Barton Fink
A New York playwright (John Turturro) moves to Los Angeles in 1941 to pursue a career in screenwriting. Commissioned to write a script for a wrestling movie, he finds himself with writer's block, increasingly distracted by his next door neighbor (John Goodman).

Before Sunrise
An American on vacation in Europe (Ethan Hawke) happens to meet a beautiful French woman (Julie Delpy), and the two spend a day and a night in Vienna, just walking around and enjoying each other's company.

Blood Simple
Joel and Ethan Coen's 1984 black comedy neo-noir stars Frances McDormand as an adulterous wife, Dan Hedaya as her husband, and M. Emmet Walsh as a detective who is hired by the husband to gather evidence of the infidelity and kill the two lovers.

Blue Velvet
After a college student (Kyle McLachlan) discovers a severed ear in a field, he teams with a high-school girl (Laura Dern) to find out how it got there. Shortly thereafter, they're drawn into the world of a local drug dealer (Dennis Hopper).

Bowling for Columbine
This documentary from Michael Moore (Roger & Me) examines gun culture in the United States.

Boys Don't Cry
Kimberly Peirce's directorial debut tells the gut-wrenching true story of Teena Brandon, a Midwestern female who disguised herself as a man. Relocating to Falls City, Nebraska, from Lincoln, she managed to convince her newfound group of friends that she was Brandon Teena. The film treats these events with a painful objectivism, as Brandon's relationships with her friends John, Tom, Kate, Candace, and Lana unfold toward their inevitably horrific conclusion. A shining example of independent filmmaking at its most impassioned.

Chasing Amy
When handsome young comic book creator Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck) meets cute young comic book creator Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams), romance seems preordained. But Holden is soon confronted with Alyssa's complex sexual history, as well as his friend and colleague Banky's (Jason Lee) conflicted and enraged response to the affair. Despite the seriousness of the issues, director Kevin Smith keeps the laughs coming, even as Holden goes through hell and grows up.

Clerks
A day in the life of Dante's hell as a 22-year-old college dropout (Brian O'Halloran) is forced to work on his day off at his lame job as a convenience store manager in New Jersey. Dante's shift includes visits from his best friend Randall, a fellow slacker who runs the video store next door, his girlfriend (Marilyn Ghigliotti), odd customers, and the constant loitering out front of two goofy drug dealers, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith).

The Daytrippers
When a content housewife discovers a love letter addressed to her husband, she impetuously piles the family into the station wagon to confront her husband directly, embarking on a journey of discovery into affairs of the heart.

Dazed and Confused
This flick is based on Richard Linklater's own recollections of the last day of high school and the party-filled night that follows in a small town in Texas in 1976. There's little in the way of a plot, but the sub-stories include Mitch Kramer and his fellow incoming freshmen trying to avoid hazings at the hands of graduating seniors and Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London), the school's star quarterback, coping with his coach wanting him to sign a pledge that states he won't smoke or drink.

Dead Man
An accountant named William Blake (Johnny Depp) travels to the Old West town of Machine from his Cleveland home after he's promised a job. But when he gets there, the job is gone, and to make matters worse, he's soon shot by a jealous husband. Slowly dying from the gunshot wound, Blake meets a Native American man who shepherds him through the last hours of his life.

Do the Right Thing
Set in a mostly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., the film's action takes place during one long, sweltering summer day. The narrative, shifting between intermingled story lines and the characters that inhabit them, revolves around the daily life of this urban landscape and the undercurrents of race, resentment, and rage that boil beneath the surface.

Down by Law
The second film from indie director Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man, Night on Earth, Mystery Train) stars Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni, and John Lurie as three men stranded in a Louisiana jail. With his typically deadpan style, Jarmusch follows his trio of bayou weirdos as they bust out of prison and go looking for a good breakfast.

Drugstore Cowboy
DRUGSTORE COWBOY was one of a group of films that led to the explosion of American independent cinema. Director Gus Van Sant generally maintains his highly stylized vision, regardless of a film's budget. His later films continue to illustrate the dreamlike moments contained in highly disturbing situations.

The film captures a slice of Americana through the back door. Bob (Matt Dillon) is an energetic junkie who leads his wife (Kelly Lynch) and another couple on a reckless spree of drugstore robberies, for drugs. When he has a brush with death, Bob realizes he must leave both his addiction and his wife if he wants to survive. Van Sant's lush photography gives us a glimpse into these lives, lending immortality to people on the fringes of society. DRUGSTORE COWBOY is a classic film that launched the career of one of the most important American directors working today.

Eraserhead
David Lynch's surreal first movie is hard to summarize, but it focuses on Henry Spencer, who marries and moves in with his pregnant girlfriend, Mary. Their child is a deformed, reptile-like creature, and Mary soon moves out in horror. Henry begins to fall for his neighbor.

Far From Heaven
Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid play a married couple in Connecticut in 1957 whose relationship becomes strained when he realizes that he's in love with another man. Moore's character looks to her gardener (Dennis Haysbert) for support, but befriending an African-American man causes tension in her conservative community.

