If you liked The Dark Knight

01 / Movie · 1995 · Michael Mann

Heat

Matches: A crime epic

A disciplined thief and an obsessive detective circle each other across Los Angeles, each recognizing himself in the other.

Nolan has named Heat as an inspiration for The Dark Knight, and you can see it in the opening bank job, the sprawling city and the respect between hunter and hunted. William Fichtner, the bank manager with the shotgun in The Dark Knight's first scene, also appears in Heat.

Nearly three hours long, with long stretches of character drama between the action.

A cop goes undercover in the Boston mob while a mobster goes undercover in the police, and both race to unmask the other.

The Departed has the same paranoid structure as The Dark Knight's second half, where nobody in the police can be trusted and every plan leaks. It moves faster and is funnier, and it won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Very violent and very profane, with an ending that is deliberately abrupt.

A cartoonist, two detectives and a reporter spend decades trying to identify the Zodiac Killer, and the search slowly consumes them.

Zodiac shows the cost of chasing a villain who taunts the public through the press, which is what the Joker does to Gotham. Where The Dark Knight gives you a confrontation, Zodiac gives you obsession, and the case is still officially unsolved.

Long and procedural, with lots of paperwork and few action scenes.

A brilliant surgeon saves a young boy's life instead of the mayor's, and years later learns that the boy has grown into a serial killer.

Monster is the best villain-as-philosophy story in anime. Johan, like the Joker, attacks people's sense of who they are, and the hero has to decide how far he will go to stop him. It is a slow-burn thriller that moves between Germany and Czech cities, with very little fighting.

74 episodes, with a slow middle stretch. Push through it.

The cartoon that defined Batman for a generation, with art deco Gotham, Kevin Conroy's voice and some of the best villain stories ever told.

It treats its villains with the same seriousness as The Dark Knight, most famously in "Heart of Ice", which reinvented Mr. Freeze as a tragic figure and won an Emmy. Mark Hamill's Joker is a different, playful kind of terrifying from Heath Ledger's.

Episodes are standalone and some are aimed more at children than others. Start from a list of the best ones.

The Joker takes over Arkham Asylum with Batman locked inside, and you have to fight, sneak and investigate your way out.

Arkham Asylum is the game that proved Batman could work as a player character. It was written by Paul Dini of the animated series and shares The Dark Knight's idea that the Joker's real game is to make Batman cross a line.

Its boss fights are its weakest part. The sequel, Arkham City, is bigger if you want more.

A killer strikes Gotham's mob families on every holiday for a year, while Batman, Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent try to stop him.

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's comic is one of the stories Nolan's films drew on, especially for Harvey Dent's fall and the mob-war plot. It reads like a detective noir, and Sale's art makes Gotham feel like a real city in the grip of winter.

It assumes you know Batman's main villains, and it is a whodunit with a disputed solution.