Directed by Sara Driver • 1994 • United States

Produced for the French television series POSTCARDS FROM NEW YORK, this short documentary captures the poetry of the city’s storied skid row before its gentrification.

Directed by Sara Driver • 1993 • Germany, United States
Starring Alfred Molina, Marianne Faithfull, Rachael Bella

A down-and-out jazz musician (Alfred Molina) is launched on a road to redemption when he comes into possession of a rocking chair haunted by two benign ghosts: a formidable middle-ag...

Directed by Sara Driver • 1981 • United States
Starring Suzanne Fletcher, Melody Schneider, Bea Boyle

A legendary, once-lost landmark of American underground cinema, Sara Driver’s first film was rediscovered in 2008 and has since taken its place as one of the key works of the No Wave filmmaking ...

Directed by Michael Roemer • 1964 • United States
Starring Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Julius Harris

Michael Roemer’s groundbreaking first feature, sensitively shot by his close collaborator Robert M. Young, is a still-resonant expression of humanity in the face of virulent prejudice. Made at the...

Directed by Michael Roemer • 1969 • United States
Starring Martin Priest, Ben Lang, Maxine Woods

A treasure of American independent filmmaking that was neglected for decades until its triumphant rediscovery, writer-director-producer Michael Roemer’s feature follow-up to his landmark NOTHING BUT ...

Directed by Michael Roemer • 1984 • United States
Starring Brooke Adams, Jon DeVries, Ari Meyers

Like director Michael Roemer’s prior features—the powerful civil-rights-era landmark NOTHING BUT A MAN and the offbeat mob comedy THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY—this continuously surprising, cuttingly incisi...

Directed by John Cameron Mitchell • 2001 • United States
Starring John Cameron Mitchell, Andrea Martin, Michael Pitt

With this trailblazing musical, writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell and composer-lyricist Stephen Trask brought their signature creation from stage to screen for a movie...

Directed by Timothy Carey • 1962 • United States
Starring Timothy Carey, Gil Barreto, Betty Rowland

Timothy Carey—the unforgettable character actor whose weird, wiggy energy brought a manic edge to classics like THE KILLING and PATHS OF GLORY—wrote, produced, directed, and starred in this outrag...

Directed by Sara Driver • 1986 • United States, West Germay
Starring Suzanne Fletcher, Ann Magnuson, Dexter Lee

Sara Driver’s first feature is a tantalizingly enigmatic, surrealist fantasia rooted in the grit and anything-goes energy of the 1980s New York night world. When Nicole (Suzanne Fletch...

Directed by Ken Russell • 1984 • United States
Starring Kathleen Turner, Anthony Perkins, Bruce Davison

She is watched. She is worshiped. And she must remain a mystery. Fashion designer Joanna Crane (Kathleen Turner, at the height of her powers) leads a double life. By night she is China Blue, a...

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 Joel Coen and Ethan Coen • 1984 • United States

Joel and Ethan Coen's career-long darkly comic road trip through misfit America began with this razor-sharp, hard-boiled neonoir set somewhere in Texas, where a sleazy bar owner releases a torrent of violence with one murderous though...

Directed by Greg Mottola • 1996 • United States
Starring Parker Posey, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber

With its droll humor and bittersweet emotional heft, the feature debut of writer-director Greg Mottola announced the arrival of an unassumingly sharp-witted new talent on the 1990s indie film scene....

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1991 • France, United Kingdom, Germany, United States, Japan
Starring Gena Rowlands, Winona Ryder, Rosie Perez

Five cities. Five taxicabs. A multitude of strangers in the night. Jim Jarmusch assembled an extraordinary international cast of actors (including Gena Rowlan...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1999 • United States
Starring Forest Whitaker, John Tormey, Cliff Gorman

Jim Jarmusch combined his love for the ice-cool crime dramas of Jean-Pierre Melville and Seijun Suzuki with the philosophical dimensions of samurai mythology for an eccentrically postmodern take o...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1984 • United States, Germany
Starring John Lurie, Richard Edson, Eszter Balint

With this breakout film, Jim Jarmusch established himself as one of the most exciting voices in the burgeoning independent-film scene, a road-movie poet with an affinity for Americana at it...

Directed by Noah Baumbach • 2013 • United States
Starring Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner

Greta Gerwig is radiant as Frances, a woman in her late twenties in contemporary New York trying to sort out her ambitions, her finances, and, above all, her intimate but shifting bond with her best friend, Sop...

Directed by Richard Linklater • 1991 • United States
Starring Richard Linklater, Kathy McCarty, Rudy Basquez

SLACKER, directed by Richard Linklater, presents a day in the life of a loose-knit Austin, Texas, subculture populated by eccentric and overeducated young people. Shooting on 16 mm for a ...

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 Donna Deitch • 1985 • United States

Donna Deitch's swooning and sensual first narrative feature, DESERT HEARTS, was groundbreaking upon its release in 1985: a love story about two women, made entirely independently, on a shoestring budget, by a woman. In this 1959-set film, adapted...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1995 • United States

With DEAD MAN, his first period piece, Jim Jarmusch imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, the country's legacy of violence and prejudice, a...

Directed by Jennie Livingston • 1990 • United States
Starring Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African America...

Directed by Kathleen Collins • 1982 • United States
Starring Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones

One of the first feature films directed by an African American woman, Kathleen Collins’s LOSING GROUND tells the story of a marriage between two remarkable people, both at a crossroads in their lives...

Directed by Gordon Parks • 1971 • United States
Starring Richard Roundtree, Moses Gunn, Charles Cioffi

While the Black Power movement was reshaping America, trailblazing director Gordon Parks made this groundbreaking blockbuster, which helped launch the blaxploitation era and gave the screen a n...