THE BEST DRAMA MOVIES & THE MUSIC THAT MADE THEM

Drama films connect deeply with audiences, evoking powerful emotions and human experiences, whether they’re tragedies or comedies, action films, gripping courtroom scenes or set in a different period. What makes a drama film really stand out, though? The music – it’s the secret ingredient that enhances your emotions and makes the movie even more captivating.

We’ve selected 20 of the best drama movies, across a variety of genres, to show how their soundtracks took the storytelling to a whole new level, making it more immersive and memorable. From music which adds depth to the characters, or intensifies crucial moments, to setting the perfect mood throughout the film, these are the best of the best.

Best Drama Movies

• Babylon
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Titanic
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire
• The English Patient
• Top Gun: Maverick
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Period Drama Movies

Babylon

Modern drama doesn’t come much bigger or bolder than Damien Chazelle’s epic, starring Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt. Under the wing of fading movie star Jack Conrad (Pitt), film assistant Manny Torres (Diego Calva) becomes swept up in Hollywood’s transition from silent to sound movies during the 1920s. And on the flipside, breakout star Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) grapples with fame’s downside.

Massive, masterful set-pieces, film sets, a myriad of extras, vast parties: all of Golden Era Hollywood’s excess is here. And music plays a critical role – not just because of the bands playing at the film’s wild parties, but also through the music on the silent-movie sets, together with an underscore for the three-hour epic.

Babylon is composer Justin Hurwitz’s fifth collaboration with director Damien Chazelle. The composer told Variety that, ‘the last thing in the world I wanted to do was write 1920s jazz. [Chazelle] was building this wild, unhinged, hedonistic world full of underground music, and I realised that we could do things that would really stretch the boundaries of what we think of as 1920s music.’

Hurwitz was inspired by everything from rock ‘n’ roll riffs to house and EDM – all of which match the drama’s energy and reckless abandon. A 12-piece jazz band featured soloists from across the US and Europe, giving Babylon a unique sound, which was then overdubbed with layers of African and Latin percussion. In all, Hurwitz composed over two hours of original music for the movie – a mammoth task that took nearly three years’ work. The dramatic score was performed by a 98-piece LA orchestra.

Watch this featurette for more on Babylon’s music:

All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front was the big winner at the 2023 Oscars, with nine nominations (it took home four, including Best International Film), and a record seven awards at the BAFTAs.

It tells the gripping story of 17-year-old German soldier Paul, who joins the Western Front in World War I. His initial excitement is soon shattered by the grim reality of life in the trenches. It’s the first German-language screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war classic.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw hailed it as, ‘a substantial, serious work, acted with urgency and focus and with battlefield scenes whose digital fabrications are expertly melded into the action. It never fails to do justice to its subject matter.’

Score composer Volker Bertelmann told Deadline.com that he wanted to use instruments connected to the time period, so incorporated a refurbished harmonium passed down from his grandmother. Director Edward Berger also briefed Bertelmann to create ‘something destructive in the music, and he wanted to have some snares that were played by somebody who can’t play the snares.’

He confessed that, ‘I’ve never recorded so many snares before, just to find the tone of it. In the end, it’s a combination of stacking up different snare sounds, but also using a gran cassa with a lot of rubbish on it, so when you hit it, all the rubbish flies up and it falls down and you hear this weird tail of the snare sound.’

The composer revealed that the biggest challenge was, ‘to find music that is not pathetic and that is not heroic, in a way that actually helps the attitude of a film that is shot out of a German perspective.’

His hard work paid off – the BAFTAs awarded him Best Original Score and he won the Oscar for Music (Original Score).

Romance Drama Movies

Titanic

A young aristocrat falls desperately in love with a struggling artist while aboard the ill-fated Titanic on its maiden voyage. James Cameron’s romantic epic was the first film to reach the billion-dollar mark, in 1997, and was the highest-grossing film of all time until the director’s next film, Avatar, surpassed it in 2010. It made global superstars out of its young leads, Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio, and gave people a sense of emotional connection to the disaster, over a century after it had taken place.

