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In 2018, it’s harder than ever to be independent in the world of movies. With Thanos and T. rexes and computer-animated superfamilies descending upon our multiplexes, the do-it-yourself spirit of film history is being crowded out, one IP blockbuster at a time. But there are still some fearless, indie-minded artists fighting the fight. This week on The Ringer, we’ll look at some veterans of the field and some exciting new entrants, and try to understand where independent cinema will go from here.
In his 1996 book Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, John Pierson chronicles his exploits as the self-described “guru” of independent American cinema in the period bridging the low-budget, off-the-grid incursions of the 1980s—when Spike (Lee) and Mike (Moore) came out of nowhere to become household names—and the ’90s, which could be divided into two distinct periods: before and after Pulp Fiction. Quentin Tarantino’s reverent, referential cinephile aesthetic was more Blockbuster than blockbuster. It’s no wonder that one of QT’s contemporaries, Kevin Smith, uses a video-store metaphor midway through the book to describe not only Pierson’s job as a producer’s rep but also the role of critics in getting audiences to see movies with smaller production and marketing budgets. “You take something that you really like … and take it to the people … you’re a very selective, very finicky video clerk.”
The landscape described by Pierson has changed irrevocably in the 20-plus years since his book’s publication—notably, the book’s publisher, Harvey Weinstein, has gone from power player to persona non grata. But it’s still a valuable, gossipy document of a time when it was easier to identify the difference between mainstream and indie. If the “Slacker” of Pierson’s saga—that’d be Richard Linklater—makes a movie like Last Flag Flying for a studio (Amazon), does that immediately disqualify it from consideration as indie? Probably. But what about Boyhood, financed over its 12-year genesis by a series of independent production companies and released domestically by IFC, a company whose name literally contains the word “independent?” Or how about a movie like Chloé Zhao’s The Rider, one of 2018’s true standouts, which was made completely apart from the traditional moviemaking apparatus before being acquired at Cannes by Sony Pictures Classics—a subsidiary of the studio currently spewing Venom all over American multiplexes. The omnipresent A24 now operates as an integrated production and distribution powerhouse with day-and-date delivery systems and lucrative streaming deals with Amazon Prime. When everything and everybody seem connected from the top down, “independent” becomes an elastic term. Taxonomy is tricky.
With this in mind, compiling a list of the best—or maybe let’s say the most interesting—American independent films since 2000 is a fool’s errand. I don’t mind looking foolish (I wrote a book about Showgirls, for god’s sake) but know that there were some ground rules here, only a couple of which were broken. (See if you can spot them!) No movies produced or distributed by major studios or mini-majors, which led to the decision to leave out A24 (meaning no Lady Bird, or The Witch, or Spring Breakers, or Hereditary, or you name it); no foreign titles, since financing structures abroad are even more difficult to categorize (which means that authentically shoestring masterpieces like Ben Wheatley’s Down Terrace didn’t qualify); no obvious “calling card” movies (even though some of these filmmakers got snapped up by studios pretty fast); and no need to include certain films that Ringer readers probably already know and love. (Sean Fennessey pushed for the inclusion of a certain Nicolas Winding Refn thriller starring Ryan Gosling whose title rhymes with “dive” but I exercised my one Canadian-freelancer veto, since that movie sucks.)
So take this list for what it is: a likely flawed and deeply subjective dive through 18 years of independently produced—and in all cases, independent-minded—filmmaking that runs the gamut in terms of genre and geography, featuring directors ranging from past-or-present brand names (Christopher Nolan, Barry Jenkins) to discoveries waiting to happen (Josephine Decker, Khalik Allah). Consider it the attempt of a former finicky video clerk to take some things I really like and share them with you all. Can’t wait to be told how wrong I am on Twitter.
Actress
Robert Greene, 2014
(Cinema Guild)
Robert Greene is fixated on performance; his fine indie-wrestling portrait Fake It So Real and creepy Kate Lyn Sheil showcase Kate Plays Christine are both studies of actors and their process. The standout, however, is 2014’s Actress, a film whose strange circumstances—the director became friends with Wire alumnus Brandy Burre, who was a neighbor living down the street in Beacon, New York—belie its assurance as portraiture and metaphor. Ostensibly, Actress is about Burre’s attempt to make a screen comeback but it reveals itself more as a movie about the other “performances” in her life—as a wife, as a mother, and as an “actress,” the latter an archetypal construct more complicated than any scripted role. As much an essay film as a documentary, it’s the sort of heady, intellectual movie that rattles around in your brain for days.
