Movies in the Drama genre

There are numerous powerful Holocaust movies available but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that offers the kind of grim, you-are-there perspective of Son of Saul. With perhaps 90% of the shots in close-up with long takes, the movie ...

When one contemplates the amount of Oscar talent associated with The Son, the result can’t be considered anything less than a disappointment. A story of mental illness and the associated feelings of guilt and inadequacy visited upon the loved on...

Narratively, The Song of Sway Lake doesn’t have much going for it but when it comes to capturing the tone of a specific locale, the approach of director Ari Gold is without peer. If you’ve ever spent a summer vacation at a private lakeside...

If you enjoy the music of Neil Diamond, then Song Sung Blue will take you to places that not even Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show can. But if the thought of hearing “Sweet Caroline” one more time sounds like an act of torture, t...

Spoiler Warning: This review discusses key plot points in detail. Those who have not seen Sophie's Choice and wish to have a "virgin experience" are advised not to read beyond the first paragraph. Sophie's Choice was the best film released in 1...

Sound of Metal, a 2019 Belgian-American drama from director Darius Marder, achieves its life-affirming aim in such a way that it never feels cloying or preachy. Featuring a forceful central performance by Riz Ahmed (best-known as either one of...

Boxing movies are like romantic comedies: they come in neat packages, follow tried-and-true formulas, and rarely challenge conventions.  There are outliers, of course, like Martin Scorsese's brilliant Raging Bull, but those are rare. For the...

The Space between Us is what it looks like when a promising premise is betrayed by a dumbed-down, hackneyed screenplay. Instead of developing this movie as a coming-of-age story of the first Earth-conceived child born on another planet, the narrative...

"People ask if this film is autobiographical, and many of the circumstances in it are but I've pushed them farther than they really went. It's personal, but not completely autobiographical. It was common in my home and my friends' homes to s...

Spare Parts tries too hard to be a based-on-a-true-story, feel-good, crowd-pleasing, triumph-of-the-underdogs movie. Somewhere along the line, perhaps by never deviating a millimeter from the expected trajectory of the genre, it crosses the line fr...