The soundtrack was composed, orchestrated and conducted by James Horner, and not only won the Oscar for Best Original Soundtrack, but also shot to the top of the charts in nearly two dozen territories, selling over 30 million copies.

Cameron initially wanted Enya to compose the music; when she declined, Horner composed the soundtrack with her style in mind, and brought in Norwegian soprano Sissel Kyrkjebø to perform the vocals.

Plus, of course, there’s Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ – surely one of the best-known signature songs in movie history. (It won both the 1997 Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.)

In a score filled with romance, emotion, mystery and action, Horner created themes for particular characters, events, locations and ideas throughout the film, including ‘Hymn to the Sea’, a sorrowful, melancholic theme which expresses the Titanic’s tragic end, with a menacing, descending three-note motif signifying the wreck. This contrasts with ‘Southampton’, an uplifting, heroic theme which underlines the spectacle of the Titanic. ‘Rose’ is the film’s sentimental theme, associated with the romance between Jack and Rose – first heard when Jack (di Caprio) sees Rose (Winslet) for the first time on deck.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

French filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a lesbian love story set on a remote shore in Brittany, in the eighteenth century. Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), is the sheltered but willful daughter of the house, betrothed to a wealthy Italian courtier whom she has no desire to marry. Marianne (Noémie Merlant), is the Parisian artist hired to paint Héloïse’s portrait, who becomes her lover.

Sciamma described the film as ‘a manifesto about the female gaze’, and, as The New Yorker observed, ‘builds her story out of glances and stares, of women’s faces illuminated by candlelight or the harsh white sun on the beach, of mirrored surfaces that invite careful looking.’

Music is used very sparingly; there’s no real score as such, just a few pieces of diegetic music, which makes the performance of a song by the women, when they’re gathered round a bonfire, even more haunting and mysterious. The piece, ‘La Jeune Fille en Feu’, was written for the film by electronic music producer Para One and Arthur Simonini. Their influence wasn’t period appropriate, but György Ligeti’s Requiem, famously used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The choir are singing in Latin; the central chant translates as ‘I cannot flee’, which speaks to both falling in love and Sciamma’s characters – it’s about transcending the people and things that hold you down.

As Slate.com pointed out, ‘the parsimonious use of music in the rest of the film makes the bonfire scene completely overwhelming for characters and audience alike, so intense that it is almost unbearable. The music is beautiful, it is transporting, it is rapturous.’

Portrait of a Lady on Fire was a hit at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Best Screenplay award, and was shortlisted for the Palme d’Or; Sciamma also took home the Queer Palm award for the festival’s best LGBTQ-related film – the first woman to receive it.

The English Patient

Based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient is an epic romantic World War II drama. In a field hospital in Italy, Hana (Juliette Binoche), a nurse from Canada, is caring for a pilot who was horribly burned in a plane wreck (Ralph Fiennes); he has no identification and cannot remember his name, so he’s known simply as ‘the English Patient’, thanks to his accent.

When the hospital is forced to evacuate, Hana determines en route that the patient shouldn’t be moved far due to his fragile condition, so the two are left in a monastery to be picked up later. In time, Hana begins to piece together the patient’s story from the shards of his memories. The flashbacks reveal his true identity to the viewer, together with the love affair he was involved in before the war.

The BFI ranked it the 55^th Greatest British Film of the 20^th Century and the American Film Industry placed it as the 56^th-greatest love story of all time.

The film won nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director for Anthony Minghella and composer Gabriel Yared took home the Oscar for Best Dramatic Score. The soundtrack plaits together disparate styles – a swirling combination of Hungarian folk tunes (the burned man is Hungarian count Laszlo de Almasy), baroque themes and romantic orchestration. There are also period tracks such as Fred Astaire and Ella Fitzgerald’s versions of ‘Cheek to Cheek’, Benny Goodman’s ‘Wang Wang Blues’ and Shepherd Hotel Jazz Orchestra’s rendition of ‘Where or When’. The tracks create the period flavour, whilst Marta Sebestyen’s haunting vocals add subtlety to the moving love story.