Ballast
Lance Hammer, 2008
(Gravitas Ventures)
It’s been 10 years since Batman & Robin digital designer Lance Hammer dropped the weighty, amazing Ballast into a festival circuit where it was heralded as the arrival of a major new talent. The fact he hasn’t made a movie since is a mystery, and a shame. A stark, grayed-out drama set in the Mississippi Delta about a DJ turned convenience store owner (the hulking, indelible Michael J. Smith Sr.) who steps into the wreckage of his dead identical twin’s life—sublimating grief and anger into familial responsibilities he’d always avoided—Ballast displays visual and storytelling chops comparable to the work of the Dardenne brothers; its claustrophobic domestic spaces and wide-open horizon lines make for thrilling viewing even as its tone remains hushed and mournful throughout. Of all the movies on this list, Hammer’s debut most deserves to be better known.
Blue Ruin
Jeremy Saulnier, 2013
(Radius)
Revenge is a dish best served bloody raw in Jeremy Saulnier’s absolutely crack-shot thriller, which deals with an unlikely, self-styled assassin (Macon Blair) struggling to reckon with the consequences of his righteous vigilantism. Comparisons to Blood Simple make sense insofar as Blue Ruin is a similarly regional and handcrafted enterprise, and if Saulnier lacks the Coens’ gifts for brilliant dialogue (who doesn’t?) he proves nearly their precocious equal at depicting the anxious down time in ballets of flesh wounds and headshots. (Watch it side by side with No Country for Old Men and tell me I’m wrong.) Less gory than Green Room but more effective as a thrill machine, Blue Ruin deserves its place in the canon of under-the-radar thrillers.
Butter on the Latch
Josephine Decker, 2013
(Cinelicious)
The buzz around the tricky, trippy Madeline’s Madeline suggests that Decker has emerged out of the New York indie scene as one of its front-runners, but she’s been making synapse-scrambling work for a few years now. The cryptic, visionary Butter on the Latch, about a pair of city girls who attend a Balkan music camp in the middle of the California wilderness and begin to lose their grip on reality, incorporates horror-movie motifs into a meditation on identity that’s anything but generic. Lots of indies strive for weirdness, but unusual ways of seeing—both in terms of literal camera placement and the more ephemeral quality of “perspective”—come to Decker naturally. Butter on the Latch is nightmarish in the truest sense; its freakiest moments seem to have been filmed with eyes wide shut.
Cameraperson
Kirsten Johnson, 2016
(Janus Films)
Split the title of Kirsten Johnson’s documentary in half and a dizzyingly complex series of relations reveal themselves: between the camera and its subjects; between the camera and its operator; and also between the person behind the lens and the people in front of it. A director and cinematographer who has worked with the political journalist Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) and gleaned footage from a variety of fraught spots across the globe (there are excerpts from her tours of duty in Bosnia and Afghanistan) Johnson displays a willingness to interrogate her own practice—and in the process illustrates why she’s such a sterling pro. It’s the rare sort of self-awareness that radiates with humility instead of personal branding, and it’s essential in a moment when even progressive nonfiction filmmaking too often opts for emotional shorthand and cheap shots.
Cold Weather
Aaron Katz, 2010
(IFC)
The protagonist of Aaron Katz’s sweetly shaggy semi-thriller yearns to be a detective, and ends up unexpectedly investigating a mysterious disappearance in his Portland neighborhood. When he starts smoking a Sherlock Holmes–ian pipe to aid with his deductive process, it’s a hipster affectation that’s also an act of loving homage. Of all the directors who emerged out of the so-called “Mumblecore” movement, Katz may the one with the easiest visual facility; Cold Weather has a crisp, sharp color palette and assertive camera movements that aid rather than overwhelm its modest genre aspirations. It’s also got the best brother-sister act in 21st-century indie (apologies to Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel), with Cris Lankenau and Trieste Kelly Dunn distilling sibling rivalry and affection into a subtle, wordless solidarity, whether whale-watching or listening to a beloved teenage mixtape.
