10 Drama Films That Are Perfect From Start to Finish

Drama is the hardest genre to get right, because there’s nothing to hide behind. There’s no monster, chase, and twist at the end to save you, just performances and a script, and if either one slips, you notice right away. When it works, though, nothing else in movies comes close.

These ten are the ones where I couldn’t find the slip. They cover more than sixty years, from a single jury room in 1957 to a wealthy family’s hillside house in 2019, and some are quiet while others are loud, but none of them are padded. Here they are, ranked from great to the one I’d save for last.

10

‘Manchester by the Sea’ (2016)

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Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is a janitor in Boston who barely talks to anyone, until a phone call tells him his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has died. He heads back to his hometown and finds out Joe named him guardian of his sixteen-year-old son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), a job Lee clearly isn’t ready for. Kenneth Lonergan wrote and directed Manchester by the Sea, and he shot it in the real Massachusetts town, which gives it a cold, lived-in feel you can’t fake. Matt Damon was supposed to star at first, but scheduling got in the way, so he stayed on as a producer and handed the role to Affleck.

The scene everyone talks about is a short chat on the street between Lee and his ex-wife, Randi (Michelle Williams), and it only lasts a few minutes, but it hurts more than most full movies do. Affleck won Best Actor and Lonergan won Best Original Screenplay. The film doesn’t give Lee a big breakthrough, because some people don’t get better, they just get through the day. That honesty is why it sticks with you.

9

‘A Separation’ (2011)

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Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami), a married couple in Tehran, are fighting over whether to leave Iran, and A Separation opens with the two of them arguing straight into the camera, as if it were the judge deciding whether they can divorce. When Simin moves out, Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a devout, pregnant woman, to care for his father, who has Alzheimer’s. A small argument leads to a shove, and suddenly the family is in court over whether Razieh lost her baby.

Their daughter, Termeh, is played by Farhadi’s own daughter, Sarina, and she watches the adults twist the truth with a stare that says more than any line could. It was the first Iranian film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and it also took the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Nobody in the story is a villain, and the film ends on a difficult choice not answered on screen, and it keeps you talking about it for days.

8

‘The Social Network’ (2010)

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The Social Network begins with a couple on a bar date, Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) and Erica (Rooney Mara), talking at lightning speed, and it ends at a scene where she’s dumped him and he’s headed back to his dorm to start a website. David Fincher reportedly shot that opening scene around 99 times to get the rhythm right. The film follows how Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook and lost his best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), along the way.

The Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer) are both played by Hammer, with a body double, Josh Pence, whose face was swapped with Hammer’s in post. Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) shows up as a charming, paranoid party boy who pulls Mark away from Eduardo. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won an Oscar for the score, and its cold piano gives the film a lonely, nervous pulse. Everyone in this film is smart, and nobody ends up happy.

7

‘Moonlight’ (2016)

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Moonlight follows one man, Chiron, across three stages of his life. First as a quiet kid known as Little (Alex Hibbert), as a bullied teenager (Ashton Sanders), and in the end as a hardened adult named Black (Trevante Rhodes). Barry Jenkins directed it from an unproduced play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, and both men grew up in the same Miami neighborhood, Liberty City, where the film was shot. The three actors playing Chiron were reportedly kept apart during filming, so none of them would copy another’s style. The budget was only about $1.5 million.

Juan (Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer who becomes a father figure to young Chiron, won Ali an Oscar for a role with limited screen time. Paula (Naomie Harris), Chiron’s mother, shot all her scenes in just three days. The film won Best Picture, but only after the presenters announced La La Land by mistake, one of the strangest moments in Oscar history. It’s gentle, quiet, and aching.

6

‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)

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The first fifteen minutes of There Will Be Blood have almost no dialogues, just Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) alone in a mine in 1898, digging for silver and breaking his leg, and you already understand everything about him. He turns into an oil man, raises a son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), as a business partner, and runs into a young preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) who wants a share. Paul Thomas Anderson loosely adapted it from Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, and Day-Lewis reportedly based his voice on John Huston’s from Chinatown.

