Julien Donkey Boy

John Waters and Harmony Korine are two sides of the same coin, having devoted their lives to chronicling the White Trash world of America's most ignored and least embraced. Waters, of course, chose to do so with a lovingly comic approach that throws kitch and social commentary into a blender and then pukes it up …

Red Rock West

A drifter so honest he won't lie on a job application or ever steal from the till finds himself mistaken for a hired assassin, saying yes to some much-needed cash before he even has a chance to think it through. With that zippy intro, John Dahl gives us the 90's neo-noir masterpiece, Red Rock West. …

The Funeral

Here's a 90's "indie film" starring Christopher Walken, Benicio del Toro, Isabella Rossellini, Annabella Sciorra, Vincent Gallo, Chris Penn, and Paul Hipp that never really made a big commercial splash, and is, for whatever reason, lost in limbo: Abel Ferrara's The Funeral, a fairly bleak crime family story about revenge and, well, revenge. All the …

The Water Engine

David Mamet is an odd guy. His various award-winning plays full of stylized, gritty dialogue are well known- Glengarry Glenn Ross being the quintessential Mamet example. His own film directing betrays an odd preference for a stilted, wooden delivery of his dialogue, done quite on purpose but to baffling results. It's like the characters all …

Manny & Lo

There are so many already-forgotten 90's indie films floating around, victims of distribution wars and limbo copyright issues that keep them from getting released. Lisa Krueger's Manny & Lo is certainly near the top of that list- a quirky, character-driven dramedy about a couple of sisters on the run; it's a deceptively simple story that …

Sling Blade

You saw the short, now see the feature. Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade was one of those movies with perfect timing, capitalizing on a mid-90's American indie film wave that crashed into the Oscars and, for a brief second, convinced us all that Hollywood was getting tired of the same old same old. A mere …

Some Folks Call it a Sling Blade

Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade was the big indie hit of 1997, garnering awards and critical praise all around. But few people have ever watched the original short film it was based on: Some Folks Call it a Sling Blade, directed by George Hickenlooper, without whom the feature would never have been made. Starring Molly …

La Maladie de Sachs

The French filmmaker Michel Deville, recently deceased, left a quirky body of work that will probably never garner the grandiose praise of his more famous contemporaries, or capture the zeitgeist of his era. And still, it would be a shame if we forgot his films as time went on, for they portray contemporary life in …

Dance Me to My Song

The fact that Dance Me to My Song is a completely unknown film, and not a major milestone in the independent film world, shouldn't surprise me anymore, and yet... you can't watch this film without wondering what is wrong with our world. Here is a film written by and starring Heather Rose, a woman with …

The Demise of Quentin Tarantino, Part 3: Jackie Brown

In between Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, a few things happened. First up was an overhyped side-project that completely bombed: Four Rooms, in which four indie darling directors made four short films all taking place in a hotel and starring Tim Roth. Of the four, only Robert Rodriguez' contribution is any good- in fact, it's …