Directed by Floria Sigismondi • 2010 • United States
Starring Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Michael Shannon

With this authentically scuzzy take on the rise of original punk girl group the Runaways, director Floria Sigismondi captures the mix of grit, glam, and adolescent abandon that propelle...

Directed by Lee Daniels • 2012 • United States
Starring Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey

Lee Daniels’s follow-up to his breakthrough feature PRECIOUS is a deliciously pulpy, swamp-steamy slice of Southern gothic delirium featuring an all-star cast led by Matthew McConaughey, playing...

Directed by Bill Pohlad • 2015 • United Kingdom
Starring Paul Dano, John Cusack, Paul Giamatti

The rare musician biopic to compellingly convey the process of artistic creation, this sublime portrait of Beach Boys visionary Brian Wilson jumps back and forth in time between the 1960s, as a young W...

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko • 1998 • United States
Starring Radha Mitchell, Gabriel Mann, Ally Sheedy

In a revelatory performance, Ally Sheedy stars in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s debut feature, a wry and incisive look at the politics of the New York art scene wrapped in the guise of an em...

Directed by Ulu Grosbard • 1978 • United States
Starring Dustin Hoffman, Theresa Russell, Harry Dean Stanton

Dustin Hoffman gives one of his most electrifying performances in this riveting story of an ex-con battling for a new life and love in the glare and tension of the big city. After years b...

Directed by Terry Zwigoff • 2006 • United States
Starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich

Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) dreams of becoming a great artist—perhaps the greatest artist of the twenty-first century. Enrolling at Strathmore College, he finds himself surrounded by the quirky...

Directed by Joel Potrykus • 2014 • United States
Starring Joshua Burge, Joel Potrykus, Teri Ann Nelson

Marty (Joshua Burge) is a caustic, small-time con artist drifting from one scam to the next. When his latest ruse goes awry, mounting paranoia forces him from his lousy temp job to the desolate...

Directed by John Carroll Lynch • 2017 • United States
Starring Harry Dean Stanton, David Lynch, Ron Livingston

LUCKY follows the spiritual journey of a ninety-year-old atheist and the eccentric characters who inhabit his off-the-map desert town. Having outlived and out outsmoked all of his conte...

Directed by Alex Cox • 1987 • United Kingdom, United States
Starring Dick Rude, Sy Richardson, Courtney Love

Four hapless bank robbers attempt to hide out in a depopulated desert town only to discover that it’s not really deserted at all in director Alex Cox’s wildly surreal send-up of the spagh...

Directed by Robert Altman • 1978 • United States
Starring Desi Arnaz Jr., Carol Burnett, Geraldine Chaplin

Robert Altman’s penchant for sprawling ensemble play and genre revisionism led him naturally to put his own iconoclastic spin on the wedding comedy. Here he wrangles perhaps the most expans...

Directed by Alex Cox • 1987 • United States
Starring Ed Harris, Peter Boyle, Marlee Matlin

A hallucinatory biopic that breaks all cinematic conventions, WALKER, from British director Alex Cox, tells the story of nineteenth-century American adventurer William Walker (Ed Harris), who abandoned a s...

Directed by Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV • 2020 • United States
Starring Peter Elwell, Michael Martin, Shay Walker

It’s last call at the Roaring 20s, a beloved Las Vegas dive bar where the regulars—a patchwork family of misfits, whiskey-soaked philosophers, and all-American oddballs—convene for ...

Directed by Sean Baker • 2000 • United States
Starring David Ari, Fred Berman, Henry Beylin

Sean Baker’s feature debut is an acerbic, hilarious portrait of college-aged men unwilling to jettison the raucous immaturity of adolescence. It’s three in the morning as a group of friends, on break from...

Directed by Jill Sprecher • 1997 • United States
Starring Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow

Something of a female-driven precursor to OFFICE SPACE, Jill Sprecher’s lost indie gem stars Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Toni Collette, and Alanna Ubach as a quartet of temp workers who bond over th...

Directed by Mary Bronstein • 2008 • United States
Starring Greta Gerwig, Mary Bronstein, Amy Judd

A defiantly lo-fi, ripe-for-rediscovery transmission from the early-aughts microbudget boom, Mary Bronstein’s rawer-than-raw portrait of toxic friendship traces the emotional fallout that follows a ...

Directed by Ronald Bronstein • 2007 • United States
Starring Dore Mann, Mary Wall, Carmine Marino

A nightmare transmission from the grungiest depths of the New York indie underground, the visceral, darkly funny, and totally sui generis debut feature from Ronald Bronstein is a dread-inducing visi...

Criterion Collection Edition #941

Directed by Susan Seidelman • 1982 • United States

Susan Seidelman established her distinctive vision of New York City with this debut feature, the lo-fi original for her vibrant portraits of women reinventing themselves. After escaping New Jersey, the quintess...

Directed by James Gray • 2008 • United States
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw

Set in the insular world of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, this timeless romantic drama features a remarkably raw, vulnerable performance from Joaquin Phoenix as Leonard, a charismatic but troubled y...

Directed by Jeff Lieberman • 1988 • United States
Starring Kevin Dillon, Deborah Goodrich, Jennifer Tilly

Cult director Jeff Lieberman (BLUE SUNSHINE, JUST BEFORE DAWN) pays homage to the heyday of 1950s science fiction with a sublimely schlocky, awesomely ’80s alien-invasion satire. When video-...

Directed by Jane Schoenbrun • 2021 • United States
Starring Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers, May Leitz

“I want to go to the World’s Fair.” Isolated teen Casey (Anna Cobb) repeats this cryptic mantra three times into the eerie glow of her laptop screen, initiating herself into the viral World’s Fair...

Directed by Alile Sharon Larkin • 1982 • United States

In this poetic, groundbreaking work from LA Rebellion trailblazer Alile Sharon Larkin, Alana (Margot Saxton-Federella), a Black art student, sets out to reclaim her body image and self-worth from Western, patriarchal beauty standards and, in...

Directed by Whit Stillman • 1990 • United States
Starring Carolyn Farina, Edward Clements, Taylor Nichols

One of the great American independent films of the 1990s, the surprise hit METROPOLITAN, by writer-director Whit Stillman, is a sparkling comedic chronicle of a young man’s romantic misadven...

Directed by Charles Burnett • 1999 • United States
Starring James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, Margot Kidder

Virtually unseen for years only to reemerge as a lost gem of American independent cinema, this surprising, ineffably tender romantic comedy from master director Charles Burnett (KILLER OF S...

Directed by Bette Gordon • 1983 • United States
Starring Sandy McLeod, Will Patton, Richard M. Davidson

The provocative, sexually charged tale of a woman’s journey of self-discovery, Bette Gordon’s independent landmark offers a bold challenge to conventional notions of feminism and pornography. ...