Period dramas provide a key set of unique pleasures. They manage to combine an emphasis on human desire, sumptuous costumes, and fraught relationships to immerse the viewer into a different world, whether Victorian London or the American West.
The 2010s was a particularly fruitful decade for the genre, with a number of strong entries in the genre, many of which featured stirring and powerful performances. Fortunately, the users at the Internet Movie Database have ranked the best of these, providing a useful starting point for those who want to experience the genre.
Terrence Malick has a visual style that is all his own, and his best movies are those that capture the strangeness and beauty of lived experience. In the case of A Hidden Life, he also explores the terrible choices that people sometimes have to make when faced with the burdens of history. In this case, the movie focuses on Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian who refuses to sign the oath of allegiance to the Third Reich. While the movie is very much in Malick’s elliptical style, it still manages to be very moving, haunting, and lyrical.
Downton Abbey is without a doubt one of the best period drama series, and it uses the conventions of melodrama to provide viewers an experience of the challenges and promises of 20th century modernity. The movie provides many of the same pleasures as the series upon which it’s based, as the King and Queen themselves come to Downton. While the stakes do not feel especially high, the movie nevertheless succeeds in immersing the viewer in the world that they have come to love.
As with so many other of the best period dramas of the 2010s, A Royal Affair focuses on the fraught dynamics in the royal household in Denmark. In this case, the story revolves around the mentally ill King Christian, his wife, and the royal physician.
It features some very strong performances from Mads Mikkelsen as the physician Johann Friedrich Struensee. Beneath its sumptuous period drama trappings, it is very much a story about a forbidden love.
The Favourite is without doubt one of Olivia Colman’s best roles. She captures both the pathos and the tragedy of Queen Anne, a woman who yearns for personal connection but is manipulated by two feuding cousins, Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham. As with the best of period dramas, The Favourite focuses in particular on the larger-than-life personalities of its characters, all of whom yearn for the power that being next to the Queen can provide. It’s a haunting portrait of a tainted and toxic royal court.
Many of the best period dramas of the 2010s tended to come from (and to focus on) either the United States or Europe (particularly the UK). An exception is the Vietnamese Long-thành cầm-giả ca, which focuses on the doomed love between a poet and a musician. As with the best of the period dramas of the period, it manages to combine strong performances, sumptuous costume design, and a haunting narrative to capture a melancholy past.
Little England is another international period drama that helps to demonstrate the viability of the genre outside of the American-British axis. In this case, the movie focuses on a pair of sisters in Greece from the early 20th century to the 1950s.
Like many other period dramas from this period, it focuses on their forbidden love and the way that it threatens to tear their lives apart. The acting from the two leads allows the viewer to truly feel for them as they deal with the complications of human desire.
Quentin Tarantino is regarded as one of the most unique directors in Hollywood, and he has made many movies that bear his signature style. These include The Hateful Eight, which focuses on a group of strangers who encounter one another during a blizzard. As is so often the case with Tarantino, it features a great deal of stylized violence, but it’s the performances from many of the cast–including Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, and Jennifer Jason Leigh – that allow it to capture Tarantino’s special cinematic vision.
Little Women is one of the most well-loved novels ever written, and it has seen many different adaptations in both movies and TV. Most recently, it was adapted by Greta Gerwig, who also directed. It captures much of the magic of the original novel, thanks to both the script and the performances from its cast. In particular, Saoirse Ronan excels at playing Jo, arguably the movie’s (and book’s) most popular character. The movie succeeds in both updating the source material in such a way that it feels as fresh as ever.
Given the fascinating lives that many kings and queens have led, it’s not surprising that members of royalty make such ideal subjects for period dramas. The King’s Speech, for example, focuses on George VI and his effort to master his speech impediment. It’s a powerful and moving movie, in large part because of the powerful performances from its lead cast, Colin Firth (in one of his best roles), as well as Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter. It also features its own remarkable visual style.
The movie industry of India is one of the most diverse in the world, and they produced many strong period dramas during the 2010s. These include Hellaro, which focuses on a group of women in a small village who fight back against the forces of patriarchy by learning to play the game of garba. It features a skillful weaving together of both historical detail – it takes place in the 1970s – as well as powerful and moving performances from its lead cast.