Action Drama Movies

Top Gun: Maverick

After more than 30 years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialised mission, Maverick meets Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of his late friend, Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka ‘Goose’. This big screen epic – complete with astonishing aerial sequences – culminates in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it…

Much like the film itself, the music from Top Gun: Maverick succeeds in referencing the original film while still offering fans something fresh.

The soundtrack combines songs from the 1986 soundtrack (‘Danger Zone’) with reworked originals (‘Top Gun Anthem’) and brand-new compositions (‘I Ain’t Worried’). It also marks Lady Gaga’s first foray into film scoring.

In addition to writing the song’s epic love theme ‘Hold My Hand’, the Oscar-winning songwriter collaborated on instrumental pieces with composers Hans Zimmer, Harold Faltermeyer and Lorne Balfe.

For the trailer, music composer Harold Faltermeyer brought in Hans Zimmer, Lorne Balfe and Lady Gaga to give the original Top Gun theme a 2022 makeover. Now featuring a full orchestra behind the wall of synths and guitar, it’s a spine-tingling update to one of film’s most iconic themes.

Kenny Loggins’ adrenaline-fuelled ‘Danger Zone’ kicks off the opening sequence, which led to fans air-punching and whooping with a combination of nostalgia and excitement:

And Lady Gaga replicated the success of ‘Take My Breath Away’ from Top Gun with her barnstorming ballad for the sequel, ‘Take My Hand’, which was nominated for Best Original Song at the 2023 Oscars.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri (Letitia Wright), M’Baku (Winston Duke), Okoye (Danai Gurira) and the Dora Milaje fight to protect their nation from intervening world powers in the wake of King T’Challa’s death. As the Wakandans strive to embrace their next chapter, there’s conflict with the underwater nation of Talokan and its leader, Namor (Tenoch Huerta).

The Black Panther sequel’s soundtrack was once again composed by Ludwig Goransson, who’s been working with director Ryan Coogler for 15 years, and who won the Oscar for Best Original Score for the first Black Panther movie in 2019.

The composer travelled to Mexico, Nigeria and London as he rose to the challenge of finding a new sound for the African kingdom of Wakanda and its grief-stricken people. Plus, he had to imagine the sound of Talokan, the undersea kingdom.

As the latter’s origins lay in Mexico’s ancient Mayan civilisation, Goransson consulted musical archaeologists and collaborated with Mexican musicians, using ancient instruments from clay flutes to the ‘flute of truth’ – a whistle-like woodwind instrument.

Goransson’s aim was ‘to create a complete, immersive sound and music experience for the viewer.’ He co-wrote and produced 13 of the 16 songs in the film, including Rihanna’s track, ‘Lift Me Up’.

Instruments that were brought in for this score included the kora, a West African stringed instrument akin to a harp, plus the sabar and djembe – traditional African drums. And, as Shuri is so associated with technology, there’s a synth-based theme for her character to mix things up. This score is more driven by vocals than its predecessor; Goransson used 40-voice choirs in London and LA, and an LA choir specialising in Mesoamerican music. A community of Mayan rappers in the Yucatan even appear under the end titles.

Music for Unforgettable Moments

When you need music to set the scene, introduce the audience to your character and create some unforgettable moments, that’s where we come in. We’ve put together a brilliant Drama playlist, which is specially curated with a fantastic selection of music tailor-made for drama projects. You’ll find music that’s suitable for every type of drama movie, from heartwarming melodies to epic orchestral compositions and tracks to amp up the action.

As we’ve shown, there’s an incredible synergy between drama movies and the music that brings them to life. If you’re looking for music for your future projects, then explore Audio Network to elevate the emotional impact. From our collections to wide-ranging, hand-picked playlists, our music covers every mood and genre. Want that big, Hollywood blockbuster sound? Top Gun: Maverick composer Lorne Balfe’s collection really delivers. – and we have new releases every fortnight, so there’s always something unique to discover.

If you need evocative drama music for your projects, look no further than the Aspirations album by Nathalie Bonin. Featuring poignant violin pieces, variously supported by strings, harp, cello, and piano, this captivating musical collection is pensive, wistful, and melancholic—a perfect backdrop for your storytelling needs. Download Aspirations today to infuse your projects with the power of emotive music by exploring it here: