Genre: Action & Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Actor: Anthony Oseyemi, Didintle Khunou, Jesse Suntele, Kiroshan Naidoo, Thando Thabethe
Director: Fred Wolmarans, Gareth Crocker
In life and cinema, drama is everywhere. You’ll find it in thrillers, animations, romances, you name it. For entertainment that explores the human experience with sensitivity and sincerity, here’s a mixed bag of the best dramas to stream now.
Genre: Action & Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Actor: Anthony Oseyemi, Didintle Khunou, Jesse Suntele, Kiroshan Naidoo, Thando Thabethe
Director: Fred Wolmarans, Gareth Crocker
There's a novel idea at the center of World's First Christmas, but the film's unfortunately takes it through the least interesting route available. There's a rich opportunity here to unpack what the holiday season really means to people, or to poke fun at how this occasion for togetherness and celebration has been co-opted by corporations trying to make a buck. But the film never gets there, running through a series of occasionally funny scenarios only to end up becoming an unconvincing advertisement for Christmas as a consumer holiday. The main gag here is that everyone has been left miserable by the absence of Christmas, which is an idea that falls apart immediately once you start asking even the simplest questions about it.
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy
Actor: Fabiana Karla, Ígor Jansen, Ingrid Guimarães, Lázaro Ramos, Rafael Infante, Theo Mattos, Wilson Rabelo
Director: Gigi Soares, Susana Garcia
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, TV Movie
Actor: Alain Van Goethem, Brooke D'Orsay, David Bowles, Gilles Marini, Harry Szovik, Martin Budny, Mohamed Belhadjine, Paloma Coquant
Director: Felipe Rodriguez
Trying to make a mostly two-hander drama with one primary location is much harder than it looks, and What If unfortunately doesn't succeed in taking on the challenge. It has a list of relationship issues that it wants to address (which, to be fair, come off as plausible sources of tension once they're finally brought up) and the performance from Alessandra de Rossi is reliably affecting. But a lack of chemistry between her and JM de Guzman—as well as a tedious first half that shows us their characters' blossoming relationship in the cheesiest ways—makes it very hard to care about them when the arguing eventually starts. Without a strong dramatic foundation, the conflict feels shallower than it should. And without a good use of setting, it all becomes tedious to watch.
Genre: Drama, Romance
Actor: Alessandra de Rossi, Ana Abad-Santos, Chard Ocampo, JM de Guzman, Nicole Omillo
Director: Manny Palo
Even if it knows to keep its ambitions modest, Holiday in the Vineyards still doesn't find much to do for its small cast. The actors do what they can and certainly seem like they're having fun play-acting a warm Christmas romcom, but when all is said and done there simply isn't anything particularly striking about the collection of romcom-isms assembled for this movie. Even the film's premise—which seems to promise a unique clashing of values between a small town and big capitalist business—resolves things with little more than a pat on the back. It's certainly sweet on the surface, but these people we're asked to to spend 107 minutes with still feel like strangers to us by the end.
Genre: Drama, Romance
Actor: Alan Toy, Annika Noelle, Carlos Solórzano, Cullen Douglas, Eileen Davidson, Gregory Zarian, Josh Swickard, Kaleina Cordova, Manuel Rafael Lozano, Omar Gooding, Paul Witten, Sol Rodríguez
Director: Alex Ranarivelo
Many telenovelas and soap operas make a bid for the ridiculous, and in general the world is better off for it. But if a soap can't stick the landing when it tries to manufacture conflict, it just ends up becoming infuriating to watch. Such is the case with Linlang, a Filipino drama that already sets itself up weakly from the outset through the idea of cheating as a plot device, and fails to give us anything crazy enough to earn its sudden bursts of action and perpetually intrusive score. It's almost impressive how none of these characters seem to be capable of communicating with each other like adults—which can be fun in small doses, as these people leap to conclusions with full aggression at the drop of a hat. But these misunderstandings also just stretch out plot points unnecessarily, ultimately reinforcing very tired, very traditional family values.
