The best Richard Pryor’s drama movies

A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgangers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.

Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.

A Vietnam vet returns home from a prisoner of war camp and is greeted as a hero, but is quickly forgotten and soon discovers how tough survival is in his own country.

'Sugar' Ray is the owner of an illegal casino and must contend with the pressure of vicious gangsters and corrupt police who want to see him go out of business. In the world of organised crime and police corruption in the 1920s, any dastardly trick is fair.

The misadventures of four groups of guests at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

This film is based on the true life story of Wendell Scott, the first black stock car racing champion in America.

After ex-con Joe Braxton violates his probation he is given a second chance, all he has to do is drive a group of special kids across the country.

A federal agent whose daughter dies of a heroin overdose is determined to destroy the drug ring that supplied her. He recruits various people whose lives have been torn apart by the drug trade and trains them. Then they all leave for France to track down and destroy the ring.

Goldie returns from five years at the state pen and winds up king of the pimping game. Trouble comes in the form of two corrupt white cops and a crime lord who wants him to return to the small time.

With his boss in the madhouse, a mobster is temporary boss of the criminal empire just as vicious rivals threaten the control of the empire.

Chronicles the rise and fall of legendary blues singer Billie Holiday. Her late childhood, stint as a prostitute, early tours, marriages and drug addiction are featured.

Although Jo Jo Dancer has achieved success as a stand-up comedian, he hasn't found happiness. After receiving severe burns in a narcotics-related incident, Jo Jo remains in a coma, and, while in this state, he looks back on his life. Drifting off into memories of his troubled childhood, Jo Jo revisits his youth, recalling his eventual rise to fame and the decadence that followed. As he considers his existence, he must decide if he wants to go on living or not.

Striking a zeitgeist nerve, Wild in the Streets stars Christopher Jones (Ryan's Daughter) as Max Frost, rock singer and poster boy for the counterculture revolution of the '60s. While performing with his band, The Troopers, at a political rally for Senate candidate Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild), Max seizes the opportunity to spout his own political philosophies which include, among other things, that the voting age should be lowered to 14. And thus begins the tale of Max's meteoric rise. But as he moves further and further into uncharted waters, first as a voice for the youth movement (or is he just a mouthpiece for opportunist politicians?) and then as a nominee for President of the United States, Max will not bend to the will of the old guard. Instead he begins implementing his own ideas of what would make a better world, including re-education camps for those over the age of 35 along with a liberal dosing of LSD.

A jazz musician falls in love with a comatose woman at a carny sideshow and takes her to his mansion to join his cabinet of sexual curiosities.

TV-pilot that was an ABC Movie of the Week in October of 1969 and then became a TV-series as part of the 1970-71 season.

This oddball counterculture comedy/drama follows Zalman King through a series of kooky misadventures while he searches for his life's purpose in New York City.