Directed by Julian Schnabel • 1996 • United States
Starring Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Dennis Hopper

Julian Schnabel brings the all-too-brief life and incandescent world of Jean-Michel Basquiat to the screen with this dreamily stylized tribute from one creative phenom to another. Jeffrey Wrigh...

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 Harmony Korine • 2009 • United States
Starring Rachel Korine, Brian Kotzur, Travis Nicholson

Scuzz poet Harmony Korine takes a dumpster dive into the freakiest fringes of weirdo America with this singular paragon of pop-art transgression. Shot on appropriately grimy VHS, TRASH HUMPER...

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

Newly restored to its audacious, uncut glory, the blistering second installment in Gregg Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy is a wild, meth- and fast-food-fueled joyride through the fring...

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 ...

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 Jake Meginsky with Neil Young • 2018 • United States
Starring Milford Graves

This portrait of renowned percussionist and founding pioneer of avant-garde jazz Milford Graves finds him exploring his kaleidoscopic creativity and relentless curiosity. The film draws the viewer through th...

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 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 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...

Criterion Collection Edition #902

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 from a belove...

Directed by Billy Woodberry • 1984 • United States
Starring Nate Hardman, Kaycee Moore, Angela Burnett

Scripted and shot by Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry’s slice-of-life revelation is a key masterpiece of the LA Rebellion, the black independent-cinema renaissance that emerged from UCLA’s film...

Directed by Miranda July • 2005 • United States
Starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson

With this compassionate, startling comedy that could have come from no other artistic sensibility, the brilliant Miranda July reveals a world both familiar and strange—an original vision of creativ...

Directed by Kelly Reichardt • 2006 • United States
Starring Daniel London, Will Oldham

Two old friends reunite for a quietly revelatory overnight camping trip in this breakout feature from Kelly Reichardt, a microbudget study of character and masculinity that introduced many viewers to one of co...

Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1971 • United States
Starring Melvin Van Peebles, Simon Chuckster, Hubert Scales

A landmark of Black and American independent cinema that would send shock waves through the culture, SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG was Melvin Van Peebles’s second feature film, a...

Criterion Collection Edition #407

With its low budget and lush black-and-white imagery, Gus Van Sant’s debut feature MALA NOCHE heralded an idiosyncratic, provocative new voice in American independent film. Set in Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, the film evokes a world of transient wo...

Criterion Collection Edition #834

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 thought. Actor M. Emmet Walsh loom...

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, and...