Curated playlist
English-language independent films
- Psycho (1960 film)Psycho, the 1960 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, opens on a specific Friday: December the Eleventh, in Phoenix, Arizona. A real estate secretary named Marion Crane has just stolen forty thousand dollars from her employer and is driving…
- The TerminatorThe Terminator arrived in American cinemas on the 26th of October 1984, and it began with a nightmare. Director James Cameron had fallen ill in Rome during the troubled release of his first film, Piranha II: The Spawning, and in his fever…
- RoboCopRoboCop arrived in American theaters on the 17th of July 1987, and it was not what anyone expected. The title alone put people off. Jack Mathews of the Los Angeles Times called it a "terrible title for a movie that anyone would expect an…
- Mad Max 2Mad Max 2 opened in Australian cinemas on the 24th of December 1981, a release date that gave holiday audiences something far removed from seasonal cheer. The film that director George Miller had constructed from twelve weeks of shooting…
- Waking LifeWaking Life, Richard Linklater's 2001 animated film, opens with a boy floating upward from a driveway into the sky. It is the first signal that gravity here does not apply. The film's unnamed protagonist drifts through a succession of…
- Synecdoche, New YorkSynecdoche, New York takes its name from two things simultaneously. One is Schenectady, the upstate New York city where much of the story unfolds. The other is synecdoche, a rhetorical figure in which a part stands for the whole, or the…
- Annie HallAnnie Hall arrives on screen in 1977 with Woody Allen staring directly into the camera, ignoring every convention of moviegoing in the process. He plays Alvy Singer, a comedian trying to understand why his relationship with Annie Hall fell…
- Mad Max (film)Mad Max, the 1979 Australian film directed by George Miller, was made for roughly A$400,000 and went on to earn more than US$100 million worldwide. That ratio was so extreme it earned a Guinness World Record for the most profitable film…
- Ex Machina (film)Ex Machina is a 2014 science fiction film that opens with an office prize nobody expects: a solitary week at the isolated home of a tech CEO. Written and directed by Alex Garland in his debut behind the camera, the film stars Domhnall…
- The Hunt for GollumThe Hunt for Gollum is a 2009 British fantasy fan film that achieved something almost no one expected: it reached millions of viewers worldwide on a budget of less than three thousand pounds. Director Chris Bouchard and a volunteer crew of…
- Everything Everywhere All at OnceEverything Everywhere All at Once was originally written for a man. The script's first version had a male lead, conceived specifically with Jackie Chan in mind. Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert reconceived the protagonist as a…
- Easy RiderEasy Rider opened on the 14th of July 1969 at the Beekman theater in New York City and broke the house record in its first week. A film made for roughly $400,000 would go on to earn $60 million worldwide. But the money was almost beside…
- Hardware WarsHardware Wars is a 1978 short film that asks a simple question: what happens when you point a camera at a steam iron flying through space? Made for just eight thousand dollars by San Francisco filmmaker Ernie Fosselius, it became what is…
- Session 9Session 9 is a 2001 psychological horror film set inside a real abandoned psychiatric hospital, and nearly everything terrifying about it was already there when the crew arrived. The Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts had been left to…
- Cultural impact of Star WarsStar Wars began in 1977 as a single film by George Lucas. Within months, Fox's stock price jumped from $6 to $25 per share. A studio close to bankruptcy suddenly had cash to buy the Aspen ski resort and the Pebble Beach golf courses. How…