Best Drama Movies, Films, and Streaming Features of 2021
At times, it can seem like every cinema screen is devoted to either superheroes shooting lasers in front of a green-screen or another franchise-sequel green-lit from a spreadsheet.
Thankfully, with more viewing methods than ever before, we’re lucky enough to experience an overwhelming abundance of high quality films. 2021 delivered some superb dramas from exceptional talent, such as must-watch directors Wes Anderson, Jane Campion, Edgar Wright, and Paul Thomas Anderson, and exceptional actors like Olivia Colman, Oscar Isaac, Tilda Swinton, Daniel Kaluuya, and Frances McDormand.
When it comes to drama movies, there was something sensational for every drama fan this year. Please enjoy our Best Drama Movies, Films, and Streaming Features of 2021.
Want more drama movie reviews? The Sea Shell mobile app is available worldwide as a free download on the App Store and the Play Store. Download it today.
1. The Card Counter
As director Paul Schrader makes clear with the film’s first line of dialogue (“I never imagined myself confined to a life of incarceration”), this is a movie about prisons.
‘The Card Counter’ finds Oscar Isaac operating at the peak of his abilities. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more thrillingly necessary use of the filmmaking form this year.
Read more here.
2. Judas And The Black Messiah
Led by sensational performances from Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as William O'Neal, the FBI informant who infiltrated his inner circle, this is a scalding account of oppression and revolution, coercion and betrayal, rendered more shocking by the undiminished currency of its themes.
From his first scene, Kaluuya’s Hampton has a raging fire in his belly, a quality that makes him a rousing communicator. “Anywhere there’s people, there’s power,” is one of his refrains. For much of the duration (the film runs a fast-paced two hours and change), the burning charisma of Kaluuya’s Fred makes him the sun around which everyone else orbits.
Find out more.
3. The Power Of The Dog
This is an exquisitely crafted film, its unhurried rhythms continually shifting as plangent notes of melancholy, solitude, torment, jealousy and resentment surface. Director Jane Campion is in full control of her material, digging deep into the turbulent inner life of each of her characters with unerring subtlety.
Read full review.
4. CODA
The movie ‘CODA’ reminds us that cliches sometimes work — and brilliantly. This formulaic coming-of-age comedy-drama, adapted from the 2014 French film “La Famille Belier,” pushes our buttons shamelessly, but also with enough sincerity, warmth and finesse to forestall accusations of rank manipulation. You’ll laugh, all right. You’ll cry. You’ll do both at the same time. ‘CODA’ is just that kind of movie. And thank goodness for it.
Read more.
5. Nine Days
There is a difference between a first-time director taking creative risks and the imaginative swing that Edson Oda takes with his directorial debut ‘Nine Days’. This isn’t just creative. It isn’t just imaginative. ‘Nine Days’ is the sort of original cinematic art that, these days, is few and far between.
Read more here.
Want more drama movie reviews? The Sea Shell mobile app is available worldwide as a free download on the App Store and the Play Store. Download it today.
6. The Beta Test
Jim Cummings rivets as a Hollywood agent in a Twilight Zone of temptation. The actor-director's latest DIY movie is at once a film-world satire, an erotic thriller, and a meditation on identity. I’ve rarely seen an actor portray this kind of hotshot sociopath while showing you, as Cummings does, the torrents of anxiety that drive him.
Find out more.
7. Last Night In Soho
Last Night In Soho is an intoxicatingly distinctive, delirious creation that soars out of every pigeonhole you put it in. It's a hyperactive, free-flowing, intensely emotional, must-see movie.
It also marks a refreshing change for the director and co-writer of “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz,” and “Baby Driver.” Left behind is Edgar Wright’s trademark hyperactive editing and insistent post-modernism; in its place is flowing movement and intense emotion. It’s not just different from his previous films; it’s different from everyone else’s previous films.
Read full review.
8. Licorice Pizza
Watching "Licorice Pizza" reminded me why I love movies so much; particularly the way they can drop us into another place and another time, and embed us completely into the lives of total strangers.
If "Licorice Pizza" had stretched on for another hour, I would've been perfectly content to go along.
Read more.
9. The French Dispatch
Wes Anderson pens an extravagant love letter to the adventurous editors of sophisticated literary magazines like The New Yorker, and to the writers, humorists and illustrators nurtured up through their ranks, in The French Dispatch.
Bursting at the seams with hand-crafted visual delights and eccentric performances from a stacked ensemble entirely attuned to the writer-director’s signature wavelength, this is the film equivalent of a short story collection.
Find out more.
10. Passing
Starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga in two of the year’s best performances, this mesmerizing film about race, class and gender identity in the 1920s speaks urgently to right now and marks a brilliant directing debut from Rebecca Hall.
Find out more.
Want more drama movie reviews? The Sea Shell mobile app is available worldwide as a free download on the App Store and the Play Store. Download it today.
11. Together
Featuring pointedly jagged performances from James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan, the only characters in film besides their son Arthur (Samuel Logan), who moves around the film, and frame’s, periphery, Together is an occasionally slight, but nevertheless riveting showcase for the actors and writer Dennis Kelly’s decidedly unsentimental script.
‘Together’ represents a welcome tonal shift, unafraid to showcase the nastiness associated with isolation and, paradoxically, becoming one of the most humane things Stephen Daldry has directed.
Read full review.
12. C’mon C’mon
C’mon C’mon is a gentle drama, but its deep emotional wellspring is mitigated by how wise it is about what impossible little monsters kids can be when they’re acting out. Joaquin Phoenix shines in Mike Mills’ unsentimental exploration of strained family dynamics. Phoenix and Woody Norman prove to be an understatedly comic onscreen pair, navigating their characters’ growing bond with a rich naturalism that allows no room for phony uplift or tidy resolutions.