Dano was first cast in a smaller role, then took over the larger part of Eli after the original actor left. Jonny Greenwood, the guitarist from Radiohead, wrote the screeching, uneasy score, and it sounds like nothing else in film. Day-Lewis won Best Actor, and the final bowling alley scene, with its famous milkshake line, still gets quoted by people who haven’t even seen the movie. It’s cold, loud, and brilliant.

5

‘12 Angry Men’ (1957)

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Twelve jurors lock themselves in a hot, cramped room to decide the fate of a teenager accused of murder, and eleven of them vote guilty right away. Juror 8 (Henry Fonda) is the only one who hesitates, and he says he isn’t sure, just that they should talk about it. Sidney Lumet directed 12 Angry Men in his feature debut, shooting it in around nineteen days almost entirely in one room. Writer Reginald Rose based it on his own experience serving on a jury.

Lumet switched lenses as the film went on, starting wide and gradually using longer ones, so the room seemed to shrink and the men felt more trapped. Juror 3 (Lee J. Cobb) is a furious man with his own reasons for wanting a guilty verdict, and watching his temper boil over is intense even today. The film wasn’t a hit when it came out and lost at the Oscars, but it’s now taught in law schools and film classes.

4

‘Parasite’ (2019)

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Parasite is the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars, which says a lot about how hard Bong Joon-ho’s story hit people. Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) and his family are broke, living in a cramped semi-basement, until his son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) forges a university document to become an English tutor for the wealthy Park family. Soon his sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam) joins the household as an art therapist, and their parents follow.

To get the Parks’ housekeeper, Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun), fired, Ki-taek uses peach fuzz to set off her allergy, making her cough so the Parks think she has tuberculosis. Mrs. Park (Cho Yeo-jeong) throws a Native American-themed birthday party for her young son, Da-song, and it becomes the setting for the film’s most violent turn. The mood shifts from comedy to dread so smoothly that you hardly notice it happening.

3

‘Schindler’s List’ (1993)

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Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) is a German businessman and Nazi party member who arrives in Kraków in 1939 hoping to make a fortune, and ends up saving more than a thousand Jewish workers by putting them on his factory payroll. His accountant, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), runs the books and quietly keeps people off the transport lists. Steven Spielberg shot Schindler’s List in black and white, mostly handheld, in Poland, and he refused to take a salary because profiting from it felt wrong.

Spielberg was still finishing Jurassic Park at the time, so he checked effects shots by satellite from Poland while he was shooting this. Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), the camp commandant, is terrifying in an everyday sort of way. The only splash of color in the film is a little girl’s red coat, which shows up twice at key moments. Spielberg won his first Best Director Oscar for it, and the film took Best Picture too.

2

‘The Shawshank Redemption’ (1994)

Image via Columbia Pictures

Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a banker, is sent to Shawshank prison for killing his wife and her lover, a crime he says he didn’t commit. He befriends Red (Morgan Freeman), a longtime inmate who can get anything for a price, and over twenty years the two build one of the best friendships in movie history. Frank Darabont adapted The Shawshank Redemption from a Stephen King novella, reportedly paying King just $5,000 for the rights.

It was shot at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, a real, enormous Gothic prison. The film earned seven Oscar nominations but didn’t win any, and it did so badly at the box office that it seemed destined to be forgotten. Then cable and VHS rentals found it, and it now sits at the top of audience polls.

1

‘The Godfather’ (1972)

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Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) is a Sicilian-American crime boss with a soft voice, and when he’s shot, his youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino), a war hero who wanted no part of the family business, steps in. Francis Ford Coppola directed The Godfather after Paramount nearly fired him several times, and the studio fought him over casting both Brando and Pacino. Brando reportedly stuffed cotton in his cheeks during his screen test to create Vito’s jowls.

Sonny (James Caan), Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), and Fredo (John Cazale) round out the family, and Kay (Diane Keaton) is Michael’s quiet wife. The famous cannoli line was improvised by actor Richard Castellano. Cinematographer Gordon Willis kept the lighting low, earning the nickname “the Prince of Darkness.” It’s the standard every crime drama still gets measured against, and I think it’s one of the cleanest stories ever put on film.