Directed by Kevin Smith • 1994 • United States
Starring Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Marilyn Ghigliotti

Famously shot on a shoestring budget of less than $30,000, CLERKS launched the career of indie legend Kevin Smith and won over audiences with its raw energy, irreverent humor, and proudly ...

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 James Merendino • 1998 • United States
Starring Matthew Lillard, Michael A. Goorjian, Annabeth Gish

It’s 1985 and Stevo (Matthew Lillard) is that rare animal: a punk rocker in the Mormon stronghold of Salt Lake City, Utah. Though he’s just graduated from college with honors, his life...

Directed by William Friedkin • 1985 • United States
Starring William Petersen, Willem Dafoe, John Pankow

William Friedkin’s kinetic neonoir takes the ’80s action thriller to new heights of hyperstylized excess. Federal agent Richard Chance (William Petersen) has a score to settle as he vows to t...

Directed by Gus Van Sant • 1991 • United States
Starring River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, William Richert

River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves star in this haunting tale from Gus Van Sant about two young street hustlers: Mike Waters, a sensitive narcoleptic who dreams of the mother who abandoned him, and ...

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 Horace Jenkins • 1982 • United States
Starring Richard Romain, Tommye Myrick, Carol Sutton

Written, produced, and directed by the late, trailblazing director Horace B. Jenkins and crafted by an entirely African American cast and crew, this luminous, recently rediscovered landmark of ...

Directed by Spike Lee • 1999 • United States
Starring John Leguizamo, Adrien Brody, Mira Sorvino

Spike Lee’s fever-pitch vision of murder, mass hysteria, and machismo run amok charts the escalating paranoia within an Italian American Bronx neighborhood during the sweltering summer of 1977 as the...

Directed by Paul Mazursky • 1969 • United States
Starring Natalie Wood, Elliott Gould, Robert Culp

At the height of the sexual revolution, upwardly mobile married couple Bob (Robert Culp) and Carol (Natalie Wood) return from a freethinking group-encounter session with an elevated sense of honest...

Directed by Wong Kar Wai • 2007 • China, France, Hong Kong
Starring Norah Jones, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz

For his oft-overlooked first English-language feature, legendary director Wong Kar Wai brought his dreamily elliptical sense of time and intoxicating, color-saturated romanticism to America, f...

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 John Curran • 2004 • United States, Canada
Starring Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts

Adapted from two short stories by Andre Dubus (whose work was also the inspiration for IN THE BEDROOM), this unflinching domestic drama is a fearlessly raw, morally complex exploration of infide...

Directed by Richard Kelly • 2001 • United States
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, James Duval

Described by director Richard Kelly as “‘The Catcher in the Rye’ as told by Philip K. Dick,” this cult classic is a mind-altering experience whose metaphysical enigmas are still being unraveled. T...

Directed by Sidney Lumet • 2007 • United States
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, Ethan Hawke

Renowned director Sidney Lumet brought five decades of cinematic mastery to bear in his final film, a riveting thriller that achieves the weight of Greek tragedy. A typically virtuosic Phil...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 2009 • United States
Starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer

Two of contemporary cinema’s most electrifying eccentrics, Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage, join forces for a thoroughly unhinged pulp fever dream. Not—despite the title—a remake of or sequel to the si...

Directed by Bill Gunn • 1973 • United States
Starring Duane Jones, Marlene Clark, Bill Gunn

Straining the conventions of blaxploitation and horror through a singular avant-garde sensibility, Bill Gunn’s revolutionary independent landmark GANJA & HESS is a highly stylized and utterly original tre...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 2009 • United States
Starring Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloë Sevigny

What strange series of events led a man to murder his mother with an ancient sword? Produced by David Lynch, Werner Herzog’s typically idiosyncratic take on a true crime unfolds as a fascinatin...

Directed by John Carpenter • 1974 • United States
Starring Brian Narelle, Dan O'Bannon, Cal Kuniholm

John Carpenter made his feature debut with this gleefully gonzo science-fiction satire, which began life as a student film and went on to become a cult classic. Onboard the titular spaceship, a t...

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. ...

Directed by Michael Roemer • 1980 • United States
Starring Elizabeth Huddle, Christopher Lloyd, Elizabeth Franz

Having chronicled the last days of terminally ill people for his documentary DYING, director Michael Roemer channeled his experiences making that film into this emotionally raw and wre...

Directed by Michael Imperioli • 2009 • United States
Starring Steve Schirripa, Sharon Angela, Emory Cohen

The directorial debut from “Sopranos” star Michael Imperioli is an intense, emotionally raw portrait of lost souls attempting to fill the spiritual voids at the center of their lives. Over t...