Computer Chess
Andrew Bujalski, 2013
(Kino Lorber)
In truth, there are a few movies by Andrew Bujalski that could have gone here: the tender twin-sibling study Beeswax; the goofy ode to self-improvement Results; the buoyantly bleak workplace comedy Support the Girls. The reason Computer Chess gets my vote is because it’s so singular: a deadpan black-and-white oddity shot on circa-1980s video cameras about a group of beta males—all amateur chess whizzes—who check into a lonely hotel for a weekend tournament only to become pawns in some larger game involving the Pentagon and artificial intelligence.
Donnie Darko
Richard Kelly, 2001
(Flower Films)
At Sundance in January 2001, the apocalyptic vibes of Richard Kelly’s absurdist-sci-fi-time-travel comedy impressed critics; by September of the same year, an ad campaign featuring a crashing plane destroyed its chances of a successful release. Like all cult classics, Donnie Darko found its audience—and appreciation—over time; nearly 20 years later, its I-Heart-the-’80s ironies seem more anthropological than nostalgic, while its millennial themes of alienation, identity crisis, and despair have proved apt. And even if the twisty script and demonic-bunny imagery didn’t hold up, the movie would have its place in the needle-drop hall of fame for the way Kelly turns Echo and the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon” into an anthem of creeping, unnameable dread.
Field Niggas
Khalik Allah, 2015
(KhalikoVision)
On paper, Khalik Allah’s experimental documentary sounds capital-P Problematic. On a street corner in Harlem, a group of African American locals—many high on the synthetic marijuana substitute K2—are interviewed (and perform) for a digital camera that rocks and weaves around their faces with a handheld, self-conscious stylishness. Meanwhile, the soundtrack has been manipulated so that the faces and dialogue are slightly out of sync, resulting in an amorphous blending of identities. So yes, Field Niggas is a test case for the perils of aestheticized ethnography—and critiques of Allah’s methods are valid—but it’s also a mesmerizing feat of individual and community portraiture, using its subjects’ observations, arguments, confessionals, and asides as both poetry and political commentary. Allah, who used his father’s 35mm camera to photograph members of the Wu-Tang Clan and refers to his multimedia work as “Camera Ministry,” was back this year with the hugely acclaimed Black Mother; its predecessor isn’t that easy to see but it’s worth seeking out all the same.
Fruitvale Station
Ryan Coogler, 2013
(TWC)
All three of the collaborations between Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan have yielded terrific performances inside of interesting movies; the difference with Fruitvale Station is that nobody saw them coming. There’s little of the muscular, popular style that Coogler cultivated in Creed and Black Panther here; instead, the fact-based Fruitvale Station—about the killing of Oakland resident Oscar Grant by BART officers in 2009—proceeds observationally, adopting a (last) day-in-the-life structure to fully dimensionalize a character whose fame in death threatened to overshadow his actual identity. Coogler’s wisdom in styling the movie as a showcase can’t be overstated: Jordan’s smart, magnetic acting is star-is-born stuff, and looks more than ever like ground zero for a major career.
Gerry
Gus Van Sant, 2002
(ThinkFilm)
All that goodwill for Good Will Hunting can buy a genuinely independently-minded guy a lot of leeway—enough to make a draggy, plotless parable about two guys named Gerry starving to death in the desert (not to spoil the ending but they don’t get far on foot). As a rejection of cinematic convention, Gerry was snotty and funny; as an outlet for Van Sant’s then-atrophying formalist muscles, it was, in its way, a career-saver. Van Sant reaches back to the languorous beauty of his earlier work—especially My Own Private Idaho—while rejuvenating himself and moving forward toward Cannes and Oscar glory.
George Washington
David Gordon Green, 2000
(Cowboy Pictures)
Probably the foundational American indie of the 2000s—as stylistically and tonally influential going forward as it was evidently influenced by ’70s stalwarts like Terrence Malick and Charles Burnett—George Washington used small-scale imagery and incidents to evoke larger concepts. What better way to suggest your movie is about “America” (as a place of residence and as an abstraction) than to name it after a Founding Father? Essentially a “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” riff awash in delicate, ominous lyricism, David Gordon Green’s film was propped up by critics like Roger Ebert and gradually canonized; all you need to do is watch any five minutes of Mid90s to see how an even younger generation of would-be auteurs has absorbed its atmosphere-is-everything ethos.
