821 Best Releases From the Genre Drama (Page 33)

In the late '90s, pharmaceutical companies claimed that the opioids that they produced weren’t addictive, causing a spike in medical providers prescribing them. This claim was, of course, false, and the influx of people who became addicted to opioids has created a public health crisis that results in an economic burden of $7.85 billion a year. Even worse is the human cost. In 2018,  67,367 Americans were killed via drug overdose. Of that number 69.5% of those deaths were caused by Opioids- mainly synthetic opioids.  Continue Reading →

Natalie Morales directs herself and Mark Duplass in a tender look at the bonds we form to save ourselves in a hard world. How are we supposed to process our grief when the closest we have to comfort is sharing feelings through zoom video calls? In Natalie Morales’ directorial debut Language Lessons, that question is explored at the center of the story. Wonderfully written and packed with heart and sensitivity, this heartwarming two-hander mumblecore celebrates the beauty of human connection in any kind of medium, depicting how the unexpected bond we have with other people, even the one only shared via computer and phone screens, can help us heal from the pain of losing our loved ones. Morales, who co-writes the script with indie darling Mark Duplass, plays Cariño, a Costa Rica-based Spanish teacher hired by a wealthy man named Will (Desean Terry) to give his husband, Adam (Duplass), a 100-hour lesson on the Spanish language. Though their first meeting starts off awkwardly, the two eventually warms up to each other, especially after Adam opens up about his life, his relationship with Will, and even his strange morning routine.  Continue Reading →

The sci-fi thriller takes no risks, and tries absolutely nothing you haven't seen before. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Berlin Film Festival.) The IMDb listing for Tides lists it under the "SciFi" and "Thriller" headings, and while that is nominally true, a better case could be made to file it as an anthology. While technically an original story, it is made up of elements cribbed from so many other films that genre buffs could entertain themselves while watching it by making up lists of all the movies that it borrows from and comparing them afterwards to see who scored the most. If nothing else, it will give viewers something to do while watching the film since there is precious little going on up there on the screen to hold their attention. Continue Reading →

Céline Sciamma's followup to Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a graceful tale of rediscovered childhood. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Berlin Film Festival.) In the wake of the international success of her hypnotic, Gothic-infused romantic drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), it would have been natural to assume that Céline Sciamma's next film would be a major project and the center of great scrutiny. Perhaps recognizing and preferring to avoid that template, Sciamma instead went the other way. She not only follows up Portrait with the decidedly small-scale Petite Maman, she shot it so quickly and in such secrecy that most people didn't even know she was working on anything until its world premiere at Berlinale was announced.  Continue Reading →

If I told you that thirty years ago, 1.2 million dollars literally fell out of an armored truck, would you believe me? To be clear, this money wasn’t stolen – at least, not initially. A Purolator Armored Services truck – carrying an enormous quantity of cash from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia – suffered an “equipment malfunction,” leaving 1.2 million dollars lying on the side of the road in South Philly. As 1993’s Money For Nothing will tell you, this cash was quickly discovered by Joey Coyle (John Cusack), an out-of-work twenty-something. What does one do next?  Continue Reading →

Cleveland. The early 2000s. A young man (Tom Holland, The Lost City of Z) falls in love with a girl named Emily (Ciara Bravo, Wayne). It’s lovely but fraught. When she wants to go to college in Canada, he impulsively signs up for the Army. Life as a medic in the Iraq War is traumatizing, and the young man processes that trauma poorly. Drug use becomes addiction, and Emily joins him. A loathsome drug dealer (Jack Reynor, Midsommar) becomes a hated enemy and a desperate friend. Bank robbery starts to look like a good idea. The spiral devours all.  Continue Reading →

Erin (Hope Davis) and Sean (Philip Seymour Hoffman) aren’t meant to be. We know this from the opening scene: he, a schlubby Marxist, announces he’s finally leaving. Even if he’s left and come crawling back before, this time he means it! Erin goes back inside their Comm Ave brownstone and rips up his “Think local, act global” bumper sticker attached to their – her – fridge.  Continue Reading →

While Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia (created by Sarah Lampert) has so far been hailed as a sort of edgier Gilmore Girls, the new young adult series arguably has more in common with Richard Benjamin’s Mermaids (1990), starring Cher and Winona Ryder. In essence: what if Cher’s Mrs. Flax kept two pistols in the house? Continue Reading →

An icon of the 20th-century jazz scene, Billie Holiday was an icon of Black culture, haunted by abuse and addiction. Her song “Strange Fruit”, based on a poem that describes a lynching, propelled her to fame – but also got the attention of the federal government, taking dramatic steps to stop her from singing the song in an effort to racialize the War on Drugs. In The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Lee Daniels tracks Holiday as the Federal Department of Narcotics begins to pursue her toward that end, in a film that ends up being a waste of potential. Continue Reading →

I am a great lover of camp media. I love the over-the-top, the ridiculous, the melodramatic, and the ostentatious. I love storytelling that delves so far into the extremes of the human experience that it departs from reality altogether. Unfortunately, camp can backfire, and when it doesn’t work, it can become so ridiculous that it’s hard to watch.  Continue Reading →

The apocalypse is never further from our minds in science fiction, to the point where any civilization set after mankind's inevitable collapse invariably lands on a host of tropes and conventions touched on by a million stories before it. Tribes of Europa, Germany's latest addition to Netflix's sci-fi television stable after the incredible Dark, makes the head-scratching decision to use all of them. There's a Mysterious Cataclysm that knocks out all technology, roving bands of survivors battling each other for resources and power, a Magic MacGuffin that might lead to salvation and must be protected at all costs, the list goes on. And yet, there's an ineffable charm to the six too-brief episodes of its inaugural season, chiefly due to the stalwart effects work and production design, and game performances from a cast that recognizes the story's innate schlock factor. Continue Reading →

