Best Drug dealer Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of drug dealer cinema — measured across 2,121 indexed frames from 29 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Drug dealer films over-index on handgun, beanie and car seat — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
Blood Father (2016)
Jean-François RichetDP Robert GantzIMDb 6.4TMDB 6.2See in full on FrameThrower →
Self-exiled somewhere in the dusty landscapes on the outskirts of Los Angeles, John Link--a rugged former convict, and now, a tattoo artist struggling to stay sober--sees his quasi-orderly life turn upside down, when he receives a desperate phone call from his estranged daughter, Lydia. On the run from a ruthless Mexican drug cartel, John and Lydia must navigate through a dangerous world of frail allegiances and merciless cut-throats, as they seek shelter in an inhospitable city. Can the grizzled father save his teenage daughter from this nightmare?
- 2
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Quentin TarantinoDP Andrzej SekulaIMDb 8.8TMDB 8.5See in full on FrameThrower →
Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) are two hitmen who are out to retrieve a suitcase stolen from their employer, mob boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). Wallace has also asked Vincent to take his wife Mia (Uma Thurman) out a few days later when Wallace himself will be out of town. Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) is an aging boxer who is paid by Wallace to lose his fight. The lives of these seemingly unrelated people are woven together comprising of a series of funny, bizarre and uncalled-for incidents.
- 3
Training Day (2001)
Antoine FuquaDP Mauro FioreIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
In Los Angeles, a city where streets are overrun by drug dealers, those who have sworn to uphold the law are breaking them to clean up the streets. Denzel Washington plays L.A.P.D. detective Alonzo Harris, a veteran narcotics officer whose methods of enforcing the law are questionable, if not corrupt. 'Training Day' follows Harris as he trains rookie Jake Hoyt over a 24-hour period. Ethical dilemmas arise for Hoyt as well as the audience as questions present themselves as to whether or not Harris' methodology for ridding the streets of South Central Los Angeles of drugs is right or wrong.
- 4
Moonlight (2016)
Barry JenkinsDP James LaxtonIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →
Three time periods - young adolescence, mid-teen and young adult - in the life of black-American Chiron is presented. When a child, Chiron lives with his single, crack addict mother Paula in a crime ridden neighborhood in Miami. Chiron is a shy, withdrawn child largely due to his small size and being neglected by his mother, who is more concerned about getting her fixes and satisfying her carnal needs than taking care of him. Because of these issues, Chiron is bullied, the slurs hurled at him which he doesn't understand beyond knowing that they are meant to be hurtful. Besides his same aged Cuban-American friend Kevin, Chiron is given what little guidance he has in life from a neighborhood drug dealer named Juan, who can see that he is neglected, and Juan's caring girlfriend Teresa, whose home acts as a sanctuary away from the bullies and away from Paula's abuse. With this childhood as a foundation, Chiron may have a predetermined path in life, one that will only be magnified in terms of its problems when he reaches his difficult teen years when peer pressure affects what he and many of his peers do, unless he follows Juan's advice of truly making his own decisions for himself.
- 5
The French Connection (1971)
William FriedkinDP Owen RoizmanIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
William Friedkin's gritty police drama portrays two tough New York City cops trying to intercept a huge heroin shipment coming from France. An interesting contrast is established between 'Popeye' Doyle, a short-tempered alcoholic bigot who is nevertheless a hard-working and dedicated police officer, and his nemesis Alain Charnier, a suave and urbane gentleman who is nevertheless a criminal and one of the largest drug suppliers of pure heroin to North America. During the surveillance and eventual bust, Friedkin provides one of the most gripping and memorable car chase sequences ever filmed.
- 6
Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Abel FerraraDP Ken KelschIMDb 7.0TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →
A police Lieutenant goes about his daily tasks of investigating homicides, but is more interested in pursuing his vices. He has accumulated a massive debt betting on baseball, and he keeps doubling to try to recover. His bookies are beginning to get agitated. The Lieutenant does copious amounts of drugs, cavorts with prostitutes, and uses his status to take advantage of teenage girls. While investigating a nun's rape, he begins to reflect on his lifestyle.
- 7
Taxi Driver (1976)
Martin ScorseseDP Michael ChapmanIMDb 8.2TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →
Travis Bickle is an ex-Marine and Vietnam War veteran living in New York City. As he suffers from insomnia, he spends his time working as a taxi driver at night, watching porn movies at seedy cinemas during the day, or thinking about how the world, New York in particular, has deteriorated into a cesspool. He's a loner who has strong opinions about what is right and wrong with mankind. For him, the one bright spot in humanity is Betsy, a worker on the presidential nomination campaign of Senator Charles Palantine. After an incident, he believes he has to do whatever he needs to make the world a better place.
- 8
We're the Millers (2013)
Rawson Marshall ThurberDP Barry PetersonIMDb 7.0TMDB 6.8See in full on FrameThrower →
After being robbed of a week's take, small-time pot dealer David is forced by his boss to go to Mexico to pick up a load of marijuana. In order to improve his odds of making it past the border, David asks the broke stripper Rose and two local teenagers to join him and pretend they're on a family holiday.
- 9
Blue Velvet (1986)
David LynchDP Frederick ElmesIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →
College student Jeffrey Beaumont returns to his idyllic hometown of Lumberton to manage his father's hardware store while his father is hospitalized. Walking though a grassy meadow near the family home, Jeffrey finds a severed human ear. After an initial investigation, lead police Detective John Williams advises Jeffrey not to speak to anyone about the case as they investigate further. Detective Williams also tells Jeffrey that he cannot divulge any information about what the police know. Detective Williams' high school aged daughter, Sandy Williams, tells Jeffrey what she knows about the case from overhearing her father's private conversations on the matter: that it has to do with a nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens, who lives in an older apartment building near the Beaumont home. His curiosity getting the better of him, Jeffrey, with Sandy's help, decides to find out more about the woman at the center of the case by breaking into Dorothy's apartment while he knows she's at work. What Jeffrey finds is a world unfamiliar to him, one that he doesn't truly understand but one that he is unable to deny the lure of despite the inherent dangers of being associated with a possible murder. Still, he is torn between this world and the prospect of a relationship with Sandy, the two who are falling for each other, despite Sandy already being in a relationship with Mike, the school's star football player.
- 10
Memento (2000)
Christopher NolanDP Wally PfisterIMDb 8.4TMDB 8.2See in full on FrameThrower →
Leonard Shelby is tracking down the man who raped and murdered his wife. The difficulty of locating his wife's killer, however, is compounded by the fact that he suffers from a rare, untreatable form of short-term memory loss. Although he can recall details of life before his accident, Leonard cannot remember what happened fifteen minutes ago, where he's going, or why.
What drug dealer films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a drug dealer frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — handgun is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- handgun4.3×
- beanie4.2×
- car seat3.4×
- windshield2.7×
- leather jacket2.6×
- wristwatch2.5×
- steering wheel2.5×
- plaid shirt2.4×
How drug dealer films are shot
Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate drug dealer from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 85%eye levelvs 69% baseline
What breaks the pattern
Pink Flamingos (1972) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.
Method
Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 2,121 frames from 29 films carrying the drug dealer label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.
Machine-readable: /api/list/drug-dealer
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