Only 3 Drama Movies Are Better Than ‘The Godfather’

There are a few movies that’ll pretty much always get ranked in the top 10 of all time, whenever someone tries to undertake such a ranking, and The Godfather is one of them. It’s perhaps the ultimate gangster movie, or at least the one people think of first when they hear the term “gangster movie,” more often than not. It’s about the Corleone family, and they’re literally a family and then also, there’s the Corleone crime family that the patriarch of the “actual” family runs. They’re part of the mafia, and though the Corleones weren’t an actual family, there was an attempt, on the film’s part, to reflect real-life crime families and conflicts, to some extent. Later gangster movies were sometimes a bit more realistic, like Goodfellas, which is based on a real-life person and is also generally a bit more down-to-earth in its depiction of organized crime, and then on the TV side of things, The Sopranos is probably a bit more “real,” for lack of a better word. There’s not really much that’s romantic or even very cool about the life depicted there, though it’s worth noting that that series isn’t based on real-life people, either.

The Godfather had a phenomenal sequel just two years on from its release, with The Godfather Part II effectively continuing the story, with Michael having taken over running the family from his father, Vito, while Vito remains in the story thanks to flashbacks showing how he arrived in America and began the whole crime family. It’s not hard to call The Godfather Part II as good as, or maybe even better than, The Godfather, so it’s not included below, and consider it getting name-dropped here something of an honorable mention. The following movies might well be greater than The Godfather, at least when you judge them (and The Godfather) as dramas. The Godfather is a crime movie alongside being a drama, which maybe complicates things a little, but since the family drama side of things is emphasized throughout the film, it feels worth calling it a drama, too. The movies below are also primarily dramas, one being purely so, the second being a drama and a war movie simultaneously, and the final movie mentioned has some crime elements, but primarily exists within the drama genre.

3

‘Citizen Kane’ (1941)

Image via RKO Radio Pictures

Like The Godfather, Citizen Kane is one of those potentially boring picks when it comes to singling out the best movies of all time. It’s got the historical value on its side. If the history of cinema can be seen as starting around the beginning of the 20th century, and is therefore currently a bit over 120 years old, then Citizen Kane was released within the first third of cinema’s history. Naturally, as more time passes, it’ll feel comparatively even earlier, within cinema’s timeframe, unless people just stop making and watching movies altogether, for whatever reason. Anyway, it’s not old enough to have outright invented/defined how movies should be written, edited, and acted, and all that, but it did push all those things to new heights, and did so within one remarkably forward-thinking film. And what Citizen Kane has to offer nowadays is still immense, even if the more revolutionary things it did are a little easier to take for granted, or at least not get entirely blown away by. Such is the case when you watch something undeniably influential many years on from when it first came out.

A man named Charles Foster Kane is at the center of Citizen Kane, but also, he dies right at the start of the movie. And he says one word before he croaks, and the whole ordeal of finding out what that word meant involves talking to various people who knew Kane when he was alive, which leads to a series of flashbacks that paint an almost-complete (but never entirely finished) portrait of who he was. The mystery hook is a pretty effective one, though Citizen Kane does inevitably function mostly as a drama, and a character study, feeling a little like a biographical movie but not about an actual person… for the most part. William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher, is someone whose life is reflected by Kane’s, and Hearst was not too pleased about the whole thing, to say the least, owing to how flawed and troubled the central character of Citizen Kane is. But hey, as long as you’re not Hearst, it makes for a compelling drama, and the movie’s also still easy to appreciate for how it was technically so masterful, especially when you compare it to other movies made around – or a little before – the same time.

2

‘Ran’ (1985)

It feels right to mention Ran when talking about dramas that might well top The Godfather because it’s also, at its core, something of a family drama. The question of succession weighs heavily on the mind of Vito Corleone in that first movie, and it’s also what drives the conflict in Ran. It’s an epic movie about a warlord in the 1500s who has three sons, and needs to decide what to do with the kingdom he reigns over. He attempts to abdicate and gives the most to his eldest son, unsurprisingly, and then hopes his second and third sons will cooperate and be at ease with “technically” being given less. You’d expect there’s enough to go around, and the family could remain powerful no matter what, but that would make for a pretty boring story, and also, that might well go against human nature. It’s King Lear, essentially, but not a direct adaptation of that Shakespeare play, more just a way of recontextualizing the core premise, a little like how Succession, the TV series, does King Lear, but in a modern context and with a good deal of dark humor and satire alongside all the tragedy and drama.

There’s a lot by way of spectacle in Ran, so it’s the kind of thing where it’s not “just” a drama. The film has its fair share of methodically paced and dialogue-heavy scenes, and while there are impressively grand war sequences in the film’s back half, it’s not quite an action movie in the traditional sense or anything. The drama carries it, though, and Ran finds a way to tell a familiar and enduring basic story in an inventive and ultimately very moving manner. It’s a heavy-going film alongside being a visually striking one, and if not for Seven Samurai, it would stand a good chance at being crowned the best of the best, when it comes to Akira Kurosawa films. Still, being second-best to what might well be the best – and most important – action movie of all time ain’t too bad (and Seven Samurai was considered slightly more of an action movie than a drama, for the purposes of this ranking, which is why Ran is here instead).

1

‘The Shawshank Redemption’ (1994)

Image via Columbia Pictures

Quite a few movies based on Stephen King stories had to (or at least felt the need to) shake up what was on the page, in the interest of making it work on screen, but The Shawshank Redemption was not one of them. This one had a pretty much flawless novella to adapt to a new medium, with “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” being the arguable highlight of a very consistent collection of novellas – indeed, the first King ever had published – called Different Seasons. The movie’s attained a level of popularity beyond that novella, though, and it’s got a reputation for being debatably the greatest prison movie of all time. It tells a story that involves two men locked up for serious crimes at Shawshank State Penitentiary, with the older of the two having been there for longer, and someone who’s begrudgingly accepted the idea of spending his life there. The other man, though, is newly incarcerated, and maintains his innocence, all the while finding himself able to use certain skills of his to earn privileges for himself and other prisoners from an otherwise tyrannical warden.

Since it’s The Shawshank Redemption, though, and stands as one of the most beloved and enduring movies of all time, you probably knew all that already, and there’s also a good chance you didn’t need an article telling you about how great the movie is. It’s one of those rare movies where you could single it out as your personal favorite of all time, and it’s unlikely that too many people (if anyone) would look at you funny for saying so. As a drama, The Shawshank Redemption is quite grueling at times, and when it wants to be brutal, it doesn’t really pull punches (this is something that can be said about a good many early novels, novellas, and short stories written by Stephen King). Also, this means that when it does showcase a moment of hope or happiness, it feels all the more impactful. The Shawshank Redemption just gets the balance right, in terms of being about hardships and nicer ships, like friendships. And it’s about life, friendships, hope, and overcoming adversities without ever seeming corny or melodramatic in a bad way. It’s just a wonderful and hard-to-fault movie, with that being a hopefully non-controversial statement to make.