821 Best Releases From the Genre Drama (Page 15)

No recent film has understood the Internet quite like Searching. Aneesh Chaganty’s 2018 thriller follows John Cho as David, a father desperately searching for his missing daughter. The film is formatted entirely on screens, a new form of visual storytelling called Screenlife. We see David’s investigation through video calls, websites, and digital files. But at the heart of the story is a deep understanding of the way people, especially young people, can take on new lives through technology. Continue Reading →

While they say that love is eternal, eventually, even the greatest of love stories come to an end. Marriage vows foretell the reality of “to death do us part.” It’s an inevitability rarely explored in cinema, and even then, only in schmaltzy melodramatic weepers. Fortunately, Michael Showalter’s Spoiler Alert is free of schmaltz. Instead, the film deftly explores the process of a couple dealing with a terminal illness amid all the usual messiness of a real relationship.  Continue Reading →

At the risk of sounding a bit hyperbolic, there’s been something kind of magical about Doom Patrol. That trend continues into the fourth season's first six episodes, this writer is delighted to note. Continue Reading →

The danger in revisiting anything surprising in its quality the first time around is the loss of that surprise. Once you know a book, movie, or TV series can tell compelling stories, crack great jokes, or create multi-dimensional characters, one can’t help but expect that from its follow-ups and sequels. When the shock is gone, can the work still deliver? If so, how? Continue Reading →

Willow didn’t catch on as a pop culture phenomenon like fellow Lucasfilm properties Star Wars and Indiana Jones upon its release. Still, it did ultimately achieve cult status. In these IP-obsessed times, that made a return to its fantasy realm all but inevitable. After all, Disney is giving every nostalgic property it owns a streaming sequel. Continue Reading →

Paolo (Colin Donnell), a mob fixer, is used to being the smartest person in the room. However, sometimes even the most intelligent guy makes dumb decisions. For Paolo, that begins with killing a mob boss’s son to save his own life. Then he makes that worse by going on the run with the boss’s money. But he's not done yet. Next up, he gets robbed by, of all people, a depressed Reverend, Mackenzie Boyd (P.J. Byrne), who decides to live it up on Paolo’s dime. Finally, he completes the progression of bad ideas by taking Boyd’s new job in the small town of oceanside town of Clump. There, he reasons, he can finally regain control of his life's wreckage. Continue Reading →

While movies seem to be getting increasingly chaste, it’s a comfort to know that joyful, consensual sex still has a place on television. D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel tells the story of Lady Constance Chatterley, married to a minor lord whose injuries in World War I have left him paralyzed from the waist down. While its themes of classism, a declining nobility, and the dangers of industry were nothing new, the explicit (for the times) sexual content was enough to get the book banned from at least five countries, including the US. Nearly a century later, it still feels just as revolutionary. Not the sexual content—you can find books much more scintillating in the average grocery store—but the fact that Lawrence was celebrating sex and pleasure for its own sake.             Continue Reading →

Nikyatu Jusu’s debut feature, Nanny is a story about the American Dream turned gothic nightmare. It’s a film whose horror lies in a deep-rooted sense of unease. It’s the feeling in your gut that something is wrong, even when you can’t name exactly what. Worse yet, knowing this creeping dread has nothing to do with everything so obviously wrong around you. It’s something else, something you can only assume (or fear) is so much worse than you imagine. Continue Reading →

There’s nothing wrong with adaptations finding their own path. In fact, it should be encouraged. Slavish devotion to the source material leads to dramatically inert material. That said, there are far better ways to adapt existing works than this. Echo 3’s team, led by series creator Mark Boal, has missed the mark in interpreting Amir Gutfreund’s novel When Heroes Fly and the first television adaption from Omri Givon. Continue Reading →

A little over 24 hours after seeing it, there are two sequences in Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans that I've run on repeat back and forth. One dramatic, the other comedic—both illustrate the strengths of Spielberg's semi-autobiography. Continue Reading →

Few movies have as much misdirected nostalgia surrounding them as 1983’s A Christmas Story. Directed by Bob Clark and based on Jean Shepherd’s folksy writing, it met with modest box office success (not nearly as much as the decidedly different Porky’s, Clark’s other film released the same year) but was just as quickly forgotten. It wasn’t until more than a decade later, once it made its way to basic cable, that it found a devoted audience. However, the audience didn’t consist of near-senior citizens who found something familiar in its 1940s small-town setting, but younger viewers far removed from that time. Continue Reading →

