Eight films that could not have been made any other way
Independent cinema exists in the gap between what studios are willing to fund and what filmmakers actually want to say. The best of it does not look like a compromise. It looks like the only way the film could have existed, shot on whatever budget was available with actors who were not yet famous and locations that studio productions would have dressed out of existence.
These eight films are ranked by how completely they justify their own existence. All of them are from the last fifteen years, and all of them made something out of limitations that most studio productions could not replicate with ten times the money.
Three chapters. Three actors playing the same person at different ages. A film about a boy growing up in Liberty City who does not yet have the language for who he is. Barry Jenkins shoots it in a way that makes every frame feel like a memory, and the film earns its quiet devastating third act through two chapters of complete specificity. Mahershala Ali appears for roughly twenty minutes and creates one of the most fully realized supporting performances in recent cinema. The film won Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars and deserved it without qualification. There is nothing else like it.
A film about a jazz drummer and an abusive instructor that turns into something closer to a horror film by the end. Damien Chazelle made this on $3.3 million and cut it so tightly it plays like a thriller. J.K. Simmons won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and it was not close. The central question of whether Fletcher's methods produce greatness or just damage is never resolved, and the film is honest enough not to pretend it has an answer. The final sequence is one of the best-edited sequences of the decade, and the film earns every second of it.
Shot on a $6 million budget in the motels at the edge of Disney World, this is the American Dream as it actually functions for the people the economy left behind. Moonee is six years old and the film spends most of its runtime in her perspective, which means the tragedy around her arrives slowly and then all at once. Brooklynn Prince was seven during filming and gives one of the best child performances ever put on screen. Willem Dafoe plays the motel manager and was robbed of an Oscar. Sean Baker shot the final sequence on an iPhone and it is the right call every time.
The best horror film of the decade and a film that is really about grief dressed up as one. Toni Collette gives a performance that should have received an Academy Award nomination and did not, which remains one of the more inexplicable snubs in recent memory. Ari Aster builds the dread so slowly that by the time the film becomes explicitly horrifying you are already too far in to look away. The mid-film scene that changes everything is genuinely one of the most shocking moments in recent cinema, and it is horrifying entirely through implication. Not for first-time horror viewers.
The most specific coming-of-age film of the decade and therefore the most universal. Christine McPherson insists on being called Lady Bird, wants out of Sacramento, and has the kind of relationship with her mother that is loving and exhausting and impossible to fully articulate from either side. Greta Gerwig wrote and directed her first solo feature and made something that feels completely lived-in. Laurie Metcalf as the mother is the film's secret weapon. At 93 minutes it does not waste a single scene, which is rarer than it sounds.
A film about a supervisor at a foster care facility for at-risk teenagers that is more honest about trauma and the people who work through it than almost anything in mainstream cinema. Brie Larson was not yet famous when she made this and she is extraordinary in it. The film refuses easy resolutions and does not manufacture them. Every emotional moment is earned through specificity rather than manipulation, and the sequence with Jayden and the octopus story is the best scene Brie Larson has appeared in before or since.
Robert Pattinson runs through Queens for two hours trying to get his brother out of jail, and everything he touches makes it worse. The Safdie Brothers shoot it like a documentary and score it with an Oneohtrix Point Never electronic pulse, and the combination creates a film that feels physically tense from the first frame. It does not ask you to like its protagonist and does not pretend he deserves better than what he gets. The best thing Robert Pattinson has done before or after The Batman, which is saying something.
A man dies, comes back as a sheet ghost with eye holes, and watches time pass over the house he lived in. That is the entire premise. David Lowery shoots it in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio with rounded corners like old home footage, and the effect is meditative and genuinely moving. The scene where Rooney Mara eats an entire pie in one unbroken take is either the film's best moment or its most self-indulgent one, and both readings are correct. It is the kind of film that only independent cinema can produce because studio notes would have destroyed it inside the first development meeting.
Shot in a New Jersey convenience store for $27,575, mostly at night because Kevin Smith could not afford to close the store during the day. Dante and Randal spend a shift arguing about Star Wars, relationships, and why neither of them are where they thought they would be. The film has no budget, almost no visual style, and dialogue that keeps going past the point most filmmakers would cut. All of that is the point. Clerks is the proof of concept for a generation of indie filmmakers who realized that a good script and a camera were enough. Nothing about it should work and all of it does.
Independent cinema right now is the most interesting it has been in decades. The films that did not make this list, including Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Witch, and Eighth Grade, are worth your time once you have worked through these nine. The thread connecting all of them is that none of them needed permission to exist, and it shows in every frame.