Drama Movies and Films - Find Drama Movie Recommendations, Casts, Reviews, and Summaries

Drama is the most broad of cinema's genres and includes under its umbrella such subgenres as romantic drama, period drama, courtroom drama, and adventure drama among others. At the center of a drama is usually a character or characters who are in conflict at a crucial moment in their lives. Often revolving around families, movies like Ordinary People dig under the skin of everyday life to ask big questions and touch on the deepest emotions of normal people. Dramas often, but not always, have tragic or at least painful resolutions and concern the survival of some tragic crisis, like the death of a family member (Terms of Endearment), or a divorce (Kramer vs Kramer). Some of our greatest screen performances come from dramas, as there is ample opportunity for actors to stretch into a role that most other genres don't afford. In the early years of cinema, melodrama held sway, as the transition from silent cinema's pantomime left film with a more presentational manner. In the '50s, however, the arrival of stage actors like Marlon Brando, trained in more naturalistic techniques, slowly changed drama to a more realistic tenor. Streetcar Named Desire is considered a pivotal film in this development. By the late '70s, melodrama was nearly finished as an overt genre, as the hunger for realism dominated film in groundbreaking movies like Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets.