Looking for the Best in Black Cinema? Try Brown Sugar.

As the name-brand streaming services struggle to show profits and broker cable-esque bundling packages to cut costs, the most successful streamers are proving to be niche services, which curate specialized libraries for a specific target audience. We’ve spotlighted several such streamers in this space, most of them focusing on clearly defined genres or sensibilities; this month, we look at a service with an eye on one particular culture.

Brown Sugar, which started in 2016, promises on its site “hit movies and TV shows along with the largest collection of classic Black cinema, uncut and commercial-free.” Its library features programming about the Black experience, predominately by Black creators, and aimed primarily at Black audiences (while recognizing that those audiences are seeking all sorts of entertainment). There is a robust selection of Black cinema from the 1970s, the vaunted blaxploitation era, including titles from Ossie Davis, Rudy Ray Moore and Richard Roundtree, as well as cult titles like “The Harder They Come” and “Putney Swope,” and ’80s favorites like “Hollywood Shuffle” and “Beat Street.”

That era initially dominated the service’s library, but it has since broadened its offerings to include more contemporary romantic comedies, action thrillers, heartwarming dramas, and historical and true crime documentaries. It’s also cultivated a partnership with Bounce TV that gives viewers access to such long-running and popular shows as the soap opera “Saints & Sinners,” the rags-to-riches sitcom “Family Time” and the barbershop-set comedy “In the Cut.”

Subscription is a bargain, running only $3.99 per month (after a one-week free trial) or $42 for a year. Brown Sugar is available on desktop and a variety of streaming devices, including Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire. Image quality varies wildly — some films and shows are Blu-ray quality, but occasional older and less-cared-for titles may well have been mastered from VHS. But it’s worth the risk for the hidden gems the service offers.

Here are a few highlights from the current library:

‘Hit!’: “Lady Sings the Blues” was one of the first and most successful (critically and commercially) films of ’70s Black cinema; this 1973 effort reunited that film’s director, Sidney J. Furie, with two of its co-stars, Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor, this time for an action extravaganza that more resembled “The French Connection” than “Lady.” Williams plays a federal agent who goes after an international drug cartel after his daughter dies of a heroin overdose; Pryor is one of the team of outlaws and outcasts he puts together to get the job done when his superiors veto the mission. The result is fast-paced and funny (thanks primarily to the always-reliable Pryor), and filled with thrilling action beats.

‘Joshua’: The football star-turned-actor Fred Williamson was one of the most versatile and prolific of all the blaxploitation heroes, transitioning from the leading man of “Black Caesar” and “Three the Hard Way” into a one-man filmmaking machine, frequently writing, producing and directing his starring vehicles. Larry G. Spangler produced and directed this 1976 western, but Williamson wrote it and starred as the title character, a Black soldier who returns from fighting in the Civil War to discover that a gang of thieves has killed his mother — so he sets out for revenge. “There’re five of them,” the local sheriff warns him; he replies, “I just finished fighting in your war, sheriff, I killed nearly twice that many.” Spangler deftly combines the tropes of blaxploitation and spaghetti westerns — a combination that would clearly inspire Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” decades later — while also evoking “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” in the snowy, windy third act. It’s an entertaining genre stew, with one of the greatest closing lines. After one of the cornered thieves asks, “Who are you?,” Joshua responds: “I’m my mother’s son.”

‘Hoop Dreams’: The director Steve James and his partners Peter Gilbert and Frederick Marx spent five years filming the lives of Arthur Agee and William Gates, two promising Chicago kids who are recruited into an elite suburban high school known for its first-class basketball program. This could be the first step into lucrative careers in the N.B.A., but life is never quite that simple, and the power of James’s film lies in its patience, its willingness to spend so much time with these kids and their families that we share in their triumphs and setbacks. And while sports fans will find it compelling, it also serves as a welcome antidote to the easy theatrics of sports movies, particularly when big opportunities and dramatic moments go as they typically do in the real world.

‘Prince: Sign o’ the Times’: Prince’s directorial debut, the musical comedy-drama “Under the Cherry Moon,” was not well received upon its release in 1986, but his purple highness was never one to lick his wounds; he bounced right back with another feature directing effort the following year, albeit one in the safer territory of concert performance film. But it’s one of the finest examples of the form, an electrifying document of his live show promoting the album of the same name, shot in front of a hyped crowd of friends and fans at his own Paisley Park Studios. He’s backed by one of his tightest ensembles (including Sheila E., a star in her own right, on drums), and each number is a banger — particularly a rendition of “U Got the Look” that blows the roof off.

‘Six Degrees of Separation’: Will Smith was still known primarily as the Fresh Prince, via his early rap recordings and hit sitcom, when he flexed his dramatic muscles for this film adaptation of the Broadway play by John Guare. Stockard Channing reprises her stage role as the New York City socialite Ouisa Kittredge; she and her husband, the art dealer Flan (Donald Sutherland), are conned by Paul (Smith), a young Black man who credibly claims to be a classmate of their children (and, less credibly, the son of Sidney Poitier). The director Fred Schepisi (“Roxanne”) cleverly transforms the play’s direct-to-audience devices for the screen, and Guare’s heady themes of race, class and liberal guilt remain potent. And Smith shows, for the first but not last time, that he is much more than a charismatic comic personality.