The best Rance Howard’s crime movies

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.

An American soldier who had been killed during the Vietnam War is revived 25 years later by the military as a semi-android, UniSols, a high-tech soldier of the future. After the failure of the initiative to erase all the soldier's memories, he begins to experience flashbacks that are forcing him to recall his past.

When petty criminal Luke Jackson is sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm, he doesn't play by the rules of either the sadistic warden or the yard's resident heavy, Dragline, who ends up admiring the new guy's unbreakable will. Luke's bravado, even in the face of repeated stints in the prison's dreaded solitary confinement cell, "the box," make him a rebel hero to his fellow convicts and a thorn in the side of the prison officers.

Two escaped convicts roll into the village of Happy, Texas, where they're mistaken for a gay couple who work as beauty pageant consultants. They go along with it to duck the police, but the local sheriff has a secret of his own.

When Chance (Brian Presley) returns home after five years in jail, he is determined to escape his past, start a new life and make peace with his father, (Ed Harris, Golden Globe® winner), who is the head of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang and serving a life sentence for murder. Upon his release, his dreams of a crime-free future begin to disintegrate when he is forced to assume his best friend's outrageous debt to a local mobster. Despite being thrust back into a world of organized fighting, drug dealing and ties to corrupt police agents, Chance falls in love with Pearl (Academy Award® nominee Taraji P. Henson) and the prospect of living a normal life seems almost within reach. But will he be able to escape the crimes of his father and his past?

A young man, Pat, visits the clan of gypsy-like grifters (Irish Travellers) in rural North Carolina from whom he is descended. He is at first rejected, but cousin Bokky takes him on as an apprentice. Pat learns the game while Bokky falls in love and desires a different life. Written by Jeff Hole

In this fact-based made-for TV film, Gary Gilmore, an Indiana man who just finished serving a lengthy stay in prison, tries to start anew by moving to Utah. Before long, Gary begins an ill-advised romance with the troubled Nicole Baker, a teenage single mother. As their relationship quickly deteriorates, Gary goes on a murderous rampage, leaving two dead. During his trial, he demands capital punishment; a media circus ensues and outsiders look to profit from his story.

Gary Coleman stars as a teenage arsonist. The authorities, friends, and neighbors warn his absentee parents until it is too late.