50 Indie Movies You Need to See Before You Die (2024)

Director: Benh Zeitlin

Stars: Quvenzhane Wallis, Dwight Henry

It's rare that a movie given such a high amount of critical hyperbole and instant prestige lives up to the hype. After winning both the top grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012 and the Camera d'Or (designated for best first-time director) at the Cannes Film Festival in May, first-time filmmaker Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wildrode one of the loudest, most enthusiastic waves of pre-release build-up seen in quite some time before its late June release.

Thankfully, all of the positive word was justified. Anchored by an astounding performance from 6-year-old rookie Quvenzhane Wallis, Beasts is an emotional powerhouse. The film follows a tough little girl, Hushpuppy, who, living in a fictional New Orleans marshland community called "The Bathtub," must contend with both a dying father (the equally dynamite Dwight Henry), mythical monsters known as "aurochs," and rising waters that are washing her homeland away.

Shot in the heart of New Orleans with newbie actors and a tight-knit production crew, Zeitlin's picture is as authentic as it is captivating. When Hushpuppy's defiant narration isn't either making you laugh or stand at attention, the film's rich characters and brave narrative turns will leave you clutching for fresh Kleenex.—MB

Director: Spike Jonze

Stars: John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich, Orson Bean

As far as out-there ideas go, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's concept for Being John Malkovich is tough to beat. A financially strapped puppeteer (John Cusack) starts working as a file clerk, and one day, while poking around the office, he discovers that one of its smaller doors leads directly into the mind of eccentric actor John Malkovich. Part drama, part comedy, and all gonzo genre charm, Being John Malkovich has two things going for it: its brilliantly strange idea, and the fact that it's wacky plot is beautifully sold.

Hugely beneficial to making Being John Malkovich work is the presence of Malkovich himself, fully committed the story's goofiness in an unhinged performance that's crucial. More important, however, is director Spike Jonze, the first-time feature filmmaker whose transition from acclaimed music videos (Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," The Pharcyde's "Drop," Weezer's "Buddy Holly") into film wasn't exactly natural (that's not a word you'd used to describe Being John Malkovich), but his knack for capturing the necessary heart within Kaufman's high-conceit script was an eye-opener. —MB

Director: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez

Stars: Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, Joshua Leonard

If, 20 years from now, you find yourself in the bind of having to explain how found footage became the technique in horror movies, you have to trace it back to the source, to the little indie that did, The Blair Witch Project.

Released in 1999, the film wanted you to see it as non-fiction, the actual record of three students pursuing a local legend in Maryland. (Yes, this is also the film that has got you into countless arguments with dummies who think that recent incarnations of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Paranormal Activity are based on true events.) Costing less than a million dollars, The Blair Witch Project went on to gross about 250 times that amount.

This is the model for countless films, and to be an informed, developed viewer of film, you have to go back to the blueprint. —RS

Director: Richard Linklater

Stars: Jason London, Wiley Wiggins, Matthew McConaughey, Milla Jovovich, Anthony Rapp, Adam Goldberg, Ben Affleck, Jason O. Smith, Marissa Ribisi, Christine Harnos, Michell Burke, Sasha Jenson, Cole Hauser, Shawn Andrews, Joey Lauren Adams, Parker Posey, Nicky Katt, Renee Zellweger, Esteban Powell

Have you ever wondered what your parents were like back in their high school days? Hopefully not the "senior class tramp" and "the worst varsity athlete on campus." Chances are, if they've ever borrowed one of your Cypress Hill and/or Bob Marley CDs, mommy and daddy were much like the characters in Dazed And Confused, Richard Linklater'slook at high school life in the hippie-laden '70s that captures a bygone time period about as authentically as any movie made twenty years after the fact ever could.

