There's a particular kind of film for a rainy night alone - absorbing enough to pull you fully in, good enough that you don't check your phone once.
In retrospect, the 2010s were a decade of quiet excellence - films doing serious work without demanding credit for it.
The best dramas don't require extraordinary circumstances. They find the extraordinary inside ordinary lives, and trust you to recognise it.
After leaving her daughter Jessica in a small town in Pernambuco to be raised by relatives, Val spends the next 13 years working as a nanny to Fabinho in São Paulo. She has financial stability but has to live with the guilt of having not raised Jessica herself. As Fabinho's university entrance exams approach, Jessica reappears in her life and seems to want to give her mother a second chance. However, Jessica has not been raised to be a servant and her very existence will turn Val's routine on its head. With precision and humour, the subtle and powerful forces that keep rigid class structures in place and how the youth may just be the ones to shake it all up.
Having died unexpectedly, firefighter Ja-hong is taken to the afterlife by 3 afterlife guardians. Only when he passes 7 trials over 49 days and proves he was innocent in human life, he's able to reincarnate, and his 3 afterlife guardians are by his side to defend him in trial.
The Grand Budapest Hotel tells of a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars and his friendship with a young employee who becomes his trusted protégé. The story involves the theft and recovery of a priceless Renaissance painting, the battle for an enormous family fortune and the slow and then sudden upheavals that transformed Europe during the first half of the 20th century.
A New York stockbroker refuses to cooperate in a large securities fraud case involving corruption on Wall Street, corporate banking world and mob infiltration. Based on Jordan Belfort's autobiography.
On the night she plans on taking her own life, 17-year-old 'Lisa McVey' is kidnapped and finds herself fighting to stay alive and is raped. She manages to talk her attacker into releasing her, but when she returns home, no one believes her story except for one detective, who suspects she was abducted by a serial killer. Based on horrifying true events.
These films earn their emotional weight by grounding everything in specificity. The characters feel like people, not constructs. That's rare and it's not easy.
The incredible true story behind the most controversial Italian court cases in recent years. Stefano Cucchi was arrested for a minor crime and mysteriously found dead during his detention. In one week's time, a family is changed forever.
Rizwan Khan, a Muslim from the Borivali section of Mumbai, has Asperger's syndrome. He marries a Hindu single mother, Mandira, in San Francisco. After 9/11, Rizwan is detained by authorities at LAX who treat him as a terrorist because of his condition and his race.
American car designer Carroll Shelby and the British-born driver Ken Miles work together to battle corporate interference, the laws of physics, and their own personal demons to build a revolutionary race car for Ford Motor Company and take on the dominating race cars of Enzo Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France in 1966.
When Juli meets Bryce in the second grade, she knows it's true love. After spending six years trying to convince Bryce the same, she's ready to give up - until he starts to reconsider.
Frank, a single man raising his child prodigy niece Mary, is drawn into a custody battle with his mother.
These films exist. They're excellent. The only reason you haven't seen them is that nobody told you to. Now someone has.
The best dramas don't tell you how to feel. They create conditions in which you can't help feeling â deeply, and without warning.