Directed by Jerry Schatzberg • 1973 • United States
Starring Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Dorothy Tristan

Unforgettable performances from Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, the sensitive direction of Jerry Schatzberg, and the glowing landscape cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond come together for one of the ...

Directed by Alan Rudolph • 1978 • United States
Starring Geraldine Chaplin, Anthony Perkins, Moses Gunn

Geraldine Chaplin delivers a chillingly effective performance as an unstable woman just out of prison and hell-bent on getting even with the husband (Anthony Perkins) who abandoned her years a...

Directed by Todd Stephens • 2001 • United States
Starring Sara Rue, Birkett Turton, Karen Black

Stevie Nicks superfan Gypsy (Sara Rue) and her best friend, Clive (Kett Turton), are a pair of outcasts stuck in small-town Ohio. When they learn about “The Night of 1,000 Stevies,” a look-alike conte...

Directed by Angela Robinson • 2004 • United States
Starring Sara Foster, Jordana Brewster, Meagan Good

In this smart and sexy spy spoof about love at first gunsight, sultry crime boss Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster) is back in the States, and the D.E.B.S.—an elite team of paramilitary college-co...

Directed by Ondi Timoner • 2018 • United States
Starring Matt Smith, Marianne Rendón, John Benjamin Hickey

One of the most important and controversial artists of the twentieth century, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe captured eroticism in a way that had never been seen before. Set during the 19...

Directed by Todd Haynes • 1991 • United States
Starring Edith Meeks, Larry Maxwell, Susan Norman

Inspired by the writings of Jean Genet, Todd Haynes’s debut feature deftly interweaves a trio of transgressive tales—“Hero,” “Horror,” and “Homo”—that build towards a devastating climax. “Hero,” shot...

Directed by Alan Rudolph • 1999 • United States
Starring Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte

A totally unhinged vision of all-American madness, Alan Rudolph’s outré adaptation of the novel by Kurt Vonnegut plays something like a crazed, live-action cartoon as it follows the exploits of Dwayn...

Directed by Tim Blake Nelson • 2009 • United States
Starring Edward Norton, Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss

Director Tim Blake Nelson’s audacious, tonally assured blend of black comedy and crime thriller features a marvelous dual performance from Edward Norton as identical twins Bill and Brady ...

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery • 1981 • United States
Starring Willem Dafoe, Robert Gordon, Marin Kanter

The first feature by both acclaimed director Kathryn Bigelow and future David Lynch producer Monty Montgomery, as well as the screen debut of star Willem Dafoe, this edgy, s...

Directed by Tim Blake Nelson • 2016 • United States
Starring Sam Waterston, Kristen Stewart, Glenn Close

A snowy New York City night, a beloved teacher, a shocking crime: this provocative drama pieces together the puzzle of a man’s life just before it changes forever. While on his way home one e...

Directed by Sierra Urich • 2023 • United States

In this moving first-person documentary, a young filmmaker delves into her mother and grandmother’s complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity. Having grown up in rural Vermont, far removed from the homeland of her mother, Mitra, and ...

Directed by Tim Blake Nelson • 1997 • United States
Starring Martha Plimpton, Kevin Anderson, Nick Stahl

One of the great but long-unheralded debut films, Tim Blake Nelson’s first feature is an emotionally shattering tale of existential desolation in a small Oklahoma town. Unfolding in a fractur...

Directed by Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen • 2000 • United States

Far from a standard music documentary, Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen’s loving portrait of underground musician Benjamin Smoke—speed freak, drag queen, and a true outsider artist in every sense of the word—captures his singular personalit...

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola • 1966 • United States
Starring Elizabeth Hartman, Geraldine Page, Peter Kastner

Francis Ford Coppola’s oft-overlooked second feature is a zanily offbeat entry in the 1960s sex-comedy canon. Bernard Chanticleer (Peter Kastner), a naive nineteen-year-old virgin li...

Directed by Alan Arkin • 1971 • United States
Starring Elliott Gould, Marcia Rodd, Vincent Gardenia

The black-comic stage play by writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer provides the basis for Alan Arkin’s directorial debut, a surreal satire of urban alienation and the sensele...

Directed by Bridgett M. Davis • 1996 • United States
Starring Jake-Ann Jones, Ron Cephas Jones, Patricia DeArcy

A long-unseen jewel of 1990s Black independent filmmaking, Bridgett M. Davis’s fearless exploration of Black female agency centers on Cicely (Jake-Ann Jones), the daughter of a former ...

Directed by Jerry Schatzberg • 1971 • United States
Starring Al Pacino, Kitty Winn, Alan Vint

A fragile romance unfolds against the backdrop of 1970s New York in this unsparing look at heroin addiction, scripted by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne and directed by Jerry Schatzberg. Taking its t...

Directed by Sidney Lumet • 1968 • United States
Starring George Segal, Jack Warden, Joseph Wiseman

Director Sidney Lumet made his first foray into comedy with this wildly irreverent farce, rich in 1960s New York City flavor and Borscht Belt humor. When their buddy, the writer Leslie Braverman (“...

Directed by Harmony Korine • 1999 • United States
Starring Ewen Bremner, Chloë Sevigny, Werner Herzog

The first Dogme 95 film made outside of Europe, Harmony Korine’s follow-up to his divisive GUMMO finds him and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who shot the original Dogme film, Thomas Vinter...

Directed by Peter Sollett • 2002 • United States
Starring Victor Rasuk, Judy Marte, Melonie Diaz

Vividly set amid New York City’s Dominican community, this warm, naturalistic slice-of-life is one of the brightest gems of early-2000s American independent cinema. Growing up on the Lower East Side,...

Directed by Joan Micklin Silver • 1977 • United States
Starring John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum

Inspired by director Joan Micklin Silver’s time working at New York’s storied alt weekly the “Village Voice,” this unsung gem of 1970s slice-of-life seriocomedy offers an incisive, bitterswe...

Directed by Cauleen Smith • 1998 • United States
Starring Toby Smith, April Barnett, Will Power

A rediscovered treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s DRYLONGSO embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rat...

Directed by RaMell Ross • 2018 • United States
Starring Quincy Bryant, Daniel Collins

An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, RaMell Ross’s HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING looks at the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rura...