Best Drama Movies to Watch on Netflix (Page 5)
In life and cinema, drama is everywhere. You’ll find it in thrillers, animations, romances, you name it. For entertainment that explores the human experience with sensitivity and sincerity, here’s a mixed bag of the best dramas to stream now.
Remember the creepy blind nun from the Spanish horror film Veronica? While many nun-related horror films have nuns as its horror element, this time it’s the nun that gets spooked in Sister Death. The new release expands on her backstory, taking the story back in history, in her start as a novitiate in the former […]
Painkiller is a dramatized account of the opioid crisis that details how Purdue Pharmaceuticals manufactured and marketed the highly addictive pain medication OxyContin. Before each episode, the family member of an opioid victim recounts how the drug scarred their lives. Although the intentions seem righteous, the execution begs to differ. The drama leans heavily into […]
Prayers for the Stolen takes more time to observe life in its rural town, than to showcase the action and violence inflicted by the cartels that pass by. It’s a needed perspective. This move drives home how long these cartels were left unaddressed, as the women of the town have gotten used to the danger […]
This sensitive and elegantly crafted melodrama recognizes that a death in the family doesn’t have to lead to the same expressions of mourning we expect from movies; there might not be any real sadness at all. But when different family members come together again and bring their own personal conflicts with them, suddenly everyone else’s […]
This fun comedy-drama is about a New York playwright called Radha who never hit big. When she turns 40, she decides to reinvent herself as RadhaMUSPrime, a rapper. And it’s all a personal affair: Radha Blank plays the main character (named after herself) and is also the writer, director, and producer. The story is about […]
Based on the DC Vertigo comic, Bodies is an intriguing crime thriller with a unique twist – one body, in four separate time periods, being solved simultaneously all at once. While the show is triggered by the same body, the mini-series feels like four separate shows at the same time, marrying the classic Victorian detective […]
Narrated by the familiar voice of Jack Black, Apollo 10 ½ is a throwback story told with admirable specificity and imagination. Black plays a grown-up Stan, who looks back on his younger years with a mix of fondness and wonder: how did they get away with the things they did then? American suburbia in the […]
Love Life, like the Prime Video show Modern Love, is an anthology series featuring all sorts of romances and relationships. But unlike the latter, which gives us wildly different characters and plotlines in each episode, Love Life dedicates an entire season to one person. It follows them from the moment they meet their first love […]
Meet Rilakkuma, a relaxed teddy bear (which is indeed what his name translates to in Japanese), and Kaoru, a Japanese office worker in her mid-thirties, who lives with said bear as well as a smaller white bear named Korilakkuma and a yellow chick by the name of Kiiroitori. As whimsical as all this may sound, […]
Hospital Playlist is a heartwarming and engaging South Korean series that follows the lives and friendships of five doctors who work at the same hospital. With its perfect blend of drama, humor, and genuine moments, the show offers an intimate and realistic portrayal of the challenges and joys faced by medical professionals. The characters are […]
After winning Oscars for their documentary work, filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin make their narrative feature debut with Nyad. The move to narrative fiction isn’t a monumental jump for the director duo, whose cinematic documentaries (among them Free Solo and The Rescue) play like nerve-shredding action thrillers and intense human dramas. Nor does […]
One would hope that, even with a premise like this, My Life with the Walter Boys could have some sort of emotional center to pin everything down, but if the first two episodes watched for this review are any indication, the series is too content playing out as an odd romantic fantasy. It’s not even […]
Funny, refreshing, and heartwarming, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah gives the seminal girlhood film Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. a Gen Z update. Stacy and her friends are constantly on social media and watch each other for potentially politically incorrect terms, but they also struggle with period pain, crushes, […]
An all-female action comedy that doesn’t get self-serious about the way it’s subverting the genre — Wingwomen feels like a breath of fresh air. It wisely grasps that plot isn’t paramount for a movie like this, and so it joyously dunks on cerebral scenarios with its unabashedly silly story convolutions, like when its professional thieves […]
After the successful release of The Gentlemen (2019), it would have been easy to just continue the story with the same cast of characters, but instead Guy Ritchie makes a spinoff with the same cannibis chaos, but instead expands it to a startlingly funny depiction of the British aristocracy and the criminal underworld. It has […]
Aspiring boxer Kim Gun-woo (Woo Do-hwan) befriends fellow rookie Hong Woo-jin (Lee Sang-yi) during the heights of Covid-19. After a ruthless loan shark, Kim Myung-gil (Park Sung-woong) cons Gun-woo’s mother into taking a predatory loan, they team up with a moneylender (motivated by his own painful history with Myung-gil) to shut down his schemes for […]
The first episode is directed by the maker of Warrior, Gavin O’Connor, and shares its emotional, yet suspenseful and action-packed flow. A white police officer and his squad are involved in an attempt to cover up the hit-and-run murder of a black teenager. You’ll see the officers weigh guilt and remorse against their fears of […]
