123 Best Drama Releases on Netflix (Page 6)

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

I never feel the need to apologize for loving a movie. I might be more inclined to defend that love, but not apologize for it. When I see a movie so beloved and come out the other side largely unaffected, though, I feel bad. Is it my fault? Is it just that I’m a cold person? I shouldn’t feel bad for being in the minority, but maybe I should feel bad that I didn’t feel a ton else. I kind of do, to be honest. Of course everyone’s tastes are different. Of course I’m far from likely to always agree with the majority. Continue Reading →

Netflix’s new romantic drama Firefly Lane, based on the 2008 novel by Kristin Hannah, follows the multi-decade friendship of brash and bold Tully (Katherine Heigl) and smart and nerdy Kate (Sarah Chalke). They meet at age fourteen living on Firefly Lane. From there they spend years cultivating their journeys: Tully is a journalist with a wildly popular daytime talk show, and Kate took a break in her career to marry fellow journalist Ryan (a stilted Ben Lawson) and raise a daughter.  Continue Reading →

Sam Levinson’s gorgeously shot but obnoxious and exhausting relationship drama Malcolm & Marie is filled with plenty of big ideas — about film, about art criticism, about authenticity, about the relationship between artists and their muse. But more often than not, those big ideas are just big ideas that go unexplored. Instead of trying to make solid arguments about what it wants to say at the beginning, Malcolm & Marie is too busy being angry and whiny. So what could’ve been a compelling two-hander drama examining art and a fractured relationship instead ends up as a movie struggling to find itself, made by a man with nothing but pettiness in his mind. Continue Reading →

Penguin Bloom director Glendyn Ivin is one of the leading names in Australian television, which checks out all too well given that the execution of this admittedly inspirational story has “made-for-TV” written all over it. Of course, the real frustrating part is that there are occasional glimpses of a better movie that's focused on exploring these characters beyond a surface-level peek of what it's like to come to terms with a disability or be a caretaker for someone who’s disabled. Continue Reading →

Adapted from the Nickelodeon show Winx Club, Netflix’s new series Fate: The Winx Saga attempts to reboot the long-running favorite with gritty live action to fit on the homepage somewhere between The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Cursed. It’s a visually stunning fantasy quest centered around young women that has all the magic it needs to fly but hasn’t yet learned to focus its potential within. Continue Reading →

If anybody could find something new to add to pop culture’s fixation with serial killers and true crime, it would likely be David Fincher. Se7en announced him as a major director while Zodiac revealed him as a master. The Fincher style – dark lighting and sickly colors, obsessive attention to detail, unblinking looks at violence – has served as a template not just for other movies, but also for TV shows of both the prestigious and potboiler variety and for the ever-increasing number of investigative podcasts and Netflix documentaries. In 2017, Fincher returned to the serial killer subgenre by taking his project Mindhunter to the streaming service. Continue Reading →

With its magic, monsters, and ridiculously attractive cast, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina makes no attempt at relatability. However, while its fourth and final season is filled with situations that no person will ever find themselves in, its premise of a world being assaulted with unimaginable terrors before finally succumbing to a soulless void is a #2020mood.  Continue Reading →

It's hard to know what to make of the '80s nostalgia boom that's hit pop culture in recent years -- that Stranger Things-y crystallization of an entire decade has permeated everything from prestige drama to Wonder Woman flicks, a throwback aesthetic revived for a newer generation (or, more accurately, the same generation who grew up in it and desperately clamors for the apparent simplicity of those times in a chaotic 21st century). But like so many things about our youth, it can be dangerous to romanticize it at the expense of our messy present. That's a lesson that, of all things, Cobra Kai understands more than most of its '80s-inspired kin. Continue Reading →

Thank goodness for Shonda Rhimes, not only for having the clout to bring a beloved historical romance to a major streaming service but for recognizing what’s been missing from historical television drama: Fun. And Bridgerton is fun, bursting at the seams with romantic tropes, six-packs, friendship, and scandal.  Continue Reading →

Awards season is upon us, which means all the studios and streaming services are breaking out their big guns. Luckily, one of the best films of the year comes to Netflix this weekend. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, based on the play by August Wilson and starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman in his final role. A fictionalized snapshot in the life of the Mother of the Blues, Ma Rainey, George C. Wolfe's film imagines her in a sweaty, muggy Chicago recording studio in the 1920s, trying to record her most popular singles for white Northern audiences, far from her comfortable Black Southern crowds. Of course, tensions rise over everything from artistic freedom,  racial animus, and Coca-Cola. Continue Reading →

As TV’s best series about mental illness and addiction comes to an end, our hero BoJack doesn’t get closure, exactly (because there’s really no such thing), but is further down the road to self-awareness and real insight than he ever was. He may end up making yet another bad decision based both on self-loathing and selfishness, but there has to be some reason he keeps getting another chance, another hit at the reset button. If you’ve ever struggled with depression and/or addiction, then you know how both wonderful and absolutely terrifying that feels. Though the final season stumbles a bit with extended bits on cancel culture and open relationships, it ends on a subtle, melancholy note: “Life’s a bitch, and then you go on living.” [Gena Radcliffe] Continue Reading →

When I saw that Netflix made all ten hour-long episodes of its new ballet show, Tiny Pretty Things, available to review, I was intimidated. Even during a global pandemic, ten hours of uninterrupted solo TV time can be hard to come by on short notice. Luckily, Tiny Pretty Things was built to be binged. Fast-paced and drama-filled, the story whisks viewers away from their own lives and plunges them into a grim, seedy world of backroom dealings, sexual blackmail, Machiavellian schemes, and, finally, ballet.  Continue Reading →