social hierarchy and an unrelenting landscape as they simultaneously fight the battle at home and the battle abroad.

Roper, a hostage negotiator catches a murderous bank robber after a blown heist. The bank robber escapes and immediately goes after the man who put him behind bars.

In late 1940s Los Angeles, Easy Rawlins is an unemployed black World War II veteran with few job prospects. At a bar, Easy meets DeWitt Albright, a mysterious white man looking for someone to investigate the disappearance of a missing white woman named Daphne Monet, who he suspects is hiding out in one of the city's black jazz clubs. Strapped for money and facing house payments, Easy takes the job, but soon finds himself in over his head.

A black police detective must solve a strange case of a kidnapped boy and deal with a big racial protest.

A Mississippi district attorney and the widow of Medgar Evers struggle to bring a white supremacist to justice for the 1963 murder of the civil rights leader.

Deputy Sheriff Joe "Deke" Deacon joins forces with Sgt. Jim Baxter to search for a serial killer who's terrorizing Los Angeles. As they track the culprit, Baxter is unaware that the investigation is dredging up echoes of Deke's past, uncovering disturbing secrets that could threaten more than his case.

A police detective's investigation of a prostitute's murder points to his best friend.

An enigmatic young woman has been murdered in a small California coast town. The investigation by the local sheriff uncovers a complex web of relationships centering on the victim; the scattered trail of evidence ranges from a mysterious photograph to the victim's own dog. During the investigation, the sheriff meets and becomes romantically involved with a woman whose connection to the murder is ambiguous.

Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, battles through one of his career-defining cases.

Undertaker L.B. Jones, the richest black man in his county of Tennessee, is divorcing his wife for infidelity with a white policeman. Taking a stand against racism, he is greeted with a hostile bunch of Southern bigots and other various stereotypes.

Two FBI agents investigating the murder of civil rights workers during the 60s seek to breach the conspiracy of silence in a small Southern town where segregation divides black and white. The younger agent trained in FBI school runs up against the small town ways of his partner, a former sheriff.

A small-town police chief investigating a murder is offered help by a self-described psychic. However, when the chief discovers that the "psychic" is in possession of information known only to the police, he suspects that the man may be more involved in the case than he lets on.

After several locals are viciously murdered, a Louisiana sheriff starts to suspect he may be dealing with a werewolf.

A seamstress recalls events leading to her act of peaceful defiance that prompted the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.

In 1965 Alabama, an 11 year old girl is touched by a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. and becomes a devout follower. But her resolution is tested when she joins others in the famed march from Selma to Montgomery.

When six-year-old Ruby Bridges is chosen to be the first African-American to integrate her local elementary school, she is subjected to the true ugliness of racism for the first time.

After a long time in the army, an Afro-American soldier returns to his hometown, where, years ago, his brother was executed for the rape and murder of two white girls. The commando believes his brother to have been innocent and seeks a proof for that, but there are some people in the town who will stop at nothing to hide the secrets of their past...

Two women, black and white, in 1955 Montgomery Alabama, must decide what they are going to do in response to the famous bus boycott led by Martin Luther King.

In 1964, members of the Ku Klux Klan murdered three Civil Rights workers who had traveled to the South to encourage African-American voter registration. Examines the last three weeks in the lives of the slain activists.

An enigmatic man (Sidney Poitier) returns to his Alabama hometown as his sister is dying of cancer and incites the suspicion of notable town officials.

The true story of the US Government's 1932 Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiments, in which a group of black test subjects were allowed to die, despite a cure having been developed.

Spurred by a white woman's lie, vigilantes destroy a black Florida town and slay inhabitants in 1923.

FBI agent Frank LaCrosse tries to catch a serial killer who kidnapped his son.

Three black revolutionaries gun down two New York City police officers. The subsequent investigation puts a white assistant DA and a black police detective on the trail of the killers that leads from New York to San Francisco and down to New Orleans.

Racial tensions threaten to explode when a black man is elected sheriff of a small, racially divided town in the Deep South.

Following a series of drug deals and murders, three criminals -- Fantasia, Ray Malcolm and Pluto -- travel from Los Angeles to Houston, finally arriving in a small Arkansas town to go into hiding. Two detectives from the LAPD, who are already on the case, contact the town's sheriff, Dale Dixon, to alert him of the fugitives' presence in the area. Underestimating Dixon, the criminals have no idea what they are about to face.

J.J. is a rookie in the Sheriff's Department and the first black officer at that station. Racial tensions run high in the department as some of J.J.'s fellow officers resent his presence. His only real friend is the other new trooper, the first female officer to work there, who also suffers similar discrimination in the otherwise all-white male work environment. When J.J. becomes increasingly aware of police corruption during the murder trial of Teddy Woods, whom he helped to arrest, he faces difficult decisions and puts himself into grave personal danger in the service of justice.

A pregnant white Southern girl and a black New York lawyer, both on the run in rural Texas, meet up in a boarded-up, abandoned house and realize they both need each other in order to survive.

Just as her life is coming together, Allison experiences a terrible tragedy when her boyfriend is murdered by an intruder from whom the woman herself barely escapes. The police capture a man they believe to be the killer, but Allison, still unsettled, has her doubts. Things take a frightening turn when she meets her friend's new boyfriend and suspects him to be the killer.

Election Night 1979: Margaret Thatcher is about to come into power. A young black man is held on suspicion of murdering his pregnant wife. Officers Karn and Wilby, racist to the core and high on the prospect of a Conservative Party victory, try to lure the suspect into a quick confession. But the night has just begun...Callous humiliation gives way to a barrage of sinister violence, leading to a devastating conclusion.Written by Barrie Keefe, who was behind the British classic The Long Good Friday, SUS is an emotionally charged and incredibly tense crime drama that serves as a powerful outcry against past institutional racism. But in the age of counter-terrorism SUS also begs the question: has history caught up with us?

Three white kids travel down to Mississippi to help with voter registration. Murder, sex slavery and general unsavoriness follow.

Set in the 1960s, Christmas in Canaan is a drama about a black family and a white family that learn to love each other out of their Christian beliefs.