Structured more like a network procedural than a gritty streaming miniseries, the TV adaptation of The Lincoln Lawyer feels easy, even nostalgic, to watch. The formula is simple: in every episode, Mickey handles a new case (most of them wrongful convictions against people on the fringe), all while dealing with a larger, more complicated case […]
1990s Los Angeles was both glamorous and seedy, and it’s this murky territory that filmmaker Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar) enters as she tries to make her movie dreams a reality. Lisa is ambitious and polite enough—if not a bit naive—but when she gets screwed over, she enlists the help of a mysterious stranger (played to […]
In Move to Heaven, a man and his son clean up after the dead—specifically, the dead who have no one else to look out for them. Believing that no one should be robbed of a respectable farewell, they piece together the deceased’s possessions and celebrate them postmortem. It’s a noble job, but its existence is […]
Entergalactic, a vibrant animated romcom from the mind of musician Kid Cudi, follows new neighbors Jabari (Cudi) and Meadow (Jessica Williams) as they navigate their way through the ups and downs of modern love. They’re both established artists at the height of their careers, but when it comes to romance, they’re still scraping for lessons, […]
This is an thrilling BBC/Netflix show and a Yakuza drama that takes place between Tokyo and London. About half of the dialogue is in Japanese and the other half is in English. Yakuza families are no longer at peace when a boss’s nephew is assassinated in London. Trying to bring the culprit in without interference […]
Your Name Engraved Herein is a melancholy and emotional film set in 1987 just as martial law ends in Taiwan. The film explores the relationship between Jia-han and Birdy, two boys in a Catholic school who are in a romantic relationship. The movie tackles homophobia and social stigma in society which evokes a bleak and […]
In fantasy worlds, races with different lifespans are a given, but rarely does a work actually contemplate how these variations would affect relationships between them. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End starts after a great war, at the moment of peace, and to the titular elf, her shared journey with the human Himmel and their party feels […]
Lisa Kudrow and many other recognizable faces star in this sweet British comedy that feels like a Fleabag take on LGBTQ+ love. Mae (played by Canadian comedian Mae Martin) is a stand-up comic in London who starts dating a fan, George (Charlotte Ritchie). Up to that point, George had only dated men. Martin also co-wrote […]
For almost the entirety of its runtime, Old Dads feels like it has something it’s desperately trying to prove. But while the millennial generation and a newfound popular interest in political correctness are ripe for satire, this film chooses the lowest hanging fruit possible to make jokes about—inventing one senseless situation after another in order […]
It starts off slowly, if a bit unevenly, but Black Earth Rising gradually finds its footing over the course of eight episodes. The series, a political thriller that takes a closer look at the legality of international war crimes, is led by the ever-commanding Michaela Coel and always-reliable John Goodman. As the Rwandan adoptee and […]
Demons don’t seem to have the same scariness that terrified previous generations. That’s because there are more immediate, realistic horrors that can possibly happen, like other people. My Demon takes a humorous approach to this diminished reputation, as the titular demon has his powers transferred to a modern day capitalist. Without these mystical powers, Jung […]
Iceland is a country of vast lands but limited population – only about 300,000 people can call themselves Icelandic. On the other hand, 8 million people have connecting flights through Iceland every year. In this setting of mass movement, a single mother dealing with poverty is offered a chance to turn things around – a […]
This documentary starts with Alex Lewis, who gets into a motorcycle accident and wakes up in the hospital not knowing who he is. He doesn’t remember anything (not even what a bicycle or a TV is, or who his mother or father are), but he remembers his twin brother, Marcus. When Alex gets back into […]
Following the success of the Zom 100 manga and anime, Netflix quickly followed suit with a live-action film, which begs the question: why? Why bother, when the freshly released series is barely a month old and already a vibrant interpretation of the comic book it was based from? Why bother, when you’re not going to […]
It’s bold to make a film about a legendary icon of cinema, but it’s even bolder to make one about Orson Welles. Best known for making Citizen Kane (universally agreed upon as one of the best movies ever made), Orson Welles is the renegade filmmaker whose works and techniques form the foundation of modern narrative […]
You don’t need to have watched the first Code 8 (released in 2019) to enjoy Part II, which speaks to how this sequel has improved as a piece of sci-fi entertainment—but also hasn’t done anything particularly interesting with its characters or themes. At the end of the day this really isn’t all that different from […]
Dear Ex is a family drama that explores LGBT+ issues in contemporary Taiwan. As much as it is a movie about how people cope with loss, it’s a powerful, heartwarming, and intimate portrait of the relationship between Jay and Song Zhengyuan and all the obstacles they face. While the themes of Dear Ex are heavy, […]
At the age of 17, Héctor runs away from a juvenile detention center and embarks on a journey to find a shelter dog he had befriended in a rescue center whom he has found out has just been adopted. Along his quest, he is joined by his ailing grandmother and older brother. Featuring beautiful landscapes […]
