The 29 Best Dramas on Netflix Right Now

Movies make us better people by giving us glimpses into worlds we might otherwise never encounter. We laugh with characters who might be miles away, cry over the past, or fear for the future. We come to understand each other through shared experience, and in this endeavor, the moving image is perhaps humanity’s greatest translator.

Because it is the film genre taken most seriously, dramas often get a bad rap. You probably can’t remember the last time you heard someone say, “Hey, let’s watch a drama.” But still, the heart sometimes craves the kind of emotional roller coaster only a drama can provide. That in mind, these are the best dramas on Netflix (US) right now. We’ve listed them from oldest to newest, the last drama-free moment you’ll get before diving into the wringer.

To Kill a Mockingbird

A star-cementing and Oscar-winning performance from Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch underscores what is inarguably one of America’s best-remembered films. At the time, actor Mary Badham was the youngest person ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Although the “white savior” overtones don’t hold up as well today as they did in 1962, this adaptation of Harper Lee’s beloved novel remains one of the few movies middle schoolers have to watch that they actually end up enjoying.

Dead Poets Society

An unforgettable “serious role” earned Robin Williams an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in 1999. At the heart of this prep school drama is the late actor and comedian’s gentle gusto, which will make you cry. For some reason it’s also the only Robin Williams-starring movie on Netflix. Someone should fix that.

Schindler’s List

Nobody wants to watch Schindler’s List, but Steven Spielberg’s 1993 historical drama about a German businessman who saved about 1,200 Jewish refugees from Nazi death or concentration camps remains every bit as important today as it was when it won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, in 1994. You might be a Liam Neeson fan from his Nic Cage-y turn in action movies like Taken, but it’s worth remembering he’s also a very serious actor.

Eyes Wide Shut

By far his most labyrinthine and impenetrable masterpiece, Kubrick’s final film demands the viewer unravel it for themselves. The small story of a hiccup in the marriage of Bill and Alice Harford may or may not hide a cosmos of geopolitical implications, but what it puts on display front-and-center is the incomparable talent of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who were married at the time of filming. Get ready to have a lot of questions, including, Sure it’s the holidays, but why the fuck does every room have a Christmas tree?

Sex and Lucía

If coastal Spain is even a fraction as beautiful as it is in 2001’s Sex and Lucía, then it’s a wonder more people don’t move to the Mediterranean. Awash in sumptuous cinematography and so. much. sex., this 2001 Spanish drama is meant to please the brooding, horny writer in all of us.

Y Tu Mamá También

When you think of Alfonso Cuarón, you think of Children of Men and Gravity. Y Tu Mamá También is better. Soft-spoken but boasting breakout performances from Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, and Maribel Verdú, you will not forget the ending of this coming-of-age story couched in a road movie.

City of God

The story of Rocket growing up in the crime-ridden favelas of Rio de Janeiro has received such widespread acclaim, few today would think to recommend it. Let this 2002 Brazilian drama grab you by the throat and you’ll be rewarded with one of the best coming-of-age stories since The 400 Blows.

Friday Night Lights

Most sports dramas suck, because sports themselves are already dramatic enough. On the other hand, the 2004 film that spawned the best sports TV show bar none (sorry Arli$$) is a paean to the pigskin that puts the talents of director Peter Berg (The Rundown, Lone Survivor) on full display.

Michael Clayton

Back in the early aughts, political films like Syriana and Thank You for Smoking were apparently too woke for audiences who saw Erin Brockovich as a simple story about a mom getting back on her feet. But what this slow-burn drama about a legal fixer’s crisis of faith lacks in widespread notoriety, it makes up for in its all-too-topical skewering of modern agribusinesses like Monsanto. It will also, without a doubt, make you remember why America loves George Clooney.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

The final film from Sidney Lumet stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, and Marisa Tomei as small-time crooks who get in way over their heads. What sounds like a simple premise, however, delivers a river-deep story about modern American desperation in only the way the director of Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon knew how.

The Hurt Locker

Military movies by Kathryn Bigelow (K-19: The Widowmaker, Zero Dark Thirty) make it hard to know whose side you’re on. You could be as anti-Iraq War as it gets, for instance, and still find yourself cheering on Jeremy Renner’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit. Great dramas about the depths of the human spirit will always be bigger than personal political opinions, which is why you should watch them (carefully).

Milk

The triumphant life and tragic death of Harvey Milk gets the biopic treatment in Gus Van Sant’s 2008 film. Although Sean Penn carries the film with his idiosyncratic portrayal of the openly gay San Francisco activist and politician, guest appearances from stars including Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, James Franco, and Diego Luna make this both a novel drama for its historical aspects and for watching with your entire family.

A Serious Man

Have the Coen Bros. ever been more depressing than when, in 2009, they used a period-piece setting and the critically-undervalued Michael Stuhlbarg to retell the Biblical story of Job? You might consider this a black comedy, but the weight Roger Deakins’s cinematography gives to the barren 1960s Minnesota landscape puts this one squarely in ‘drama’ territory.

Even the Rain

The terrible tale of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World becomes a meta-exploration into the colonial aspects of filmmaking in Spanish director Icíar Bollaín’s stunningEven the Rain (También la lluvia). When a director (played by Gael García Bernal) gets caught in the throes of a water war, a crisis of consciousness quickly emerges for the cast and crew.

