296 Best Independent Dramas Movies to Watch (Page 17)

Fourteen-year-old Segundo dreams of being just like his father Noé, a revered tableau artist in their small Peruvian town. The teenage apprentice follows Noé's every move and instruction, that is until one day, he discovers a shocking truth about Noé's identity. Hurt, angered, and incredibly confused, Segundo starts detaching from his family, as well as from the life he thought he'd wanted to live. 

Retablo is a slow but vibrant film, set in Peruvian locales and spoken in the country's indigenous tongue, Quechua. Its limited dialogue smartly reflects the people's own silence when it comes to sex and gender ideas, although the movements themselves—from traditional parties to teenage fights—have a lot to say about masculinity, conservatism, and the dangers of their excess. Retablo might be a difficult watch for some, but it's just as necessary and enlightening.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Amiel Cayo, Claudia Solís, Coco Chiarella, Hermelinda Luján, Junior Béjar Roca, Magaly Solier, Mauro Chuchón

Director: Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio L., Alvaro Delgado-Aparicio

Rating: R

Adults and kids can be friends, but there’s obviously a line that shouldn’t be crossed. This line is why most people would look at a friendship like this and automatically assume terrible things, but Lawn Dogs depicts one such connection in such a way that it’s clear how easy and disproportionate these assumptions are made for marginalized and less powerful people, over the affluent sociopaths that can and have gotten away with the accusations they lobby against others. The fairy tale ending, and of course, the disgusting behavior done by the rich guys, might turn some viewers off from the movie, but there’s also something genuine with the way screenwriter Naomi Wallace depicts a girl with a literally different heart who just wants to befriend someone real.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Angie Harmon, Beth Grant, Bruce McGill, Christopher McDonald, David Barry Gray, Eric Mabius, Kathleen Quinlan, Miles Meehan, Mischa Barton, Sam Rockwell, Tom Aldredge

Director: John Duigan

Rating: R

Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) runs a high-brow art gallery in Chicago and has to take a trip to North Carolina to meet with an artist she wants to sign. She uses this opportunity to also meet her husband’s family, who is originally from there.

She is introduced into the small world of rural North Carolina, personified in Ashley (Amy Adams), the wife of her husband’s brother. Ashley is a wide-eyed but good-hearted person who has never left her town and who is in a bad relationship but pregnant with her first child. 

Ashley is the true main character of this movie (even if all Adams accolades were for ‘best supporting’ awards). Her joyfulness, her pregnancy, and her interactions with Madeliene are studied closely in this subtle but touching family drama.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: Alessandro Nivola, Alicia Van Couvering, Amy Adams, Ben McKenzie, Bobby Tisdale, Celia Weston, David Kuhn, Embeth Davidtz, Frank Hoyt Taylor, Jerry Minor, Jill Wagner, Joanne Pankow, Matt Besser, R. Keith Harris, Scott Wilson, Will Oldham

Director: Phil Morrison

Rating: R

The Syrian refugee crisis is still ongoing, so it can understandably be difficult to create a nuanced and accurate depiction. Jacir is an earnest attempt at this. Keeping it on the more personal side, the film focuses on the journey of one Syrian refugee as he gets to know members of his neighborhood, like his black co-worker Jerome and his opioid-addicted neighbor Meryl. Though occasionally bogged down by clunky dialogue, their struggles genuinely outline the same struggles faced by communities failed by their institutions. It’s only through banding together as a community that Jacir and his friends can survive.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Christine Solomon, Jonathan Stoddard, Lorraine Bracco, Luke Barnett, Mark Jeffrey Miller, Rosalyn R. Ross

Director: Waheed AlQawasmi

Ida, the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is a stark black & white drama set in the early 60’s about a young Polish nun-to-be and her bawdy Aunt Wanda searching for the truth behind her family’s demise at the hands of the Nazis. What initially comes off as a painfully slow sleep-inducer pretty quickly evolves into a touching and lively contrast between the two lead characters; one virtuous and pure, the other boorish and hedonistic. Their journey is equal parts amusing, insightful and heartbreaking, with Ida’s personal exploration of self playing out as a remarkably humanistic affair. The cinematography by Lukasz Za and Ryszard Lenczewski is particularly striking, each shot a work of art in it’s own right. Logging in at just 82 minutes, the entire story whizzes by in a flash. The kind of film that will stay with you long after you’ve watched it.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Adam Szyszkowski, Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Artur Janusiak, Dawid Ogrodnik, Dorota Kuduk, Halina Skoczynska, Izabela Dąbrowska, Jerzy Trela, Joanna Kulig, Marek Kasprzyk, Mariusz Jakus, Paweł Burczyk

Director: Paweł Pawlikowski

Rating: PG-13

You would think that a movie about making soup for your friends and studying moss would be a strange mix, but there’s just something so beautifully delicate about the way writer-director Bas Devos links the lives of two immigrants in Brussels, with the contrast between the length of their stay, the things they make, and how long their work would last. It’s a slow burn connection, and with the pending move, it’s a fleeting one, but the runtime is just right to capture the quiet grace of their connection, the one they share as strangers in a stopping point from different places. Here is subtle and transcendent.

Genre: Drama, Romance

Actor: Cédric Luvuezo, Liyo Gong, Saadia Bentaïeb, Stefan Gota, Teodor Corban

Director: Bas Devos

Rating: NR