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 Cameron Crowe • 1992 • United States
Starring Bridget Fonda, Campbell Scott, Kyra Sedgwick

Six young Seattle urbanites just starting their lives—with bills to pay, budding careers, heightened social awareness, and restless hearts—share their dreams, their music, and the common courty...

Directed by Dennis Hopper • 1980 • United States
Starring Linda Manz, Dennis Hopper, Sharon Farrell

Dennis Hopper’s hurricane-force domestic tragedy is the ’80s answer to EASY RIDER, following troubled youth subculture to its frightening, screaming, self-annihilating extreme. Just out of prison ...

Directed by John Carpenter • 1980 • United States
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Adrienne Barbeau, Tom Atkins

Long-buried secrets come back to haunt a small town in this triumph of atmosphere and creeping unease from genre great John Carpenter. Drawing inspiration from the moody masterworks of Val L...

Directed by Gregg Araki • 1997 • United States
Starring James Duval, Rachel True, Nathan Bexton

You can practically smell the pheromones wafting off this kaleidoscopic odyssey, which finds director Gregg Araki crossing soap-operatic elements with blasts of science fiction, indie-kid cool, and sh...

Directed by Karyn Kusama • 2000 • United States
Starring Michelle Rodriguez, Jaime Tirelli, Paul Calderon

Bullied by her father at home and feeling adrift at school, Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) finds refuge in an unexpected pocket of her native Brooklyn—a timeworn boxing gym, where she lea...

Directed by Bob Odenkirk • 2003 • United States
Starring Michael Blieden, Stephanie Courtney, Matt Price

Perhaps the finest conversation movie this side of MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ, Bob Odenkirk’s directorial debut invites you along for a stimulating evening of hilarious, engrossing, and disarmingly...

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 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 Lizzie Borden • 1976 • United States
Starring Kathryn Bigelow, Ariel Bock, Marion Cajori

While Lizzie Borden’s features BORN IN FLAMES and WORKING GIRLS have taken their place as landmarks of feminist cinema, her debut—the fascinating experimental documentary REGROUPING—has gone larg...

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 Jem Cohen • 1999 • United States
Starring Fugazi

Filmed over the course of more than ten years, from 1987 to 1998, INSTRUMENT is director Jem Cohen’s visceral, fittingly unconventional portrait of legendary DC punk band Fugazi from their origins through their electrifying prime. Capt...

Directed by Ekwa Msangi • 2020 • United States
Starring Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah, Jayme Lawson

In her luminous feature debut, filmmaker Ekwa Msangi chronicles a broken family’s journey to wholeness with empathy and insight. Seventeen years after his family was separated by the civil wa...

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 Jonathan Wacks • 1989 • United Kingdom, United States
Starring A Martinez, Gary Farmer, Joanelle Romero

The road-movie genre gets a lyrical twist shot through with Native American spirituality in this bittersweet portrait of two Cheyenne men on a journey through the American West and...

Directed by Reed Harkness • 2022 • United States

Sam Harkness was fourteen years old when his mother, Jois, abruptly disappeared. Tracking cryptic clues of her whereabouts years later, Sam and his half brother—director Reed Harkness, who has been making short films with Sam since childhood—head ...

Directed by Diana Peralta • 2019 • United States
Starring Sasha Merci, Darlene Demorizi, Héctor Aníbal

Sibling bonds are both rekindled and tested in the achingly alive feature debut from Diana Peralta. Rita (Sasha Merci) and Carolina (Darlene Demorizi), two high-spirited sisters raised in New Y...

Directed by Cheryl Dunye • 1996 • United States
Starring Cheryl Dunye, Guinevere Turner, Valarie Walker

The wry, incisive debut feature by Cheryl Dunye gave cinema something bracingly new and groundbreaking: a vibrant representation of Black lesbian identity by a Black lesbian filmmaker. Dunye s...

Directed by Gregg Araki • 1995 • United States, France
Starring James Duval, Rose McGowan, Johnathon Schaech

Gregg Araki takes a road trip to hell in this wild, meth- and fast-food-fueled joyride through the margins of a menacing American wasteland. When they inadvertently link up with a dangero...

Directed by Paul Schrader • 1990 • United States
Starring Christopher Walken, Rupert Everett, Natasha Richardson

Two couples are drawn into a dark psychosexual vortex in Paul Schrader’s stylish take on the erotic thriller. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson are a British couple hoping to repa...

Directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer • 1995 • United States
Starring Parker Posey, Anthony DeSando, Guillermo Díaz

Nineties indie queen Parker Posey is at her effortlessly cool best in this irresistible comedy, a time capsule of the era’s Manhattan club scene. She stars as Mary, a hard-partying ...