Before it was a Broadway musical, ‘Waitress’ was a sweet romantic drama from filmmaker Adrienne Shelly, costarring Nathan Fillion.
Category: American Independent Cinema
Last chance: ‘Take Shelter’ – Madness and the end of the world on Hulu
Jeff Nichols builds an an apocalyptic thriller around a touching family drama of a troubled father (Michael Shannon) determined to protect his family from the impending Armageddon he sees in his visions.
‘Experimenter’ with Peter Sarsgaard on Amazon Prime
Sarsgaard plays Yale psychology professor Stanley Milgram in Michael Almereyda’s inventive drama about his life and legendary experiments that shocked the world.
Channing Tatum is ‘Magic Mike’ on Hulu and HBO Max
Steven Soderbergh directs Channing Tatum in a film inspired by his life as a male stripper.
Matthew McConaughey is ‘Mud’ on Amazon Prime and Hulu
The third film from director Jeff Nichols is a story of childhood adventure steeped in the rural culture of life on the Mississippi and the mythology of Huckleberry Finn, but this boy’s adventure is also tangled in the world of adults and family bonds.
Martin Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’ on HBO Max
“You don’t pay for your sins in church. You pay for them on the street. All the rest is bullshit.” Mean Streets (1973) is not Martin Scorsese’s first film, but it is the film in which he came into his own. Passionate, energetic, stylistically inventive and personally driven, it is the first mature, full blooded “Martin […]
‘Frozen River’ on Amazon Prime
Courtney Hunt delivers the best kind of American independent drama with Frozen River (2008), a film that is respectful of its characters, responsive to its location, and honest in its storytelling. This kind of uncompromising filmmaking is often a hard sell. Hunt not only got her film a theatrical release, she earned Academy Award nominations […]
‘Reservoir Dogs’ – Quentin Tarantino begins on HBO Max
Reservoir Dogs (1992), Quentin Tarantino’s quotable blast of post-modern crime movie cool, is one of the most attention grabbing directorial debuts in history. Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, and Steve Buscemi—all dressed in identical black suits with thin ties and dark glasses—are gangsters who regroup in an empty warehouse in the aftermath of jewel […]
‘Dear White People’ – a sharp social satire on Hulu
Dear White People (2014), the feature debut of director / writer Justin Simien, is a sharp, smart, ambitious satire of race, racism, privilege, prejudice, and power at an Ivy League college that has drawn comparisons to Spike Lee. It’s a fitting comparison. Simien uses humor and provocation to explore issues of race and race relationships […]
‘Brick’- High school noir on Criterion Channel
Brick (2005), the debut feature from Star Trek: The Last Jedi filmmaker Rian Johnson, puts the collected works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in a blender with a jigger of teenage melodrama and pours it into a high school mold. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays things so close to his chest that he’s almost unreadable as […]