With its wide array of memorable characters, this multi-plot comedy never tries very hard to pull laughs from its audience-it simply follows interesting kids doing normal things, albeit hilariously. Dazed And Confused also works on a film geek level, showing the earliest, and ten times funnier, days of now-famous actors like Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey. After watching this, you'll hope that pops was a lot like the latter's character, Wooderson, the king of younger-tail-chasing Zen. —MB

Director: Michel Gondry

Stars: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson

Put director Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind) and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation.) together and bewildering, joyous eccentricities are guaranteed.Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, their 2004 romantic comedy subversion, isn't an exception. Fortunately, it's also not simply quirky for quirky's sake, and the Gondry/Kaufman tandem had much more on their mind than butterflies and sappiness.

With an excellently against-type Jim Carrey and the always solid Kate Winslet in the leads, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind utilizes Gondry's visual inventiveness and Kaufman's narrative forward-thinking to tell a love story that's warm, tender, and raw. It's a heart-tugger perfectly suited for David Lynch acolytes. —MB

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Stars: Forest Whitaker, John Tormey, Henry Silva, Cliff Gorman, Camille Winbush, Tricia Vessey, RZA

Jim Jarmusch is one of the most influential (and prolific) American directors in independent cinema. Jarmusch's films focus on fringe experiences in the United States; his camera surveys the country from a perspective that feels foreign, befuddled and amused by this place. Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man, and Down By Law are all indicative of the director's deadpan style.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, with its color cinematography and hip-hop soundtrack, feels like an outlier in Jarmusch's body of work, but take a closer look and you'll see that it fits right in. The protagonist is Ghost Dog (forest Whitaker), a hitman who observes theode of thesamurai. By playing with the conventions of the gangster film and unpacking issues of race and urban spaces, Jarmusch makes something that feels, oddly enough, American. —RS

Director: Neil LaBute

Stars: Aaron Eckhart, Matt Malloy, Stacy Edwards

Like many films improperly labeled as "misogynistic," Neil LaBute's polarizing In the Company of Men deals with outright misogynists but isn't worthy of such description itself. Also similar to other movies on this list, it requires efforts on behalf of its viewers to look beyond what's addressed in the IMDb page's plot synopsis, which, in this case, states that In the Company of Men is about two corporate jerks who strategically try to destroy a deaf female co-worker's spirits. Although, the efforts to dissect LaBute's script seem minimal compared to, say Antichrist.

Aside from being a very well-written character, Chad (Aaron Eckhart) is an easy one to decipher: He hates both men and women with equal vigor, and his excitement in mentally assaulting Christine (Stacy Edwards) is always heightened by how he manipulates Howard (Matt Malloy) in the process. To him, Christine is just a pawn in a much bigger chess game. Chad loathes mankind's vulnerable tendencies, so when Howard talks about the ways he chases after his girlfriend, Chad sees his colleague-in-misogyny as a puny weakling. What kind of man would call his girl three times in a row just to make her call him back? One who deserves to be crushed.

In the end, Howard gets it much worse than Christine, and, moreover, Chad's awful characteristics are made abundantly clear. In the Company of Men leaves Christine as the obvious answer to the question of, "Who would you rather be?" —MB

Director: Wes Craven

Stars: Sandra Cassel, Lucy Grantham, Dvaid Hess, Fred Lincoln, Jeramie Rain, Marc Sheffler

Based loosely on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, The Last House on the Left is an exploitation horror film that is notorious for the rape/torture scenes that fill out the film's second act. In fact, the movie was found to be so sad*stic and unseemly that it was banned in Great Britain for a while because of the unrestrained violence and sexual humiliation that run rampant throughout.

There's one scene in particular that should have men everywhere reaching for the Pepto Bismol, when, in a twisted act of revenge, the mother of the rape victim proceeds to orally remove the manhood of the perpetrator that killed her daughter. This revenge-fantasy was Wes Craven's first feature-length directing gig, and it went on to redefine the horror genre. Don't bother with the recent remake; if you want to be truly disturbed, go for the raw, deplorable original. —JS

Director: Sofia Coppola

Stars: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris

First off, how can you not love Bill Murray? The comedy legend could do a mime routine and still leave us in stitches, thanks to his uncanny ability to derive laughs out of stares, raised eyebrows, and indifference.