Flirt
Hal Hartley's cinematic experiment, FLIRT, presents a film shot in three parts at three different locations: New York, Berlin, and Tokyo. Each story contains the same basic elements--a love triangle, a phone call, a crisis, and a shooting--but the specifics change with each city and situation. In New York, a noncommittal man (William Sage) contemplates a future with the woman (Parker Posey) he's currently involved with; in Berlin, a gay man (Dwight Ewell) wavers between two lovers; and in Tokyo, a female flirt (Miho Nikaido) ponders life with her American boyfriend (Hartley himself). By taking one plot (and essentially the same script) and transposing it to three sets of characters and locales, Hartley creates an intriguing (and at times self-mocking) trilogy that questions the nature of commitment.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Forest Whitaker plays the title character, a skilled and accomplished contract killer who has isolated himself from society by taking refuge in a shack atop an inner city rooftop. He works for Louie (John Tormey), a middle ranking member of the local crime syndicate, whom he communicates with via carrier pigeon.

Ghost World
Based on the serialized comic book tale by Daniel Clowes, the film is based on two ultra-hip friends (Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson) who spend their summer after high school together contemplating the future. As Enid and Becky talk snobbishly and cynically about the world ahead of them, they're being watched, unbeknownst to them, by another person.

Harold and Maude
Harold (Bud Cort) is a depressed 20-year-old with a penchant for faking his own death and hanging out at funerals. When he meets 80-year-old Maude, a woman who shares his fascination with death but not his gloomy nature, an odd friendship is formed.

High Art
Syd (Radha Mitchell) works for an art magazine in New York. When she meets a formerly famous photographer named Lucy (Ally Sheedy), Syd is enthralled by both Lucy and her photos. The two women begin a troubled relationship, which is fraught with drama in the form of Lucy's girlfriend, Greta (Patricia Clarkson), and heroin addiction.

In the Company of Men
In writer-director Neil LaBute's debut feature film, a pair of thirtysomething white-collar businessmen, embittered by their shallow lives and bad experiences with women, target and romance a beautiful deaf secretary (Stacy Edwards) solely for the purpose of dumping her and thus gaining revenge on her sex. While one of the junior execs, Chad (Aaron Eckhart), is relentlessly cold-blooded and cruel, his partner, Howard (Matt Malloy), proves to be a spineless tagalong. When their manipulative game ends, one of them is in for a shocking surprise.

Touted as "the most controversial film of the year" upon its release in 1997, this articulate black comedy sparked a roiling storm of praise and loathing from critics and audiences alike. Eckhart, a college friend of LaBute's, became the primary lightning rod for these passionate, widely varying responses, winning an Independent Spirit Award for his performance while also fending off occasional verbal abuse from angry women mistaking him for the reptilian character he plays. The film unapologetically depicts appalling behavior but never condones Chad and Howard's actions, making it one of the most intriguing and memorable movies of the late 1990s.

Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Set in London's East End, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels follows the son of a bartender, who enlists his friends to help him steal money to cover a half-million-pound debt incurred during a rigged poker game.

Magnolia
Paul Thomas Anderson's epic drama comprises a series of interweaving stories, all taking place in Los Angeles, some at the same time. Its characters include a dying television game-show producer (Jason Robards); his son, a sex guru (Tom Cruise); a browbeating father who berates his son; a drunken man who used to be a child star of game shows (William H. Macy); a well-meaning cop (John C. Reilly); and more.

Mallrats
When a couple of well-meaning slackers, T.S. (Jeremy London) and Brodie (Jason Lee), lose their girlfriends, they set about trying to reclaim their pride (and their ladies) in the most obvious of places — the mall. Once there, the pair push the limits of decency and mall etiquette, encountering an array of mall denizens, including Jay and Silent Bob from Clerks and legendary comic book creator Stan Lee. A surprising number of misadventures ensue, bringing the boys the possibility of regaining their lady loves.

Memento
An insurance investigator (Guy Pearce) loses his short-term memory when he sustains a head injury during his wife's murder. He can now remember things only through notes, photographs, or writing them on his body. As he tries to track down his wife's killer despite his handicap, the movie's story moves backward in time to retrace his steps with him.

Mulholland Drive
Originally a pilot for a TV series that never got picked up, the story focuses on an amnesiac woman abandoned on Mulholland Drive after a car accident. She stumbles into the apartment of a wannabe actress, who helps her piece her life together.

My Own Private Idaho
In My Own Private Idaho, Mike (River Phoenix) is a narcoleptic hustler who meets the rebellious son of the mayor of Portland (Keanu Reeves) and together they embark on a search to find Mike's mother that takes them halfway around the world.

Mystery Train
Three stories intertwine in this musing on what it means to be an outsider in the United States. Two Elvis-obsessed Japanese tourists visit Memphis to pay homage to their idol, a broken-down Italian woman gains new hope when the ghost of the King inspires her, and a down-and-out tough struggles to find a reason to live.

