Drama

American Beauty

Anna Karenina (2012)

Anne of the Thousand Days

Beasts of the Southern Wild

A Beautiful Mind

Beowulf and Grendel

Birdman: or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance

Blast of Silence

Blue is the Warmest Color

Bringing Out the Dead

Branded to Kill

Broken Embraces

Call Her Savage

Chicken With Plums

The Christine Jorgensen Story

The Cider House Rules

Caesar Must Die

The Conversation

Dallas Buyer's Club

A Dangerous Method

Dear White People

Diary of a Teenage Girl

Different for Girls

Don't Look for Me

The Fast Runner

The Flower of My Secret

Gangs of New York

The Gate of Flesh

The Grandmaster

The Great Beauty

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

A History of Violence

How Green Was My Valley

The Hurt Locker

I Know Where I'm Going

The Imitation Game

In the Mood for Love

Inglourious Basterds

Inside Llewyn Davis

The Intouchables

It's a Funny Kind of Story

Jamaica Inn (1939)

Jane Eyre (2011)

The Kids Are All Right

The King and the Clown

Kingdom of Heaven

The King's Speech

Leave Her To Heaven

Maps to the Stars

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A Matter of Life and Death

Melinda and Melinda

Les Miserables (2012)

A Most Wanted Man

Napoleon (1927)

No Country for Old Men

No Man of her Own (1950)

Only Angels Have Wings

Only Lovers Left Alive

Passage to Marseille

The Place Beyond the Pines

The Pleasure Garden

La pointe-courte

Quanto Dura o Amor?

The Red Riding Trilogy

The Road to Perdition

Samurai Rebellion

The Scarlet Empress

The Secret in Their Eyes

Secret Sunshine

Shun Li and the Poet

A Snake of June

The Spectacular Now

Synedoche, New York

The Tempest (2010)

Tess of the Storm Country (1914)

That Obscure Object of Desire

The Theory of Everything

There Will Be Blood

Three Days of the Condor

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

To Have and Have Not

The Tree of Life

The Trojan Women

The Truman Show

24 Hour Party People

Two Days One Night

Under Capricorn

Valhalla Rising

The Virgin Suicides

The Wayward Cloud

The Wolf of Wall Street

Your Sister's Sister

I am not entirely sure of what constitutes a "drama." For my purposes, "drama" is a dumping ground for anything that doesn't fit my other categories. For instance, some "epic" dramas of the sort made by David Lean stradle this category and the Action/Adventure category. Certainly, Douglas Sirk worked in a different idiom than Frank Capra, but both made "dramatic" films. We get melodramas here, as well as biographies, hagiographies, spectacles, romances, courtroom dramas, and expose`. As a result, films as diverse as Raging Bull, Beckett, and American Beauty will rub elbows here. When in doubt, I will probably just continue my practice of listing some films in multiple categories. This category in particular will probably have a lot of redundancies. My apologies to all.

A word about foreign films: It is common practice among movie guides to list foreign language films in their own separate category. Even within this framework, categorization breaks down, since films like Mario Bava's Black Sunday still wind up listed with horror movies. Now, I generally don't care for genre distinctions--there is an implied qualitative judgement involved in segregating some movies from others. When I first began to work on this site, I didn't want to break things out by genre at all, but nobody liked that idea but me. The categories on my site are a capitulation to popular demand. However, I am not going to create a foreign film archive. I think it makes more sense to treat foreign films like any other movies, so I am arbitrarily placing them in with the genres to which I think they belong. Many of the greatest foreign films will wind up here. A word to the wise...