Melodrama Films are a sub-type of drama films, characterized by a plot to appeal to the heightened emotions of the audience. Melodrama, a combination of drama and melos (music), literally means "play with music." The themes of dramas, the oldest literary and stage art form, were exaggerated within melodramas, and the liberal use of music often enhanced their emotional plots. Often, film studies criticism used the term 'melodrama' pejoratively to connote an unrealistic, pathos-filled, campy tale of romance or domestic situations with stereotypical characters (often including a central female character) that would directly appeal to feminine audiences.

There are many names for melodramatic films - 'women's pictures', 'weepies', tearjerkers, soap operas (or soapers), and more recently, 'chick flicks'. O Magazine compiled their 50 Greatest Chick Flicks in their July 2004 issue.). See Filmsite's own Memorable and Great "Chick Flicks." Pure melodramas reached their pinnacle in the films of the 50s by Douglas Sirk. See also this site's extensive, illustrated compilation: Greatest Tearjerker Films, Moments and Scenes. (Entertainment Weekly's November 28, 2003 issue listed their choices for the Top 50 Greatest Tearjerkers: each one "involves a terminally ill loved one, or an impossible love, or a giant robot that dies for our sins.") However, not all melodramas are tearjerkers, but more like heightened dramas.

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any early films in this genre featured similar fanciful special effects and thrilled early audiences. The pioneering science fiction film, a 14-minute ground-breaking masterpiece with 30 separate tableaus (scenes), Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902), was made by imaginative, turn-of-the-century French filmmaker/magician Georges Melies, approximating the contents of the novels by Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon) and H.G. Wells (First Men in the Moon). With innovative, illusionary cinematic techniques (trick photography with superimposed images, dissolves and cuts), he depicted many memorable, whimsical old-fashioned images

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Stars: Max Ryan, Maria Conchita Alonso and Chris Mulkey

Review:

One flick we've been talking about for a while now is Dana Mennie's werewolf driven love story Dark Moon Rising. Don't let the love story part fool ya, though; the movie features Sid Haig fighting werewolves! That premise alone is enough for me to get my ass into a seat to watch it.

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Courtroom legal dramas, which include dramatic tension in the courtroom setting, maneuverings between trial opponents (lawyers, prosecutors, and clients), surprise witnesses, and the psychological breakdown of key participants, were exemplified in films such as the following:

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Director D.W. Griffith's expensive, most ambitious silent film masterpiece Intolerance (1916) is one of the milestones and landmarks in cinematic history. Many reviewers and film historians consider it the greatest film of the silent era. The mammoth film was also subtitled: "A Sun-Play of the Ages" and "Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages." Griffith was inspired to make this film after watching the revolutionary Italian silent film epic Cabiria (1914) by director Giovanni Pastrone.

After the widespread controversy surrounding his racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), Griffith attempted to defensively answer his critics with this work. He took a smaller feature film that he was working on about the contemporary, Progressive Era struggle between capital and labor [titled "The Mother and the Law"] and the theme of social injustice and combined it with three new stories to create a more spectacular, monumental, dramatic epic. All of the stories, spanning several hundreds of years and cultures, are held together by themes of intolerance, man's inhumanity to man, hypocrisy, bigotry, religious hatred, persecution, discrimination and injustice achieved in all eras by entrenched political, social and religious systems.

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Cast
Kevin Sorbo as Aedan
Whitney Able as Xia
Melissa Ordway as Princess Tanis
Sarah Ann Schultz as Malia
Janelle Giumarra as Rajan
Inbar Lavi as Alana
Jennifer Siebel Newsom as Queen Ma'at
Ralf Moeller as General Hafez
Matthew Willig as Giant Iberian
Lee Horsley as Talon

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Starring Kristen Bell
Jamie Lee Curtis
Sigourney Weaver
Odette Yustman
Betty White

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Starring Ulrich Tukur
Daniel Brühl
Steve Buscemi
Anne Consigny
Jingchu Zhang

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Cast:

Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, Michael Rooker, Janine Turner, Paul Winfield

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