Film

Richard Pryor’s startlingly raw, criminally underseen spin on the filmed autobiography. Recovering from third-degree burns, superstar comic Jo Jo Dancer looks back on growing up in a small-town bordello, working his way through the lower echelons of the nightclub circuit (enacting Pryor’s great “Mafia club” routine), and finally getting swallowed up by the LA drug scene. Any resemblance to Pryor is, of course, purely coincidental.

Groundbreaking choreographer Bob Fosse casts a jaundiced eye on his own life and career in this woundingly autobiographical, art-as-exorcism backstage drama. A brilliant Roy Scheider plays the director’s stand-in, a pill-popping, death-haunted showbiz veteran who looks back on his life in a series of audaciously over-the-top, Felliniesque flights of fancy that push the musical form to new heights of psychodramatic excess.