Genre: Drama, Mystery, Soap, Thriller
Actor: JM de Guzman, Kaila Estrada, Kim Chiu, Maricel Soriano, Paulo Avelino
Director: FM Reyes, Jojo Saguin
At one point in The Whale, Brendan Fraser’s Charlie — a morbidly obese, reclusive teacher — describes an act of abject cruelty as “not evil” but “honesty.” Darren Aronofsky seems to believe the same about his movie, but alas, he's gravely misled, because The Whale is flooringly glib. From the outset, the film actively and incessantly tries to choreograph audience disgust for Charlie, all so that it can pull off a manipulative “he’s human, actually” swing later on — a “twist” that won’t work if you, you know, already accept people’s humanity irrespective of their appearance.
Cinematography, makeup, and score all conspire to paint Charlie as grotesque: the camera laboriously over-emphasizes his size and mobility issues, while histrionic music chimes in to frame trivial moments (like Charlie reaching to pick something up from the floor) as grand, tragic dramas. Even if you ignore all its needless cruelty, The Whale — which is adapted from a play — can never shed its stagy origins: the writing frequently reaches for transcendence, but its efforts are as subtle as its evidently retroactively-shoehorned-in-title. If it’s as sincere as it purports to be, this is one of the worst movies of recent years, and if it’s not — which is almost preferable — then it’s a landmark exercise in trolling.
Genre: Drama
Actor: Allison Altman, Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau, Jacey Sink, Sadie Sink, Samantha Morton, Sathya Sridharan, Ty Simpkins
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Genre: Action, Drama, Thriller
Actor: Angela Kovács, Edvin Ryding, Felicia Truedsson, Jakob Hultcrantz Hansson, Jakob Öhrman, Kardo Razzazi, Katarina Ewerlöf, Peter Franzén, Tintin Poggats Sarri, Tuva Novotny
Director: Richard Holm
Bogged down by a platonic best friendship with a suspicious lack of communication and the repetitive use of tacky nicknames, Seasons never gains enough momentum to justify 108 minutes of uninteresting romance tropes. Carlo Aquino and Lovi Poe's chemistry is overshadowed by the glaring mound of unoriginal dialogue and drawn-out story. The lack of awareness and childish antics that culminate at the tail-end of a 15-year-long friendship are more disappointing than believable. With no external (or personal) struggles of their own, every sequence reinforces how flat and underdeveloped our leads are, as if they only engage with the world when close to, or thinking about, each other. Love-me/Love-me-not is never enough to carry the film.
Genre: Drama, Romance
Actor: Carlo Aquino, Lovi Poe, Sarah Edwards, Sheenly Gener
Director: Easy Ferrer
There’s no way to escape it– the plotline of One True Loves feels like the other side of Cast Away (2000), but instead of focusing on the survival aspect, it focuses on the wife trying to move on with grief. The original novel portrays Emma moving on through reclaiming her past, and learning to appreciate the roots she’s tried to forget with her lost husband. However, the film adaptation falters in depicting the personal, inner world of Emma, as it bungles through the timelines with Hallmark-esque quotes and disarranged scenes. It tries to save the film through its star-studded cast, but their decent performances can’t save the way the film is structured.
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
Actor: Beth Broderick, Christina Bach, Cooper van Grootel, Gabriella Garcia, Gary Hudson, Jacinte Blankenship, Jay DeVon Johnson, Jessi Goei, Kelvin Hodge, Lauren Tom, Luke Bracey, Michael OKeefe, Michaela Conlin, Oceana Matsumoto, Oona Yaffe, Phillipa Soo, Simu Liu, Tom Everett Scott, Victoria Blade, Wil Deusner
Director: Andy Fickman
Mae is a hopeless romantic looking for love and more clients for her custom t-shirts. After a meet-cute at the grocery store, she turns to an app called Missed Connections to find him. After they finally meet, Mae realizes he has a connection with someone else. Now determined to make him fall in love with her, she hires him to rebuild her website. As a rom-com, the comedy isn't particularly outstanding or noticeable. The romance, and Mae, are hard to root for, especially when her obsessions go too far, her slut-shaming goes unchecked, and it all lasts for 90% of the film without any real cathartic resolutions.
