A great period movie doesn’t just recreate the past. It makes it feel alive, strange, and emotionally immediate. The costumes and production design are important, sure. But the best historical dramas go deeper. They use history as a lens to explore eternally relevant ideas like obsession, power, repression, and ambition.
Over the past 50 years, directors have taken us from powdered-wig courtrooms to oil fields, from romantic longing in candlelit rooms to political backrooms where nations were reshaped. Some of the films on this list are sweeping epics. Others are intimate and devastating. All of them remind us that history is never as distant (or as tidy) as we think.
10
‘The Age of Innocence’ (1993)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
“You never asked me.” Scorsese is mostly known for gangsters and crime sagas, but with The Age of Innocence, he delivered one of the most emotionally devastating period dramas…. well, ever, really. Set in 1870s New York high society, the film follows Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), a man trapped between duty, reputation, and forbidden love. What makes the film so engaging isn’t just its meticulous detail (the corsets, the silverware, the opera boxes) but how it turns all that beauty into a cage. Every glance is loaded. Every pause is a small act of repression.
Alongside the always stellar Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder deliver career-best (or at least near-best) performances, playing two women who represent freedom and tradition in equal, painful measure. And Scorsese’s camera moves through this world like an anthropologist, chronicling a society so obsessed with appearances that it kills love before it can live.
9
‘Lincoln’ (2012)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
“Do we choose to be born? Are we fitted to the times we’re born into?” Day-Lewis strikes again. He is the most indispensable element in Lincoln. Without him, this movie could have been a dusty civics lesson. Another biopic weighed down with Important Speeches and Serious Music. Instead, Spielberg and his star craft a tense, character-driven political thriller about compromise, power, and the ugly backroom deals behind great moments in history.
As America’s 16th president, Day-Lewis gives one of the most quietly commanding performances of the last two decades. His Lincoln isn’t a saint. Rather, he’s a shrewd, often manipulative operator who knows how to twist arms and massage egos to get the 13th Amendment passed. The film’s focus on process, on political gamesmanship and personal cost, make it riveting. The dialogue crackles with intelligence and moral tension. And Spielberg’s restrained, shadow-soaked visuals make 1860s Washington feel both intimate and monumental.
8
‘The Favourite’ (2018)
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
“Some wounds do not close. I have many such.” Where Lincoln is stately and serious, The Favourite is energetic and anarchic. Set during the reign of Queen Anne, the film follows a vicious love triangle between the monarch (Olivia Colman), her advisor (Rachel Weisz), and a social climber (Emma Stone) desperate to seize power. Although it draws on real events, the movie takes the traditional period drama and sets it on fire. Yorgos Lanthimos isn’t interested in stuffy historical accuracy. He’s here for psychological warfare, toxic relationships, and deadpan cruelty.
The resulting film is hilarious, mean-spirited, and quietly devastating. The cinematography leans into fisheye lenses and natural light, making every room feel both grand and claustrophobic. Behind the ornate costumes and candlelit halls, these characters backstab, seduce, and manipulate their way into and out of favor. Colman’s performance, in particular, is both pathetic and terrifying. She’s a monarch rotting from the inside, clinging to affection like a drowning person grabbing at driftwood.
7
‘Gangs of New York’ (2002)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
“Civilization is crumbling.” Another historical gem from Scorsese, this one playing more inside his usual gangster wheelhouse. Gangs of New York is messy, sprawling, and overloaded, and that’s exactly what makes it great. With this one, Marty plunges us into 1860s Manhattan, a place of muddy streets, corrupt politics, and open warfare between immigrant gangs and nativist thugs. At the center (yet again) is Daniel Day-Lewis. He plays Bill the Butcher, turning in a performance so towering and unhinged it threatens to consume the whole movie.
Opposite him, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Amsterdam Vallon, a young man bent on revenge but constantly caught between loyalty, survival, and identity. The violence is brutal. The politics are dirty. And the social divisions the film explores, about race, class, and belonging, still feel uncomfortably relevant. Even when it overreaches (and it often does), Gangs of New York captures something essential: that America was built on ambition. And blood.
6
‘Cold War’ (2018)
Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski
“I love you. That’s the only thing I do.” Cold War is a love story, but it’s not romantic. Instead, it’s jagged, elliptical, and devastating. Shot in luminous black and white, Paweł Pawlikowski’s film follows the doomed relationship between Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig), two musicians whose love keeps pulling them together and tearing them apart across years and borders in post-war Europe. The images are often beautiful, but emotional violence simmers beneath every interaction.
The film jumps through time with brutal efficiency. One minute they’re in love, the next they’re separated by politics, pride, or pure self-destruction. Plus, the Cold War setting isn’t just a backdrop. It’s the third character in their relationship. Freedom and control, escape and entrapment, longing and resignation; all of it plays out against the bleak, shifting landscapes of Poland, Berlin, and Paris. All this builds up to one of the most masterful closing shots in recent memory.