Read more.
13. Memoria
The film is serious in its reflection on whether there’s a spirit world that persists beneath the façades of urban modernity. Again in a Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, we find spirits lurking behind the everyday world, but in Memoria, they might just be repressed memories emanating from a world that never actually forgets.
Read more.
14. The Tragedy of Macbeth
Joel Coen’s brutally stark, nightmarish vision of ”the Scottish play“ features both dazzling performances and contemporary resonance. If there’s a quibble with this graphically imagined The Tragedy of Macbeth, it’s one common to the movies Coen made with his brother: It’s ruthless, intelligent, and entertaining, and mightily drinkable as filmmaking, without necessarily raising the emotional temperature past a clinical, grim efficiency. Often, even with the never-not-human Washington going for it, dazzlingly so.
Read more here.
15. The Father
Over the course of his six-decade career, Hopkins has played it broad and played it fine, and sometimes he’s done both at the same time. That’s not easy to pull off. As Anthony, a blustery London widower whose grip on reality slowly comes unglued over the course of the film, Hopkins does it again. This is a magnificent and harrowing performance: A lion in winter slowly coming to ground.
Read full review.
Want more drama movie reviews? The Sea Shell mobile app is available worldwide as a free download on the App Store and the Play Store. Download it today.
16. The Many Saints of Newark
If you’re a “Sopranos” fanatic (and who isn’t?), there are a few key things you want from “The Many Saints of Newark,” starting with a movie that’s compulsively authentic and watchable the way that the show was.
It’s a sharp, lively, and engrossing movie, one that provides a fascinating running commentary on how the world of 'The Sopranos' came into being.
Read more.
17. Pig
This is so much more than a movie where Nicolas Cage hunts down the men who kidnapped his beloved hog. Like the animal itself, ‘Pig’ is considerably smarter and more ardent than it appears at first glance, and unearths treasures that are barely evident on the surface level. We’d have settled for much less, but what a rare treat to be offered a great deal more.
Find out more.
18. The Courier
While espionage thrillers in the 007/Mission Impossible vein rely on spectacle to elevate the pulse and obscure plot hiccups, The Courier is content to tell an engaging story and rely on the circumstances and characters to hold the viewer’s interest. It replaces action scenes and stunts with slow-burn suspense.
Dominic Cooke’s unadorned style and pacing work for the material and the result is a spy story worth telling and experiencing.
Find out more.
19. The Little Things
The opening scene in the midnight-dark, period piece serial killer thriller “The Little Things” feels like a lift from a certain segment in “The Silence of the Lambs,” as if to acknowledge we’re in for a derivative thrill ride. Rami Malek and Denzel Washington are electric together in this atmospheric, moody thriller that will keep you guessing and on the edge of the proverbial seat (or living room sofa). You won’t be able to shake this one off for a very long time.
Read full review.
20. No Sudden Move
It forcefully snaps into focus in the simple notion that this is a movie about people under pressure. As is his usual style, director Steven Soderbergh doesn’t fully lay the play out— he lets us figure it out as it happens, alongside his characters. What occurs is a dizzying series of bluffs, set-ups, deals, double-crosses, and MacGuffins (I counted two, your mileage may vary), driven by the ever-enjoyable Benicio Del Toro, Don Cheadle, David Harbour, and Brendan Fraser.
Read full review.
Want more drama movie reviews? The Sea Shell mobile app is available worldwide as a free download on the App Store and the Play Store. Download it today.
21. Violet
Olivia Munn often plays whip-smart, no-nonsense, badass characters who might not give out the warmest vibe and don’t seem particularly vulnerable — which makes her performance in Justine Bateman’s searing and bold and emotionally impactful ‘Violet’ all the more impressive. Thanks in large part to Munn’s elegant, authentic, grounded and moving performance, we’re rooting hard for Violet to find some inner peace.
Read more here.
22. Rare Beasts
Billie Piper’s ambitious, darkly funny drama suggests the arrival of a new filmmaker with a vision, verve and a voice. ‘Anti-romcom’, as the film’s been labelled, doesn’t quite cover it. Rare Beasts doesn’t so much lightly skewer love and romance as take a big old bulldozer to every corner of modern life.
Find out more.
23. Locked Down
Chiwitel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway make a great pairing; they get memorable moments separately, from his regaling their cozy block of townhouses with poetry to her sneaking cigarettes and trying to keep it together during those deadening work calls, but they absolutely click together as a couple who think they’ve reached the end of their rope, only to discover that maybe they haven’t.
It’s a daring mix of genres, but it works, as though Noah Baumbach had been called in to do a rewrite on “How to Steal a Million.” Steven Knight wrote and directed one of the best (“Locke”) and worst (“Serenity”) films of the last decade, but when he is good, he is very, very good, and his skillful handing of relationships and claustrophobia and corporate-speak is matched by Doug Liman’s ability to bring all of this to fruition.
Read more.
24. Cruella
This witty, zesty, high-energy prequel succeeds by creating its own wild world - one in which we follow Cruella on a darkly comic quest from cradle to catwalk. Driven by a spectacular Emma Stone performance, it’s hands-down Disney’s best and punchiest prequel yet, one whose playful perils make for a deliciously rowdy ride.
Read more.
25. Pixie
‘Pixie’ is a jaunty, Tarantino-esque drama-action-comedy contraption, loaded with double and quadruple crosses, genre-mashing diversions and loads of idiots dying sudden, violent deaths.
The film simply wouldn’t be much, without Olivia Cooke’s quick-witted performance. She’s formidable and disarming at the same time, all the time.
Read more here.
Want more drama movie reviews? The Sea Shell mobile app is available worldwide as a free download on the App Store and the Play Store. Download it today.