The Best Period Pieces Movies to Watch

The first things that grab your attention in Nickel Boys are its beauty and technicality. Director RaMell Ross, a large-format photographer, ensures every frame relays something deep, intimate, and moving. Then there’s how he takes these shots: we see things unfold through the POV of Elwood and Turner, students at an abusive reform school in […]

How do you make a film about the Holocaust feel new? How do you make the terrors feel fresh, like it was just in the news, without sounding redundant or without giving into the sensationalized and emotionally manipulative? For Director Jonathan Glazer, the answer lies in not what you show but what you don’t show. […]

While based on the Mononoke series, which is in turn, a spin-off of Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, it might seem that Mononoke The Movie: The Phantom in the Rain would require some background reading for people new to the story. Thankfully, there’s no need to do homework for this beautifully designed masterpiece, as the Medicine […]

A good biography remains fully faithful to the actual history, but a great one understands what their life story means as a whole, on a larger scale. Number 24 could have been one of many World War II biopics. It could have just celebrated Norwegian resistance fighter Gunnar Sønsteby and his numerous deeds. By simply […]

On September 5, 1972, at the Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, Palestinian terrorists held members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage in exchange for imprisoned countrymen. The ABC Sports team, led by Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), despite their lack of preparation, decided to fully pivot from covering sports to news. […]

Just a few minutes in, you can already feel the immensity of The Brutalist. The rousing score stirs you. The weight of The Holocaust and Toth’s immigration story, which is also one of xenophobia and addiction, pulls you in. The visuals, shot in VistaVision, demand your attention. The period setting calls for nostalgia, but the […]

Fast and funny with surprisingly tender moments in between, Mixed by Erry doubles as a fascinating period piece and a heartfelt family comedy. On a larger scale, it tracks the rise of musical piracy, which Erry and his brothers accidentally stumble onto with their cassette-copying business, Mixed by Erry. But what starts out as an […]

On the one hand, Godland is a film about nature’s unforgiving beauty. Like the photographs the priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) takes, these quietly superb scenes speak for themselves. The Earth moves in mysterious and harsh ways, and we are but mere specks, organic matter to be folded in and absorbed, in the grand scheme […]

Is this the most thrilling head-scratcher we’ve seen in a while? No. Is it a rousing take on the feminist cause? Not really. But what Wicked Little Letters lacks in intrigue and relevance, it more than makes up for in entertainment value. Not that anyone needs convincing, but here Colman and Buckley further prove why […]

After drawing controversy for the embellished, modern day-set Sound of Freedom, director Alejandro Monteverde and writer Rod Barr pivoted to the past to tell the story of Cabrini. It’s a straightforward biopic. It seemed like a safer story to tell, with the protagonist being a literal Catholic saint, who also happened to have an undisputed […]

It’s slower and talkier than you’d expect from a semi-erotic film, but Ehnegard lives up to its title well enough to satisfy. It’s titillating, but in a cheeky rather than provocative way. The dialogues are lengthy, but they’re alternately witty and poetic, so despite the pace they never actually bore. Ehnegard’s real delight, however, is […]

Given the current tension around reproductive health issues, it should be no surprise that Joy might feel rather tame. To a certain extent, it is, as in vitro fertilization doesn’t have the same controversies compared to abortion. But it does hold some of the same questions, asked through straightforward dialogue from screenwriter Jack Thorne and […]

Miranda’s Victim often feels like two different movies smushed into one. On the one hand, it tells the story of how Trish finds the courage to speak up against her abuser, who happens to be a person of color. On the other hand, it shows us the legal intricacies that led to the founding of […]

Of the three Brontë sisters—all of whom are accomplished writers in their own right—it’s Emily who remains the most enigmatic to this day. She died early and left in her wake just one work: her first and only novel, Wuthering Heights. The book shook England back then; it was rugged and sexual and violent, and […]

One of the worst aspects of war in general is that it always interferes with the hopes and dreams of the people that are living through it. The Road Dance depicts a small Scottish village in World War I, and a woman whose plan had been interfered with. It’s a bleak story, one that’s been […]

Inu-oh is a visually stunning and thought-provoking anime that reimagines a Japanese folk tale as it explores themes of artistic freedom, individuality, and the consequences of challenging societal norms. The movie’s striking imagery, original music, and captivating story make it a memorable viewing experience, delving into issues of identity and the prejudices faced by disabled […]

It’s not easy to abandon the past. Even if you want to shed your new identity, the memory of what you’ve done still linger in other people’s minds, especially if guns and violence are involved. Old Henry is one of the few Westerns that actually examines that. Of course, it holds some of the classic […]

This unique romance is set during a time when a man would be sent the painting of the woman he was to marry before the wedding could take place. Héloïse, secluded with her mother and a maid on a remote island, doesn’t approve of her upcoming wedding and refuses to be painted. Her mother sends […]

