Tokyo Story to Ordinary People to Shoplifters to Marriage Story. The genre that takes domestic interpersonal relationships as the entire substance of cinema.
The family drama is one of cinema's quietest genres. The dramatic stakes are domestic and interpersonal rather than external; the conflicts are typically about relationships rather than plots; the resolution, when one comes, is emotional rather than logistical. The films on this sub-page are the ones that have, by general critical consensus, earned the genre's seriousness.
Family drama is, structurally, one of the easiest categories for directors to deliver significant work in — and one of the easiest to fail at. The genre's specific challenge is that the conflicts are interior. The audience has to be made to care about disagreements that are, by external standards, small. The films that succeed do so by treating the domestic conflicts with the same dramatic seriousness that conventional genre cinema reserves for life-or-death plot stakes.
This is part of why the genre has produced some of the most-respected acting in modern cinema. The performances in these films are typically calibrated at a register that is significantly more disciplined than action or thriller leads — the actors must communicate complex emotional states across long sequences with limited external action. The Brenda Blethyn / Lesley Manville / Casey Affleck / Adam Driver / Greta Lee tradition of restrained dramatic leads is downstream of this form's specific requirements.