Heaven Knows What
Josh and Benny Safdie, 2014
(Radius)
It’s definitely one way to make a movie: after meeting a 20-year-old former crack addict on the streets of New York City, Josh and Benny Safdie encouraged her to write a memoir of her experiences—and then cast her in the film version. The ferocious, lived-in authenticity of Arielle Holmes’s performance in the literal adaptation of her life gives her as much ownership of Heaven Knows What as the Safdies, whose subsequent breakthrough in last year’s superb Good Time owes plenty to its predecessor’s restless, nervy, street-level rhythms. Heaven Knows What is one of the decade’s most harrowing viewing experiences, with no built-in comfort or distance; it’s a mix of aesthetic innovation, artistic tourism, debatable exploitation, and stealth empathy that’s as worth arguing over as it is watching in the first place.
The House of the Devil
Ti West, 2009
(MPI)
It’s been diminishing returns for Ti West since this awesome ’80s shlock riff, which is why it’s important to remember the good times: The Fixx on the stereo; poison on the pizza; Greta Gerwig in a supporting role; and witches in the attic. (Plus: Mary Woronov, the closest thing to a walking seal of approval for offbeat genre fare.) Where most newish horror movies opt for a slow burn or full-on sensory overload, House of the Devil mixes moods and modes without ever losing sight of its primary goal, which is to terrify—rather than amuse or gross out—an audience that’s too jaded at this point to think it can be done. Believe.
Inland Empire
David Lynch, 2006
(Absurda)
The conclusion of David Lynch’s L.A. trilogy doesn’t just repudiate studio filmmaking à la Mulholland Drive; it adopts a borderline incomprehensible visual and narrative form to say goodbye to Hollywood for good. Even for such a congenitally uncompromising filmmaker, Inland Empire is my-way-or-the-highway stuff, reaching back—at times, seemingly on purpose—to the underground-shock ethos of Eraserhead, when its maker was a mere “maniac” (to quote Mel Brooks) instead of our Surrealist elder statesman. Whatever else you can say about this strategically ugly, grueling, extraordinary three-hour ordeal—complete with “Locomotion” music video—it is the film of a free man.
It Felt Like Love
Eliza Hittman, 2013
(Variance Films)
The shallow-focus imagery of Eliza Hittman’s debut belies its depth as a coming-of-age fable. Besides being wise about its teenage female protagonist’s arc from (not-quite) innocence to (less-than-spectacular) experience, It Felt Like Love perceives its male characters with a devastating acuity. Hittman’s “boys-will-be-boys” thesis isn’t endearing, forgiving, or accepting; on the contrary, the film bristles with frustration and despair over the kind of callow cruelty inflicted from a place of privilege and base insecurity. In other words, it hits the nail on the head—and at times, between the eyes.
Medicine for Melancholy
Barry Jenkins, 2008
(IFC)
It makes sense that critics compared Barry Jenkins’s first foray as a writer-director to Before Sunrise, since its premise is really nothing more than a boy-meets-girl-and-they-talk-all-day story. But Richard Linklater’s Before films were never as inherently politicized as Medicine for Melancholy, whose characters—wary, militant Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and sharp, supple-minded Jo (Tracey Heggins)—become embodiments of a larger, argumentative dialectic about the assimilation of African American art, culture, and identity as well as gentrification in that all-time cinematic city, San Francisco. No less than Moonlight or If Beale Street Could Talk, the film is a visual tour-de-force, using color (and its absence) to code and contextualize dialogue that’s at once poetically vivid and awkwardly everyday: happily, the promise of its low-budget craftsmanship and conceptual intelligence has been fulfilled.
Memento
Christopher Nolan, 2000
(Newmarket)
If you made a Memento-style movie about Christopher Nolan’s career—that is, started it now and worked back to the beginning—then his 2000 breakthrough would be one hell of a climax: the kind of perfectly structured and acted neo-noir that would serve as another writer-director’s crowning achievement. Long before he commanded budgets equal to the GDP of a small country and had Michael Caine on speed-dial, Nolan got big-time production value out of his priceless instincts for how to discombobulate an audience without losing them completely; what makes Memento memorable isn’t just its Harold Pinter–ish reverse chronology but all the little visual and verbal details—a tattoo here, a cryptic one-liner there—that stick firmly in the back of our minds even as they go in one of Guy Pearce’s antiheroic ears and out the other.