In 1979, the Village People released the song “Ready for the 80’s” on their double-LP Live and Sleazy. The song is upbeat and bright, full of hope and promise. The group sings “I’m ready for the 80s / Ready for the time of my life” throughout the chorus, and one verse starts “Everything is gonna work out fine / I have faith in this old world of mine / We'll be loving in the bright sunshine.” Listening to this song over 40 years later, you can’t shake a sense of dramatic irony. In the end, the 80’s weren’t kind to the Village People, disco, or queer men in general. As I watched the opening episode of Russell T. Davies' latest mini-series, It’s a Sin, I kept thinking of this song and its optimistic outlook for a new decade, an optimism echoed in the fresh faces of its cast, blissfully unaware of the heartbreak awaiting them.  Continue Reading →

Following off the success of Bridgerton, the next bestseller to be spun into Netflix gold is Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes, a book that was so aggressively marketed around its super-secret third act twist that early readers were encouraged to use the hashtag #WTFthatending. They aren’t kidding. WTF that ending, indeed.  Continue Reading →

Part melodrama, part gold rush adventure story, part soulmate fable, and part astrology app come to life, The Luminaries, Starz’s 6-episode adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s 2013 novel, is much like the gold its characters seek: shiny, ephemeral, and ultimately cold. Adapted by Catton and directed by Claire McCarthy, The Luminaries wastes no time in unfurling several plot points in media res, with dramatic but confusing results.  Continue Reading →

For a film constantly trying to surprise viewers with its seemingly mad-libs format of world-building, it's odd to see such a mundane story driving Bliss, the latest film from Mike Cahill. Stop me if you've heard this one before. A pretty boring guy named Greg (Owen Wilson) is living a pretty boring life, and let's just say things never seem to really go his way. But all that changes when he meets a stunningly beautiful woman named Isabel (Salma Hayek), who convinces him there's much more to life than he previously imagined. It's the age-old love story ripped straight from the kind of light, Blockbuster rental shelf section circa 1999.  Continue Reading →

In the wide world of algorithmically-derived Netflix teen romantic comedies, surely one of the finest was 2018's To All The Boys I've Loved Before, the syrupy-sweet story of adorable bookworm Lara Jean Covey (an always-radiant Lana Condor) and her shockingly-resilient relationship with too-good-to-be-true-except-he-is jock Peter (Noah Centineo). The film did well enough to spawn an entire trilogy based on Jenny Han's YA romances; while the second, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, still had its fair share of charms, it started to show the cracks in the sunny, conflict-free firmament of Lara Jean's fairy tale romance. Now, the trilogy closes with To All the Boys: Always and Forever, and this time, the decision isn't between Peter and some other boy: it's between Peter and the rest of her life. Continue Reading →

Rebecca Hall adapts Nella Larsen's novella about Black social mobility (and its corresponding resentments) to haunting effect. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Nella Larsen's 1929 novella Passing is a fascinating text, a frank but elegant discussion of the intersections of race, class, and gender as cold and delicate as its subject matter. It makes sense, then, that Rebecca Hall's adaptation is similarly airy and ominous, an intimate portrait of resentment and racial/social mobility set amid the stifling backdrop of 1920s New York. Continue Reading →

When it comes to suffering, no one does it like Catholics. Consider Opus Dei, the secretive branch of Catholicism that still allegedly practices self-flagellation, or the hardcore worshipers who recreate Christ’s crucifixion every Easter, rather than dyeing eggs or baking a ham. Even when mortification of the flesh isn’t involved, no other religion promotes the idea of misery as the pathway to salvation. Rose Glass’s nightmarish Saint Maud digs deep into the pathology of that mindset, and is something you won’t likely forget for a long time. Continue Reading →

A quick look at the best in short features at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. With 50 short films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the programming represented a wide breadth of filmmakers, styles, and world regions. Comprising four shorts programs, two documentary sections, and an animation spotlight, these 50 films display the variability of style and substance in up-and-coming filmmakers in 2021. A few stood above the rest, though, defining the festival as a mixture of heavy topics, comic relief, and an inordinate amount of personal, affected storytelling.  The following seven shorts are listed in alphabetical order.  Continue Reading →

Before its release, Sia’s Music has generated controversy regarding the handling of its titular autistic character, including the decision to cast neurotypical actor Maddie Zeigler in the role. Sia’s responses to these critiques have only enflamed the hubbub, but tragically, those concerns are immaterial. Not because Music does a good job of handling the perspective of an autistic person, but rather quite the opposite. Continue Reading →

Cathy Yan's debut feature already shows an assured and clever director's eye. Urban inequality and the rapidly changing landscape of China are at the center of Cathy Yan’s first feature Dead Pigs. A sharp satire filled with plenty of colorful characters, Yan’s debut loosely takes inspiration from an incident that occurred in 2013, when more than 16,000 dead pigs were found floating on the Huangpu, the river flowing through Shanghai. But instead of investigating the cause behind the deadly virus that kills the pigs, Yan chooses to zero in on the human story behind it, exploring five different characters from different social classes who, in one way or another, are impacted by the chain of events leading up to the death of the pigs in question. The result is an ensemble piece that is quirky and funny as it is compelling and gritty. Set mostly on the outskirt of Shanghai, Dead Pigs begins with Old Wang (Haoyu Yang), one of the farmers who has to deal with the mysterious pandemic that kills his pigs one by one. Wang first assumes that he can salvage his big loss by selling the meat of his deceased pigs to some local butcher shops. But when he realizes that his effort is futile, he decides to start dumping the dead pigs into the river around his house, and unbeknownst to him, all the local pig farmers have also done the same thing. Continue Reading →