Which all plays greatly into Sofia Coppola's unconventional romantic comedy Lost in Translation, starring Murray as a disenchanted actor making ends meet by working in Japanese commercials. His disillusionment its matched by that of an unhappily married, younger woman (Scarlett Johansson) he meets at a hotel bar.

Budding butterfly-in-stomach feelings emerge, but Coppola, who also wrote the script, steers clear of cheesy sentiments, instead grounding the hypnotic Lost In Translation in fine-tuned subtlety. —MB

Director: Gus Van Sant

Stars: River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves

It's pretty clear that the '90s were all about Keanu Reeves: The Matrix, The Devil's Advocate, Bram Stoker's Dracula, you name it. Yet again, he does not let anyone down in My Own Private Idahoalongside the very talented River Phoenix. Gus van Sant, another film icon of the nineties, tells the story of two teenagers on the road to self-discovery and, because van Sant is merciless, they seem to never discover anything.

But like most of van Sant's projects, everything is up to interpretation. The film is not as confrontational as his other films, but that does not mean that it is the kind of movie you would want to watch on your first date, unless you're that kind of guy. My Own Private Idaho tries to grasp the feeling of change, or lack thereof, in a raw and symbolic way that makes you think about the movie for weeks after having watched it. —VC

Director: George A. Romero

Stars: Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley, Bill Cardille, Kyra Schon

George A. Romero's Night of the Living Deadis a national treasure; shot on a shoestring budget in and around Evans City, Pennsylvania, the zombie classic stands as a crucial milestone for independent cinema, an untouchable gem amongst horror purists, and an intelligent, thought-provoking time capsule from the Civil Rights era. Not bad for a movie about corpses devouring humans.

Ask The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman or original series showrunner Frank Darabont-George A. Romero's genre-defining Night of the Living Dead is the most important zombie movie of all time. It's also one of the most important horror movies of all time.

The set-up is basic: Seven random people barricade themselves inside a nondescript farmhouse as flesh-eating corpses stalk around outside. Independently made back in 1968, Night Of The Living Deadpushed horror's boundaries with extraordinarily graphic scenes of cannibalism and the ballsy choice to have a black leading man during the Civil Rights era.

Above all else, though, it's still scary ashell. —MB

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Stars: Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Ellen Burstyn, Marlon Wayans

It's not a slight to label Requiem for a Dreamone of the most depressing movies ever made-a film about the destruction of four addicts isn't supposed to be uplifting. At every turn, director Darren Aronofskyputs the film's downbeat tone on front street, no more so than during Requiem's dizzying and relentless final act. With an alarming franticness, Aronofsky employs all kinds of camera tricks to disorient the viewer beyond belief, showing all four characters' ends in one roiling boil of images.

After its release, the film became the drug film par excellence, unseating Trainspotting in dorm rooms everywhere. It's also one of the most successful film adaptations of a novel ever. Of course, it must've helped that novelistHubert Selby, Jr. closely collaborated withAronofsky during the process.—MB

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Stars: James Spader, Andie MacDowel, Peter Gallagher, Laura San Giacomo

In 1989, American independent cinema got the boost it needed to create such works as Pulp Fiction andThe Shawshank Redemption. The boost came in the form ofsex, lies, and videotape, Steven Soderbergh's Palme d'Orwinner at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. From there, all the major studios wanted in. Independent movies as we know them today-especially as a kind of genre, with a specific style and tropes-came into being.

Truthfully, sex, lies, and videotape feels tame today. Which makes it all the more important to see. It follows Ann, (Andie MacDowell) a woman in a bloodless marriage with John(Peter Gallagher). When John's old college buddy (James Spader) comes to town with a video camera and rocks to get off, everything changes. —RS

Director: Spike Lee

Stars: Tracy Camilla Johns, Tommy Redmond Hicks, Spike Lee, Raye Dowell, John Canada Terrell

In 1986, when Spike Lee brought African American cinema into the mainstreamwith his lo-fi romantic comedy She's Gotta Have It, the general presentation of black people in cinema wasn't the most flattering-more often than not, they were pimps and other undesirable types. And even if they managed to get a complicated, non-stereotypical role, it wouldn't be a leading role.Lee's independently made debut, however, handles its characters with intelligence and sophistication, depicting a go-getting woman's (Tracy Camilla Johns) struggles in pleasing three boyfriends, one of whom is Lee's beloved Mars Blackmon alter-ego.

