The Washington Post's Desson Thompson offers up a top 20 indie films list with an asterix:
These aren't going to be everybody's top 10 indie lists, of course. They're here to get you started on your own.
Fine: I'll play along!
He divides them up into two eras: Post and pre-Pulp Fiction:
The posties:
- Pulp Fiction, 1994
- Memento, 2000
- Clerks, 1994
- Amores Perros, 2000
- City of God, 2002
- Trainspotting, 1996
- Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, 1998
- Being John Malkovich, 1999
- Sling Blade, 1996
- Magnolia, 1999
Films on that list that I'm not crazy about include Clerks, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and, to a lesser extent, City of God.
Films that I would add for consideration: Shallow Grave, Donnie Darko, The Blair Witch Project, El Crimen del Padre Amaro.
I've seen other lists tout Garden State, Napolean Dynamite and The Passion of the Christ as being noteworthy indie films.
I'm perplexed as to why none of the great docs that have been made since 1974 are on that list, nor any of the fantastic Asian movies that have come out.
Here's his pre-Pulp Fiction list:
- Reservoir Dogs, 1992
- Repo Man , 1984
- Blue Velvet, 1986
Thompson sez: "David Lynch has made so many great films, but this dark vision of American life -- featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an innocent who discovers a bizarre underworld beneath suburbia -- deserves its own grim category."
It wasn't about suburbia!! It was about the grimy, sleazy, seductive, violent world one layer below every Norman Rockwell portrait of small-town America!!! More to the point, it bears striking familiarities to Lynch's home town of Missoula, Mont. -- a place I've been and can understand how it inspired Lynch.
But frankly, you could easily set the film in Orillia or Kingston. Let's not talk about Trenton; that place is scary enough. :)
- She's Gotta Have It, 1986
- El Mariachi, 1992
- The Thin Blue Line, 1988
- Slacker, 1991
- Bottle Rocket, 1996
- Stranger Than Paradise, 1983