Fleishman Is in Trouble, the adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel starring Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes, and Lizzy Caplan, has a first-act problem. Or rather, a first-episode problem. Continue Reading →

Trust is a fundamental aspect of any relationship. Whether it’s a friend, co-worker, or relative, developing trust in each other is what can make a beautiful bond flourish. But trusting someone is also giving them the ability to hurt us, leaving us always with the possibility of trusting the wrong person, and suffering because of it. Such is the case of Tobias Lindholm’s The Good Nurse, a film based on the real-life case of serial killer Charles Cullen. The overall tone of the movie is as gray as the dull hospital rooms in which the story takes place, taking away the energy from what would otherwise be a stellar thriller. Continue Reading →

The Inspection, the narrative feature debut of writer-director Elegance Bratton, aims to be a fictionalized treatment of Bratton’s own real-life experiences as a young gay Black man attempting to turn his life around by, of all things, joining the Marines. As dramatic hooks go, that’s a compelling one, but the finished film seems strangely unwilling to grapple with it in any meaningful way. Instead, what could have been a unique, deeply personal narrative is eventually reduced to a well-meaning but largely undistinguished military melodrama that is ultimately too familiar for its own good.  Continue Reading →

For most people contemplating going to see She Said, the screen adaptation of the 2019 best-seller by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey chronicling their ground-breaking investigation of Harvey Weinstein, three questions may come to mind. How graphic is the film going to be regarding the crimes he perpetuated over the years against hundreds of women unfortunate enough to cross his path? How will it handle the representation of the well-known personalities who were critical elements of the story, ranging from Weinstein himself to the famous actresses who were among his victims? Finally, as films chronicling journalists as they break hugely important stories go, how does it stack up against the likes of All the President’s Men, still the gold standard of the genre, or more recent examples like Spotlight or The Post? Continue Reading →

In pop culture, The Mafia is as intertwined with New York as it is with Italian heritage. As a result, the idea of having a show about the Mafia taking place outside of the East Coast is novel. That’s especially if it takes place in an explicitly un-NYC location like Tulsa. Unfortunately, the premise of having a Mafioso in Oklahoma is the only original thing about Taylor Sheridan’s (Yellowstone) latest crime drama, Tulsa King.  Continue Reading →

“Out there, back then…” That’s when The English takes place. “And in between…I wanted to kill a man for the murder of my child. You wanted back your land, stolen from you.” That is what The English is about. Continue Reading →

If Satan’s Slaves: Communion wants to be a local PSA for better management of high-rises instead of a second wringer for the Suwono family to go through, it can. There’s an elevator in the film’s setting that is home to a horrific banquet of images and sounds. There are happenings inside, outside of, and even underneath it that will get the one in your building more regular inspections and stricter compliance with the “maximum capacity” notice. Per the film, poorly maintained and overloaded lifts won’t just be an eventual Final Destination moment, it’s also how hell gets to be on Earth. Continue Reading →

We’re all living in the looming shadows of our past. The actions or mistakes we undertake today shape our tomorrow. It’s as true for the poorest pauper as it is for the mightiest king, and Causeway protagonist Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) is no exception. Formerly deployed to the Middle East as a soldier, she’s come home to New Orleans after suffering a brain injury. The ensuing movie’s emphasis on coping with the long-term effects of trauma is quietly established through Causeway beginning not with a grisly accident overseas, but rather with a shell-shocked Lynsey waiting for a taxi in America. Continue Reading →

As we lurch our way through the sixth or seventh wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve only just begun to see how much billion dollar companies (and billionaires themselves) profited from the chaos, while smaller businesses and individuals took devastating financial hits. A class war has erupted, if not in real life (yet) then certainly on social media, marked by endless heated debates over privilege, the victims and villains of capitalism, and who the “elite” really are. Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness satirizes this very unsettling period in time, putting a cheeky spin on class rage, but with an acidic undertaste that lingers long after it’s over. Continue Reading →

Armageddon Time, writer/director James Gray’s eighth feature film, follows a young boy named Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a stand-in for Gray. He’s an unknowing, bratty, artsy kid. He breaks rules, makes fun of his teachers, won’t eat his mother’s cooking. He’s a regular, if not annoying, teenager. Paul’s family is Jewish and living in Queens in the 1980s. They send him to public school while his brother attends private school. They’re constantly hoping to get a leg up for their family amongst a sea of other discriminated families.   Continue Reading →