Granted, the film is not without its problems—see bell hooks on the film' "Whose puss*is this?" scene—but it's still a work of such talent, it holds up in many other ways. —MB

Director: Melvin Van Peebles

Stars: Melvin Van Peebles, "The Black Community"

Over 19 days in 1971,Melvin Van Peebles directed, produced and starred inSweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the indie film he also scored (played by Earth, Wind & Fire)and wrote. The year before, Van Peebles had made Watermelon Man for Columbia, a comedy about a white bigot who wakes up black. For his follow-up, Van Peebles wanted to make something even more antagonistic, a rough tale about a bad motherf*cker bucking white authority. Columbia was gutless; Van Peebles would have to go it alone.

Melvin Van Peebles made his movie about his bad motherf*cker, Sweet Sweetback, he of the long dick and no f*cks given, and thank god he did. For the samples alone,Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is worth its weight in vinyl (in particular Madlib has sought out choice moments of the dialogue for many of his projects). Beyond rap, Song is largely credited with starting the Blaxploitation genre. It inspired scores of black filmmakers, including Spike Lee. —RS

Director: Tobe Hooper

Stars: Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, Gunnar Hansen

The two most important horror movies inlight of the current state of the genre areHalloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Halloween is the prototypical slasher flick. The Texas Chainsaw Massacreis a slasher, too, but it stands out from Halloween because of its extreme grit. Watching Tobe Hooper's 1974 film, even today, is too much like watching a snuff film.

It is one of the only films this writer has ever seen that, whenthe killer first appeared, triggered a horrible looping thought of: "I don't want to watch this I don't want to watch this I don't want to watch this." And the writer has seen many horror movies. But there's something so—it seems silly to use a meaningless word like "real." There isn't a word for this. It's just terrifying.

The film, on paper, is patently ridiculous. Family of cannibals. Van of kids. Death. But truly, this movie is scary. Too scary. —RS

Director: Rob Reiner

Stars: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner, Fran Drescher, Bruno Kirby

You don't have to be an undying Mötley Crüefan to appreciate This Is Spinal Tap, director Rob Reiner's (When Harry Met Sally..., A Few Good Men) hilarious and sharp send-up of the music industry, particularly the hair metal culture of the 1980s.

Presented as a "real" documentary, it's a work of committed brilliance; as the self-centered, at times delusional, members of the fictional heavy metal group Spinal Tap, actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer deliver every ridiculous bit of dialogue and perform each exaggerated song with such all-in vigor that This Is Spinal Tap feels like the funniest episode of Behind The Music ever made. —MB

Director: Bryan Singer

Stars: Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro, Chazz Palmintieri, Kevin Pollak, Pete Postlethwaite

On the surface, The Usual Suspects sounds like a hybrid of Reservoir Dogs and Rashom*on, with its exploration of an elaborate criminalistic plot gone wrong, as recounted by its seemingly untrustworthy lone survivor. And, truth be told, that's exactly how director Bryan Singer's twisty thriller plays out. Except that, well, it's much more complicated than that.

Without divulging too much of the film's enigmatic pleasures, The Usual Suspects takes the traditional thieves-gone-wild premise and, like Tarantino's aforementioned Reservoir Dogs, totally subverts it with a large dose of Agatha Christie-level intrigue.

Who is Keyser Soze? Why would these loser deviants sign up for what's so clearly a suicide mission? And how in the hell were Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie able to pull the imaginary rug out from under viewers with a final reveal that should be obvious but is nonetheless a mind-scrambler? —MB