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
Terence Nance, 2012
(Variance Films)
The popularity of Random Acts of Flyness should hopefully introduce viewers to Terence Nance’s wildly inventive, essentially unclassifiable debut feature, in which the director—playing a version of himself—agonizes, rhapsodizes, philosophizes, and aestheticizes a woman (Namik Minter) with whom he has decided he is crazily in love even as their friendship displays clearly demarcated platonic boundaries. There are aspects of Woody Allen and Spike Lee here, but also a thrifty, stop-motion fabulism more akin to Michel Gondry, and yet Nance’s vision is more than the sum of its influences: it illustrates that art—whether beautifully sincere or wildly undisciplined—consists of nothing less (or more) than the courage to take something from the inside and put it out into the world.
Old Joy
Kelly Reichardt, 2006
(Kino International)
The weekend warriors in Kelly Reichardt’s humanely humorous road movie aren’t alpha-male types à la Deliverance; they don’t want to forge rapids, only soak their early-middle-aged bones in a lonely mountain hot springs. At once a sly satire of journey-is-the-destination philosophizing and a deeply felt elegy for eroding countercultural values—with Will Oldham as a more melancholy version of The Dude—Old Joy re-established its director in the indie vanguard 12 years after her debut River of Grass. Since then, she’s worked with increasingly shimmery stars (Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart), revised foundational American movie genres (Meek’s Cutoff’s reckoning with the Western), and become a brand-name auteur. But this remains her most affecting work.
Pariah
Dee Rees, 2011
(Focus Features)
The story behind the making of Pariah is as indie-textbook as it gets: a film school thesis short expanded into a feature script and nurtured in the Sundance Directors Lab before a splashy festival premiere. But Dee Rees’s film stood—and stands—apart because of the subcultural specificity of its subject matter: as a queer, black coming-out story, it anticipates Moonlight while incorporating aspects of its director’s own autobiography, framed by sensitive, exuberant cinematography by Bradford Young. Working in glorious tandem, Rees and Young style the images so that Alike (Adepero Oduye) goes from the camera’s striking but introverted subject to the source of its elegant point-of-view compositions; Rees’s subsequent triumph with Mudbound (which received an Oscar nomination for its cinematography) should hopefully shed more light on her debut.
Police Beat
Robinson Devor, 2005
(Northwest Film Forum/WigglyWorld Studios)
The Rhodesian-born political columnist and hip-hop chronicler Charles Mudede cowrote Robinson Devor’s amazing, underseen crime drama, based on his experiences as a journalist on Seattle’s “police beat.” Its hero is a Senegalese immigrant who works as a bike cop and narrates his experiences in his native Wolof language while we watch him interact in English with Americans. This structure elegantly distills themes of identity and assimilation into a film that’s also pressurized by urban decay and its protagonist’s spiralling romantic paranoia: the subtitle, “Seven Days of Crime and Delusion,” evokes David Fincher and Dostoyevsky with equal efficiency.
Redacted
Brian De Palma, 2007
(Magnolia)
Greetings, Brian De Palma—good to have you back! Nothing against the classic Hollywood-style giallos that made him a household name, but Redacted’s simultaneously irreverent and deadly serious exploration of the Iraq War—staged in a YouTube-channel style that only looks better and more prescient in retrospect—was the return that fans of BDP’s late-’60s “American Godard” period had been hankering for. Made for less than $5 million and released into a fractious Iraq zeitgeist, Redacted divided critics, tanked commercially, and led to a vicious behind-the-scenes feud between the director and his financier Mark Cuban—a good sign that De Palma was awake and pissed off after sleepwalking through a decade of studio assignments.
Room 237
Rodney Ascher, 2012
(IFC)
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve read or heard somebody misinterpret Rodney Ascher’s homemade, legally contentious, and fully brilliant video essay on The Shining, I’d probably have $237. But that’s OK, because what Room 237 is really about—beyond whether or not Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing and used a shot of child’s sweater to confess it (spoiler: he didn’t)—is how even the most magisterially controlled works of art (e.g. The Shining) become wide open to interpretation the moment they reach an audience. Forget Steven Spielberg’s obscene CGI recreation of the Overlook in Ready Player One: it’s Ascher who truly gets inside the madness of Kubrick’s masterpiece.