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
Actor: Chie Filomeno, JC Santos, Kelvin Miranda, Matet De Leon, Miles Ocampo
Director: Jelise Chung
Painkiller is a dramatized account of the opioid crisis that details how Purdue Pharmaceuticals manufactured and marketed the highly addictive pain medication OxyContin. Before each episode, the family member of an opioid victim recounts how the drug scarred their lives. Although the intentions seem righteous, the execution begs to differ. The drama leans heavily into crime thriller tropes, overproducing the events to a sensational degree with flat, cookie-cutter characters making it unwatchable at times.
Two episodes in, the theatrics in the production choices feel dismissive of the severity of the opioid crisis, prioritizing eccentricities and a shallow textbook overview.
Genre: Drama
Actor: Ana Kayne, Carolina Bartczak, Clark Gregg, Dina Shihabi, Jack Mulhern, John Ales, John Rothman, Matthew Broderick, Ron Lea, Sam Anderson, Taylor Kitsch, Tyler Ritter, Uzo Aduba, West Duchovny
At its core, this series is a socio-economic commentary wrapped in heavy discrimination of poor and queer communities with a sprinkle of Disney Channel music numbers. It tackles issues like gentrification, climate change, the refugee crisis, and homophobia, but even for a teen drama, this all feels like too much, especially since it forwards a forbidden romance above all else. It tries to save face with music; the show uses songs and musical expression to bridge the divide between the people about to lose their neighborhood and the rich kids oblivious to it all. But the talent show quality eclipses the impact. One should expect the large cast and storylines to iron themselves out after two episodes, but with the class-difference romance carrying the bulk of the story forward, the investment isn't worth it.
Genre: Drama
Actor: Erika de la Rosa, Jorge Salinas, Mar Sordo, Marco de la O, Roberto Aguilar
About My Father is clearly intended to be a cringe comedy a la Meet the Parents (it even features Robert De Niro as another grumpy dad), but it stretches the concept of “funny” so thin that the memory of that scene in which a cat pees on the contents of a smashed urn will feel like dizzying comic heights in comparison. The premise — an Italian-American man struggles to win the acceptance of his WASPish in-laws — might have made sense 100 years ago, but today, it strikes as farfetched. Even without that weak foundation, much of About My Father has a shaky grasp on what makes a movie work. The screenplay feels like the product of crudely stitching together several over-manufactured set-pieces, with the result being an almost total lack of fluidity and characters who often contradict themselves.
The film starts out on its worst foot: star–co-writer Sebastian Maniscalco lays the voiceover on thick, while Sebastian’s brash Sicilian father Salvo (De Niro) is so unceasingly negative that it turns a presence that should be great into one that’s only grating. Though it does find something of a footing as a saccharine family drama in its back half, it’s much too little, too late.
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Actor: Adan James Carrillo, Anders Holm, Brett Dier, David Rasche, Kim Cattrall, Leslie Bibb, Robert De Niro, Sebastian Maniscalco
Director: Laura Terruso
Stilted and awkward from the beginning, the first two episodes of Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale that were watched for this review promise a rough start for a series that just doesn't have enough of its own personality. Characters and conflict are introduced in ham-fisted fashion, with this fantasy world never given enough shape to make the magic elements feel significant to the story. It's not necessarily a problem that the show functions more as a small-town crime drama—it can be interesting to have magic be so normalized in this setting—but even these hints of mystery feel obligatory, rather than motivated to explore more of its story.
Genre: Crime, Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Actor: Amy De Bhrún, Elaine Cassidy, Hazel Doupe, Kelly Campbell, Stephanie Levi-John, Stephen Lord, Valerie O'Connor