5
‘Days of Heaven’ (1978)
Directed by Terrence Malick
“The earth is big and there’s a lot of places to hide.” Days of Heaven is pure visual poetry. Set in the Texas Panhandle in the early 20th century, Terrence Malick‘s sophomore effort chronicles a doomed love triangle between a fugitive laborer (Richard Gere), his girlfriend (Brooke Adams), and a dying, lonely farmer (Sam Shepard). Emotionally, it’s realistic and complex. Aesthetically, it’s striking. Every frame looks like a painting, with Néstor Almendros‘s cinematography capturing wheat fields at magic hour and skies that seem too wide for human suffering.
The narration, delivered with childlike detachment by Linda Manz, adds a layer of mythic distance, making the violence and betrayal feel both inevitable and strangely small compared to the scale of nature itself. In the end, Malick turns history into atmosphere, showing a world where human lives barely register against the vast, indifferent landscape. Few period films feel this beautiful, or this quietly apocalyptic.
Days of Heaven
- Release Date
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September 13, 1978
- Runtime
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94 minutes
- Director
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Terrence Malick
- Writers
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Terrence Malick
4
‘Barry Lyndon’ (1975)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
“It’s all done for.” Barry Lyndon is Stanley Kubrick at his coldest and his most visually breathtaking. Adapted from William Makepeace Thackeray‘s 19th-century novel, this movie tracks the slow, inevitable downfall of Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal), a petty opportunist who claws his way into the aristocracy only to squander everything through pride, vanity, and bad decisions. Every shot is meticulously composed, often lit entirely by natural light or candlelight, giving the film the texture of an 18th-century oil painting.
Yet beneath the beauty, the tone is frequently brutal. Kubrick treats Barry’s rise and fall with detached irony, letting the audience admire the aesthetic while feeling the emotional void inside every character. The battlefields here are social and psychological. Betrayals, duels, and quiet humiliations pile up until Barry’s collapse feels less like tragedy and more like cosmic punishment. Barry Lyndon may be slow, but its darkness creeps up on you, frame by frame, scene by scene.
3
‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ (2019)
Directed by Céline Sciamma
“Don’t regret. Remember.” Portrait of a Lady on Fire is restrained, delicate, and emotionally devastating. Set in 18th-century France, the story follows a painter (Noémie Merlant) hired to secretly paint the portrait of a young woman (Adèle Haenel) who doesn’t want to be painted. What starts as reluctant observation turns into romantic obsession, and then something even more painful. Silence is weaponized here. Every gesture carries weight. And when the characters do speak, the dialogue cuts like a knife.
Refreshingly, director Céline Sciamma avoids period drama clichés. There are no grand ballroom scenes, no swelling orchestras, just the quiet, slow burn of two women falling in love with the full knowledge that their time together is limited. The ending is one of the most emotionally crushing finales in recent cinema history. All in all, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a moving study in longing and inevitable loss.
2
‘Amadeus’ (1984)
Directed by Miloš Forman
“Why did you choose me?” Amadeus turns history into opera: grand, melodramatic, and deeply human. Based on Peter Shaffer‘s play, this absolute banger tells the story of Mozart (Tom Hulce) through the bitter, jealous eyes of rival composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham). Sure, it plays a little fast and loose with the acts at times, but it compensates with sweeping period detail and piercing psychological realism. Director Miloš Forman stages each musical performance like a theatrical event, making the 18th-century setting feel alive, immediate, and emotionally raw.
The costumes, the music, the court politics, all of it creates an extravagant backdrop for Salieri’s internal collapse. The court composer knows he’ll never match Mozart’s genius, and that awareness poisons him. He admires Mozart’s music as much as he hates the man behind it. The film turns that jealousy into a slow-burn tragedy, where the real villain isn’t ambition but mediocrity in the face of brilliance.
1
‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
“I drink your milkshake!” Daniel Day-Lewis just cannot be kept off this list. He’s in top form in There Will Be Blood, a primal scream disguised as a historical epic. He leads PTA‘s magnum opus as Daniel Plainview, a silver prospector turned ruthless oil tycoon who will sacrifice anything (and anyone) for power and control. The period detail is impeccable: dusty California landscapes, hand-dug oil wells, early industrial machinery, but what gives the film its real power is Plainview’s slow, inevitable moral disintegration.
The aesthetics complement this. Anderson shoots the film like an Old Testament parable, with sweeping wide shots and long, unbroken takes that let the dread build. The score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood buzzes with anxiety, turning even quiet scenes into nerve-shredding experiences. By the final act, the film has morphed from historical drama into full-blown operatic tragedy. Betrayal, isolation, and unchecked ambition curdle into madness. Greed personified.