The Rider
Chloé Zhao, 2017
(Sony Pictures Classics)
Western myths get put through the wringer in Chloe Zhao’s visually rugged, emotionally delicate drama, in which a battered cowboy (Brady Jandreau playing a broken-down version of himself) has to decide the value of getting back in the saddle again. Part landscape film, part community study, and wholly gorgeous in a way that incorporates but does not defer to the aesthetics of classic Westerns, The Rider received enough critical attention that Zhao has been tapped—surprisingly and maybe a bit worryingly—to take her talents to the MCU. However that adventure goes, the success of this anxious, unique feature means that Zhao’s place in the contemporary indie vanguard is secure—either till she comes back or moves on completely.
Shotgun Stories
Jeff Nichols, 2007
(Multicom)
“This started a long time ago,” says Son (Michael Shannon) of the inter-family feud that drives Jeff Nichols’s dusty, indelible debut; while it’s easy to intuit metaphor (social and biblical) in the hatred festering between the film’s two sets of brothers from different mothers, Shotgun Stories works because it’s so compelling on the levels of character and drama. Nichols swung for the fences a couple of years later with the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it psychodrama Take Shelter, and while that’s an impressive piece of work, his feeling for the hard, mean contingencies of American self-sufficiency—of stubborn loyalty that mutates into murderous anger—has never been more precise. Nor, I’d say, has Shannon necessarily been any better, partially because back in 2007, his laconic-to-volcanic eruptions still felt spontaneous instead of like a recognizable actorly signature.
Starlet
Sean Baker, 2012
(Music Box Films)
I could have gone with Tangerine, Sean Baker’s winning, stylistically innovative iPhone-shot comedy, but—happily—it was embraced upon release and boosted by the success of his Oscar-nominated follow-up The Florida Project. So instead, I’ll stump for Baker’s underseen, underrated, cumulatively overwhelming Starlet, a Los Angeles–set story of female friendship between a young adult-film performer (Dree Hemingway) and the older woman (the late Besedka Johnson, in her only film role) she meets at a yard sale. Baker’s skill with actors and use of setting as character—rightly praised in Tangerine and The Florida Project—was never surer than in Starlet’s alternately comic and abject setup, which handles lurid situations with refreshing even-handedness and demonstrates a generosity of spirit that doesn’t come naturally to most cooler-than-thou directors—and which can’t be faked.
Sweetgrass
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, 2009
(Cinema Guild)
In documentary circles, the films created by the members of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab have been considered one of the decade’s major and most contentious bodies of work: Does their narration-and-information-free descent into a series of unusual physical environments and socioeconomic ecosystems represent a new stage of verite or is the rampant GoPro abuse in a film like Leviathan just another stylistic gimmick? I like Leviathan’s doomy view of an industrial fishing vessel, but I truly love its directors’ earlier experiment, Sweetgrass, which documents a sheep drive in the mountains of Montana.
Upstream Color
Shane Carruth, 2013
(VHX)
In 2004, mathematics major Shane Carruth made a $7,000 time-travel thriller called Primer that joined El Mariachi and The Blair Witch Project in the modern DIY canon. Nine years later, he parlayed that film’s robust return on investment into the bizarre and beguiling Upstream Color, a nearly indescribable sci-fi thriller about—in no particular order—kidnapping, mind-control, parasites, Walden, late capitalism, relationship anxiety, pig farming, and parenthood. Whether or not Carruth’s mix of philosophy, body horror, and Malickian slipstream editing is truly, deeply cerebral or a commitment-free mindfuck is hard to know for sure, and yet if one definition of independence is a lack of compromise, Upstream Color qualifies and excels: nobody else has made a movie like this, and nobody else would try.
Wet Hot American Summer
David Wain, 2001
(USA Films)
OK, we’re cheating a bit here: Technically, WHAS’s original distributor, USA Films, is a subsidiary of Universal, and the recent Netflix resurrections of David Wain’s cult comedy indicate a mainstream approval that’s pretty far from the margins. But facts are facts: Wet Hot American Summer is the funniest movie of the 2000s and was financed basically out of thin air back in 2001, when its biggest stars were Janeane Garofalo and David Hyde Pierce and Siskel and Ebert went out of their way to slam its supposed amateur-hour ineptitude on national television. If there’s a legacy of independence here, it doesn’t have to do with money—OK, it does a bit, because the film looks and sounds as cheap as hell—but with an attitude. Every joke in this movie seems to be more for the people making it than for an audience. I defer to the wisdom of The Village Voice, which wrote that “this movie will be loathed, but it may be ahead of its time.” To say the least.