This biopic of the little-known Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the world’s first prominent Black classical composer, opens with a fierce indictment of history’s ignorance of its subject. Even if it’s one example of the movie’s dramatic license-taking, the scene — in which the Chevalier (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) challenges his eminent contemporary Mozart to an onstage musical […]

Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are the only two actors starring in this eccentric movie, and they deliver such grand performances that it feels like another actor would have been one too many. They star as lighthouse keepers in the 19th century, left on an island to interact only with each other and their rock. […]

Director Zhang Yimou, who already has remarkable wuxia films like Hero and House of Flying Daggers under his belt, delivers another exceptional epic. Set during China’s Three Kingdoms era (220–280 AD), Shadow revolves around a great king and his people, who are expelled from their homeland but will aspire to reclaim it. The story requires […]

Of course, as a serialized medium with plenty of volumes, it isn’t easy to condense manga into movies. Many a title have let down fans before, especially with the notorious live action curse. But there are some films that capture the energy and excitement of the original, and one such film is Kingdom. Not to […]

This is a gorgeous Danish period drama that’s based on a famous story and book in Denmark called Lykke-Per (or Lucky Per) by Nobel Prize-winning author Henrik Pontoppidan. Per, the son of an overbearing catholic priest, leaves his family house in the country side to seek a new life in Copenhagen. His passion about engineering […]

The 2016 outing of South-Korean auteur director Park Chan-wook (maker of Oldboy and Stoker) once again shifts attention to the dark side of what makes us human: betrayal, violence, and transgression. Based on the 2002 novel Fingersmith by British author Sarah Waters, The Handmaiden revolves around the love of two women and the greedy men […]

While Hollywood still makes some films in this genre, there are less historical epics being released, in part due to cost, but also in part due to having had so many, ever since the start of the medium. However, there are some historical events that we rarely see on film, and one of them is […]

From The Babadook director Jennifer Kent comes another horror, although this one is more about the horrors of humanity. Set in 1825 Tasmania, The Nightingale follows Irish settler Clare as she seeks bloody revenge on the monsters who wronged her and her family. She teams up with an Aboriginal guide named Billy to accomplish her […]

It’s been acclaimed as one the best Kung Fu movies ever made. You are probably wondering why this contemporary movie made that short list when its genre had its peak decades ago: it is visually striking and at the same time surprisingly story-oriented. As you would expect of course, there is quite a fair amount […]

Biopics usually try to capture the entirety of a life, but on occasion, they try to capture that life in a snippet, in a short period of time that could encapsulate what the subject did and what they stood for. One such film that does this is Marshall. It’s not a bad idea to depict […]

Sisters Martine and Filippa, daughters of a founder of a religious sect, live a simple and quiet life in a remote coastal village in Denmark. Throughout the course of their lives, they reject possible romances and fame as part of their commitment to deny earthly attachments. This is upended by the sudden arrival of a […]

Florence Pugh broke through with her powerhouse performance here as Katherine, a young woman who is “sold” into a coldly transactional marriage with a cruel and impotent merchant in 1800s Northern England. Lady Macbeth seems to begin as one thing — a gloomy period tale of oppression and feminist rebellion — but, on the strength […]

It’s not so easy to get rid of an evil ruler. Sometimes, you have to resort to not one, not two, not even three assassins– you have to get thirteen of them. Remaking the 1963 jidaigeki film, which in turn is based on a real life feudal lord, Takashi Miike’s take brings his signature style […]

When a man ends up in a house full of girls, the question in many stories is: who will that man fall for? Where Little Women provides everyone with a suitor and The Beguiled does the opposite, Belle Époque takes a much more comedic route for Fernando to pick his wife. Far from being a […]

Most people can easily acknowledge the atrocities Nazi Germany did in World War II, but Germany didn’t do them alone. It is a world war, after all. Sarah’s Key confronts that painful past through a journalist investigating a possible Holocaust survivor. Admittedly, alternating between 2009 and 1942 made the film a bit uneven, with the […]

2005 was a banner year for British period dramas, apparently: first, there was Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (still arguably the genre’s crowning achievement), and then came Under the Greenwood Tree, a delightful made-for-Christmas-TV romance loosely based on the eponymous Thomas Hardy novel. Anyone familiar with the author’s typically tragedy-tinged stories — think Tess of […]

With his outstanding record of resisting the Nazis, Max Manus seems like a pretty cool guy. The well-travelled soldier volunteered for his country when he could have stayed an ocean away, and he helped organize the resistance against the Germans when he could have just kept his head down. It’s no wonder that he was […]

History is rife with marriages made for practical alliance, but the ones that are more memorable are the ones made hand-in-hand with true love. Jodhaa Akbar may not start out with love at first sight, but director Ashutosh Gowariker reimagines the titular couple of the Mughal Empire with all the production value and all the […]