Criterion
Indies are often thought of as low-budget, passion projects. They’re the answer to the summer blockbuster and the superhero franchises of the world. Instead of blowing sh*t up and overloading us with CGI, they bring something different to the table. A reserved, refined, authentic storytelling ability. They’re quirky, coming-of-age narratives and messy relationship dramas. They’re meandering portraits of the Midwest and crime thrillers in the wilderness. They’re cult-favorite horror flicks and macabre comedies. An indie doesn’t ascribe to one genre but it usually sports some big talent and even bigger themes in its narrative. In other words, an independent film is one with something to say.
Here are 10 of the most interesting indies currently available on Netflix.
Related: The 25 Best Comedies On Netflix Right Now, Ranked
IFC
Frances Ha (2012)
Run Time: 86 min | IMDb: 7.4/10
Before Greta Gerwig was directed Oscar-nominated coming-of-age dramas, she was writing and starring in this black-and-white dramedy about a young woman also trying to find her way in the professional dance world of New York City. Gerwig is magnetic in the titular role of Frances, a dancer dissatisfied with her career prospects and forced to contemplate a move to Tribeca on the whim of her best friend and roommate. That trek across Manhattan serves as a jumping off point for Frances, who travels home, then to France, before settling in Washington Heights on her journey to self-discovery.
Sony
Blue Jasmine (2013)
Run Time: 98 min | IMDb: 7.3/10
This dark comedy starring Sally Hawkins and Cate Blanchett focuses on a wealthy woman cast out of her socialite existence after her husband’s nefarious dealings are made known. While he rots in prison before ultimately committing suicide, Blanchett’s character wallows in self-pity, plenty of booze, and a psychotic break or two. There are no happy endings here, or much character growth to be honest, but watching Blanchett slowly go insane while burning bridges in her wake is more than fun.
The Weinstein Company
Blue Valentine (2010)
Run Time: 112 min | IMDb: 7.4/10
This romantic drama starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling is equal parts sweet love story and messy, unavoidable tragedy. The actors play a pair of lovers whose relationship is charted in nonlinear fashion over the course of the film. Things begin promisingly, as they always do, before failed careers, addiction, dishonesty, and a general feeling of unhappiness slowly rot away at the couple’s marriage. It’s a mesmerizing train wreck, but honestly, aren’t all of the great love stories?
The Weinstein Company
Wind River (2017)
Run Time: 107 min | IMDb: 7.8/10
Wind River is a movie that’s hard to pin down. It’s both crime drama, mystery, thriller and something else, an unflinching look at a community forgotten. Jeremy Renner plays the pseudo-hero in this story, a hunter with a dark past and a tragic motive to find the men responsible for the death of a young woman on the nearby reservation. Elizabeth Olsen plays a well-meaning if out-of-her-depth FBI agent tasked with solving the case and the two quickly find themselves in the middle of a slow-brewing war between the corporations quickly taking over the Midwest and the natives struggling to survive their oppression.
Criterion
Certain Women (2016)
Run Time: 107 min | IMDb: 6.4/10
This slow-paced drama examines the lives of four women living in small-town America. Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, and Lily Gladstone fill up the screen as they carry out character arcs that are both riveting and at times, disappointing. Dern plays a lawyer tasked with managing a dissatisfied client, Stewart a law school teacher fighting against her background, Gladstone a young woman searching for love, and Williams a wife and mother undermined by her family. The plot burns its way through nearly two hours of driving shots, close-ups, and lingering glances, but it’s the performances that make it worth a watch.
Focus Features
Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Run Time: 94 min, IMDb: 7.8/10
What initially resembles puppy love between a pair of precocious children slowly, tenderly reveals itself to be something far more sophisticated and complex. Sam and Suzy (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, a pair of prodigies) both carry adult pain within their tiny hearts, and the solace they find in one another carries accordingly heavy emotional weight. As director Wes Anderson stages some of his most awe-inspiring sequences — the climactic flood like something out of F.W. Murnau’s wildest dreams, Suzy and Sam’s homemade Eden on the beach — a story about wayward adults and children grasping at their last chance for sanity expands until it fills the entire island.
Focus Features
Dallas Buyers Club (2013)
Run Time: 117 min, IMDb: 8.0/10
Matthew McConaughey’s Dallas Buyer Club is a searing look at how the world failed the LGBTQ community during the devastating AIDS crisis. McConaughey stars as Ron Woodruff, a man diagnosed with the disease in the ’80s during a time when the illness was still misunderstood and highly stigmatized. Woodruff went against the FDA and the law to smuggle in drugs to help those suffering from the disease, establishing a “Dallas Buyers Club” and fighting in court to the right to aid those in need. The story is all the more powerful because it’s true and McConaughey delivers one of the best performances of his career as Woodruff, a man who changes his entire outlook on life after being dealt a tragic blow.
Screen Australia
The Babadook (2014)
Run Time: 93 min, IMDb: 6.8/10
Starring Essie Davis (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mystery) and directed by Jennifer Kent, The Babadook is a bracing psychological horror film grounded in the terrors and frustration of parenthood. Davis plays a mother who lost her husband in a car accident on their way to the delivery room. She loves and resents her troubled 6-year-old son, feelings that seem to take supernatural form when a creepy pop-up book, Mister Babadook, mysteriously shows up on his shelf. Kent’s stylish film makes excellent uses of its creepy interiors. but it’s Davis’ committed performance that drives the horror home.
Trimark Pictures
Cube (1997)
Run Time: 90 min, IMDb: 7.3/10
The genius of Cube is in its simplicity. A group of strangers awakens to find themselves in a complex system of identical rooms, many of which contain hidden, lethal traps for anyone clueless enough to enter them. With no knowledge of where they are, how they got there, or why they’re there, they have to work together to escape and/or — usually and — die trying. As it all pretty much takes place in a single room, it’s a prime example that the only things needed are a solid idea, a little money, and the stomach to depict people getting their faces melted or their bodies diced by razor-sharp wire. The follow-up installments go a little further out there in ideas and the world outside the Cube, but the original can’t be topped thanks to its unnerving score and tense, claustrophobic nature.
Overture Films
Sunshine Cleaning (2008)
Run Time: 91 min | IMDb: 6.9/10
A comedy about a pair of sisters who run a maid service that cleans up crime scenes is the definition of dark but there are some bright spots in Amy Adams and Emily Blunt’s Sunshine Cleaning. The two play siblings struggling to find themselves and stay afloat in a small town before they happen upon a macabre idea for a new business. Mopping up blood and hazardous waste isn’t the most reputable of jobs, and the two aren’t particularly good at it, especially Blunt who plays a woman floundering in her personal and professional life, but if you’ve got a strong stomach, there’s plenty of payoff here.
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