For a Friday with friends, you need a film that doesn't require perfect silence to work. Something engaging enough that it holds attention even in a room with people in it.
Looking back, the 2000s were a golden era for this kind of filmmaking - studios still willing to fund serious work, directors still pushing at the edges of what was expected.
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.
In the poverty-stricken favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s, two young men choose different paths. Rocket is a budding photographer who documents the increasing drug-related violence of his neighborhood, while José "Zé" Pequeno is an ambitious drug dealer diving into a dangerous life of crime.
The lively João Grilo and the sly Chicó are poor guys living in the hinterland who cheat a bunch of people in a small town in Northeastern Brazil. When they die, they have to be judged by Christ, the Devil and the Virgin Mary before they are admitted to paradise.
The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.
With no clue how he came to be imprisoned, drugged and tortured for 15 years, a desperate man seeks revenge on his captors.
After the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, his devious son takes power and demotes Maximus, one of Rome's most capable generals who Marcus preferred. Eventually, Maximus is forced to become a gladiator and battle to the death against other men for the amusement of paying audiences.
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.
In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.
A mysterious story of two magicians whose intense rivalry leads them on a life-long battle for supremacy -- full of obsession, deceit and jealousy with dangerous and deadly consequences.
To take down South Boston's Irish Mafia, the police send in one of their own to infiltrate the underworld, not realizing the syndicate has done likewise. While an undercover cop curries favor with the mob kingpin, a career criminal rises through the police ranks. But both sides soon discover there's a mole among them.
A young boy, attempting to have a normal childhood in 1980s El Salvador, is caught up in a dramatic fight for his life when he desperately tries to avoid the war that is raging all around him.
Joel Barish, heartbroken that his girlfriend underwent a procedure to erase him from her memory, decides to do the same. However, as he watches his memories of her fade away, he realises that he still loves her, and may be too late to correct his mistake.
The best suspense doesn't come from action - it comes from caring about what happens. These films make you care, then twist the knife.
Great drama stays with you because it refuses easy comfort. These films hand you something true and let you carry it.