Pariah

Spike Lee’s protege, Dee Rees, burst onto the scene with this rapturous story about a 17-year-old coming to terms with her homosexuality. Come for an unforgettable performance by Nigerian newcomer Adepero Oduye, stay for the star-making cinematography of Bradford Young (Arrival, Solo: A Star Wars Story).

The Place Beyond the Pines

The best Ryan Gosling movie, Lars and the Real Girl, isn’t yet on Netflix, but The Place Beyond the Pines is a close second. Dirtbag-Gosling-on-a-dirtbike-with-a-face-tattoo is conceptually flawless in and of itself, but it’s the ways Derek Cianfrance’s 2013 film starkly explores intergenerational trauma and class warfare that make this a powerful exploration into the myriad ways capitalism makes it harder to be human.

Fruitvale Station

The debut film from Creed and Black Panther powerhouse Ryan Coogler tells the true story of Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan), a 22-year-old black man killed by a BART Police officer in the wee hours of New Year’s Day 2009. There are a number of reasons Coogler is one of the most exciting directors around, and 2013’s Fruitvale Station makes them all breathtakingly clear.

Wetlands

These days, the “teen drama” is all musicals and musical theater kids. With the exception of 20th Century Women, which was more of a memoir anyway, the last good one was the lukewarm Adventureland (also on Netflix), and that’s because Bill Hader and Kristen Stewart rule (of the latter: fight us!). The German comedy-drama Wetlands, however, is a rare exception, a film as boundary-pushing as it is comfortable in its own skin. File this in the same cabinet as The Virgin Suicides, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, and Donnie Darko, but be forewarned—were this an American movie, it would have likely earned an ‘NC-17’ rating.

Blue Caprice

French director Alexandre Moors’s low-key 2013 exploration into the DC sniper attacks of 2002 is terrifying in its banality, in the way it captures the paranoiac feeling that at any moment, seemingly out of nowhere, your life could be ended by a single bullet fired from a ways away.

Nymphomaniac Volumes I and II

Sensation is the name of the game in Danish director Lars von Trier’s two-part Nymphomaniac saga. At once profoundly nihilistic and horrifically beautiful, it’s a two-part film about pushing limits. As such, it isn’t for the weak-hearted or easily triggered, but if you’ve got the hours to join Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) as she recounts her lascivious life story—and the constitution to sit through it—we’d actually recommend splurging for the six-hour Director’s Cut.

Clouds of Sils Maria

Kristen Stewart is a good actor. Kristen Stewart is a good actor. Kristen Stewart is a good actor! Watch her steal the screen as Valentine, the assistant to famed actor Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) in Olivier Assayas’s enigmatic 2014 drama, and try telling us Kristen Stewart isn’t a good actor.

The Imitation Game

Is there a more depressing story than that of Alan Turing, the British genius who helped beat the Nazis but then was forced to undergo chemical castration for being gay? Eight Academy Award noms (and one win for Best Adapted Screenplay) later, the answer is probably not, but that doesn’t mean Benedict Cumberbatch’s 2014 portrayal of the tortured cryptanalyst isn’t well worth its heartbreaking historical conclusion.

White God

Two hundred dogs were trained to act for this 2014 Hungarian drama. If that isn’t worth your time, you aren’t just a cat person, you are Cat Person.

Tangerine

Before The Florida Project, filmmaker Sean Baker made waves in 2015 with his stunning and heartfelt iPhone-shot film about a trans sex worker in Hollywood. It’s hard to be a human, and boy, Tangerine does not shy away from our propensity towards cruelty. It makes the glimpses of hope scattered throughout all the more important to hold onto.

Carol

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara co-star in this period piece about a forbidden love in the 1950s, but what could easily have been a sappy and cliché love story is an altogether sharp, thrilling romance in the capable hands of Velvet Goldmine director Todd Haynes.

Cosmos

The psychological body horror-cum-divorce drama Possession is probably the most inviting entrée into the world of the late Polish auteur Andrzej Żuławski, and that’s saying a lot. Cosmos, his final film, is no walk in the park, but this meta-chamber piece might be the single most surreal and mind-bending drama on Netflix. Don’t expect any easy answers, and even less coherent dialogue, but do prepare yourself to enter the singular mind of a director unlike any other.

Nocturama

In 2016, French director Bertrand Bonello released this taut thriller about a bunch of teens who successfully pull of a terror attack in Paris, and then hole up in the mall to wait it out. As formal explorations of alienated youth go, it’s as close as it comes to an Elephant-style observational masterpiece. Obviously the subject matter is fraught and profoundly upsetting in and of itself—just wait until you start identifying with the main characters.

Mudbound

What Dee Rees proved she could do in Pariah finds its zenith in the Oscar-nominated Mudbound. Don’t let Rachel Morrison’s watercolor cinematography lull you into a false sense of security—this gut-wrenching story about racism and family ties was one of the most powerful films of 2017.

The Wound

In an increasingly connected, increasingly alienated world, we need more stories about the commonalities of unique experiences. Case in point is the LGBTQ drama The Wound, a tender and brutal coming-of-age story set in the Xhosa community in South Africa. You might not know anything about masculinity in the Eastern Cape, but you will definitely come away with a more nuanced understanding of how the capacity to love is universal.

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