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.
Despite everything, the 2020s have produced some genuinely remarkable cinema. Films made under pressure that somehow carry none of it.
Drama works when it makes you forget you're watching a film. The best of them pull you in so completely that the credits are a genuine surprise.
Metal drummer Ruben begins to lose his hearing. When a doctor tells him his condition will worsen, he thinks his career and life is over. His girlfriend Lou checks the former addict into a rehab for the deaf hoping it will prevent a relapse and help him adapt to his new life. After being welcomed and accepted just as he is, Ruben must choose between his new normal and the life he once knew.
Denmark, 1755. Captain Ludvig Kahlen sets out to conquer a Danish heath reputed to be uncultivable, with an impossible goal: to establish a colony in the name of the king, in exchange for a royal title. A single-minded ambition that the ruthless lord of the region will relentlessly seek to put down. Kahlen's fate hangs in the balance: will his endevours bring him wealth and honour, or cost him his life...?
In this Oscar-winning short film, grieving parents journey through an emotional void as they mourn the loss of a child after a tragic school shooting.
Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories fill the gaps between camcorder footages as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the troubled man she didn't.
In 1879, Kenshin and his allies face their strongest enemy yet: his former brother-in-law Enishi Yukishiro and his minions, who've vowed their revenge.
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.
What was supposed to be a peaceful protest turned into a violent clash with the police. What followed was one of the most notorious trials in history.
Mykola is an eccentric pacifist who wants to be useful to humanity. When the war begins in Donbas, Mykola's naive world is collapsing as the militants kill his pregnant wife and burn his home to the ground. Recovered, he makes a cardinal decision and gets enlisted in a sniper company. Having met his wife's killers, he emotionally breaks down and arranges "sniper terror" for the enemy.
A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them - a damaged, brainy troublemaker - and with the school's head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.
Marcel is an adorable one-inch-tall shell who ekes out a colorful existence with his grandmother Connie and their pet lint, Alan. Once part of a sprawling community of shells, they now live alone as the sole survivors of a mysterious tragedy. When a documentarian discovers them amongst the clutter of his Airbnb, his resulting short film brings Marcel millions of passionate fans, as well as unprecedented dangers and a new hope at finding his long-lost family.
Dr. Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but egotistical scientist, brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.
The films that give you a good cry do so because they've earned it. Not through sadness alone - through care. These films care.
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.