What Are the Best Indie Movies Playing Right Now?
This time of year is slow at the cinema: the season for sludge that got shunted out of a proper release date but that studios weren’t willing to throw away to streaming. This appears to still be somewhat true this year, as evidenced by Wonka playing for what must be its twentieth week at my theater of choice. But don’t despair: there’s a surprisingly great crop of indie releases showing right now. Here’s a rundown of what’s worth seeing when you’re sick of Dune: Part Two.
Love Lies Bleeding
Two queer gym rats fall in love, pump iron, and hide bodies in late 80s New Mexico.
Skip Drive-Away Dolls — this is the lesbian getaway movie you want to see this winter. A true midnight movie steeped in drive-in thrills, I balked at a lot of the unfortunately corny dialogue (a staple from writer-director Rose Glass, whose first feature Saint Maud mainly trafficked in post-Exorcist Catholic cliche). Fortunately, performances from a saurian Ed Harris and a sweat-glistened Kristen Stewart keep the wheels on.
The Taste of Things
Real life ex-couple Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel star as eaters and lovers in this sumptuous French pastoral.
Literally and excessively tasteful, The Taste of Things is the kind of manipulative that is hard not to fall for. An exquisite ode to ephemeral delight and the work that goes into creating it, it is romantic to the point of being genuinely harmful. If I had seen this during the deepest, loneliest time of the pandemic, I might have blacked out.
Problemista
A young Salvadorian man in Brooklyn tries to get his work visa by helping a kooky Manhattanite put on an art show.
This can be my unpopular opinion: I’m completely over kindness. Between Ted Lasso and Everything Everywhere All At Once and every ostensibly adult drama featuring a traumatic backstory about bullying — my ability to tolerate a movie that preaches about how we should be nice is at an all-time low. Niceness isn’t a character trait, it’s the absence of one. Who cares whether Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) is prickly and impossible because she was bullied in sixth grade? Isn’t it far more interesting to see how we navigate the hereafter than to obsessively pathologize its origins? Isn’t it delightful to see that imperfect people can also experience pain, joy, and friendship?
From an opening shot of a filthy sidewalk clustered with trashed framed photographs of New York, a brilliant subversion of the ubiquitous urban-optimist drone shot, Problemista sets itself as a beautifully surreal fantasia from Torres’s genuinely singular voice. As Alejandro, Torres plays a man at permanent odds with the world — though with curiously little anger. Torres understands his audience and knows better than to waste his time preaching to it about a loathsome immigration system. Instead, he focuses on Alejandro’s specific strangeness and his heroic ability to navigate unyielding terrain, whether it’s the gigs section of Craiglist, a labyrinthine legal system, or the ferocious Elizabeth herself.
We’ve had a crop of alt-comedians making their first foray into full-length features this year, but Problemista is the first to genuinely feel like an actual movie and not a series of jokes threaded by a scrap of plot. Absurdist and tender-hearted, Problemista is already one of my favorite movies of the year with one of the best original scores.
Late Night with the Devil (Cameron and Colin Cairnes)
The host of a struggling late night talk show decides to summon the devil in an ill-fated attempt to court ratings.
David Dastmalchian (Oppenheimer, Dune: Part One, The Dark Knight) is a welcome breed of character actor, a haunting and mercurial performer who can simultaneously pull off demure seduction and physical intimidation. I was interested in this movie primarily to see whether Dastmalchian could make the jump from an incredibly effective character actor to true leading man.
In at least this way, Late Night with the Devil is a success. Minus a narrative cold open, the movie is set up like a talk show itself, with Dastmalchian commanding the center. He slides from late night cornball to ratings-hungry shock jock to a grief-struck widower already contending with one type of loss. It’s a sly performance that propels a movie that might otherwise be the same riff.
Late Night is fun to watch because it feels like real television. It captures that familiar sensation that enlightenment awaits us — just after the next commercial break. Jack’s curiosity and dread matches the audience’s. We know we shouldn’t look in the box. We have to look in the box.
And like a lot of horror movies, it fumbles that opening. In literalizing Jack’s twin monsters of ambition and grief, it diminishes both. It’s so much better to stare into the dark, not knowing what will be when the lights come back on, than to suddenly turn on the floodlights and see it was just shadows the entire time.
As for the film’s controversial use of generative AI (perhaps worth noting that the movie was shot before the 2023 strikes, which set union agreements on the use of AI) it seems particularly pointless in a movie that is as openly pastiche as this one: its reference points are pretty accessible. I really doubt the generative AI snake is going back in the can but I hope indies, at least, resist the urge to go shittier and cheaper. Leave that to the geniuses behind the five hundredth iteration of Ghostbusters.
What’s your favorite movie playing now?
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