Night on Earth
Comprising five vignettes, this Jim Jarmusch film begins in Los Angeles and follows the overnight travails of cabbies — and their passengers — in New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki.

Orlando
A man is commanded never to age by Queen Elizabeth and surprisingly, he doesn't. Even stranger, he changes genders while traveling through 400 years of British history.

Pi
In an effort to unlock the patterns of the universe, an introverted mathematician uses a complex computer program to find patterns in nature, and, hopefully, the stock market. He soon learns that both a group of Cabalistic Hasidim and the State Department want to know more about his work. But has he really found the key, or is he chasing something that doesn't exist?

The Piano
In The Piano, a mute woman (Holly Hunter) is heartbroken when her new husband sells her prized piano to a neighbor (Harvey Keitel). But the man offers to give it back if she teaches him how to play.

The Player
The Player is the satirical story of Hollywood junior executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robins), who is concerned both about losing his studio job to another man and the death threats he's been getting lately.

Punch-Drunk Love
Adam Sandler plays Barry Egan, the down-on-his-luck owner of a small business and brother of seven sisters. Because of abuse he has suffered, he hasn't been able to fall in love and has remained alone. After he resorts to a phone-sex line for companionship, he's blackmailed when a woman steals his credit card number. His luck changes, however, when he finds a loophole that allows him to earn 1 million free frequent-flyer miles by purchasing $3,000 of pudding. A mysterious woman (Emily Watson) and a harmonium enter his life, and romance blossoms.

Raising Arizona
A policewoman (Holly Hunter) falls for a convenience-store robber (Nicolas Cage) while she's taking his mug shot, and after he's released from prison, they get married. Both are disappointed, however, to learn that they can't have children. When they read a report in a local paper about a furniture-store owner who's had quintuplets, the two would-be parents hatch a scheme to kidnap one of the newborns.

Requiem for a Dream
Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn gets an all-too-rare starring role as a lonely shut-in drifting further away from reality as she obsesses over her dream of appearing on a TV game show. Jared Leto plays her son, a strung-out heroin addict who's looking to make the big drug deal that will lift him and his mother up from the depths. Jennifer Connelly also stars as Leto's junkie girlfriend.

Reservoir Dogs
Quentin Tarantino's legendary directing debut tells the story of six strangers — brought together by a crime boss and given code names like Mr. Pink and Mr. Orange — who attempt a robbery with disastrous results.

Rushmore
Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman compete mano a mano for the affections of Olivia Williams in director Wes Anderson's coming-of-age comedy Rushmore. Schwartzman plays Max Fischer, an ambitious yet strangely unsuccessful student in danger of flunking out of school. Murray is Mr. Blume, a businessman and alumnus of Max's school who is suffering through a midlife crisis. When they meet a young, attractive teacher (Williams), they both develop a dangerous crush.

Secrets & Lies
In Secrets & Lies, Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a young black optometrist who was raised by an adoptive family. When her mother dies, Hortense learns that her real mother was white and decides to seek her out; their meeting sets off fireworks in the white woman's dysfunctional family.

Slacker
Richard Linklater's debut examines the lives of "slackers" — bohemian 20-somethings hanging around a college town and talking about their existential angst. There's no real story, really, just a series of interwoven vignettes and monologues.

Sling Blade
After murdering his mother, Karl Childers (Billy Bob Thornton) does a 25-year stint in a mental hospital. When he's released, Karl meets a young boy whose friendship helps him ease back into society.

The Straight Story
Inspired by a New York Times article, this is a genial road movie about two estranged brothers, Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), a 73-year-old widower in declining health, and his brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) who lives in Wisconsin. When Lyle has a stroke, Alvin determines to visit his ailing brother. His only means of transportation: a John Deere tractor, which he rides all the way to Wisconsin.

The Sweet Hereafter
A rural Canadian town is racked by grief after 14 children are killed in a school-bus accident. A lawyer (Ian Holmes) arrives on the scene, looking to file a class-action suit on behalf of the grieving parents. During his interviews with the townspeople, he uncovers the town's secrets and unspoken dramas.

Trainspotting
Based on the novel by Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting is a pitch black comedy about a group of young Scottish drug addicts whose lives are completely immersed in getting, using, or quitting heroin.

The Virgin Suicides
Based on the 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES tells the dreamlike tale of the Lisbons, a family living in a sheltered 1970s suburbia. When Cecilia (Hannah Hall), the youngest of the five teenage Lisbon daughters, inexplicably commits suicide, the rest of the family--Mr. Lisbon (James Woods), an awkward high school math teacher; Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner), a stern, humorless housewife; and the four remaining sisters: Lux (Kirsten Dunst), Bonnie (Chelse Swain), Mary (A.J. Cook), and Therese (Leslie Hayman)--recedes into a morbid cloud of repression and denial. As the girls are forced to retreat from everyday life by their conservative mother, they become the subject of fascination for a group of neighborhood boys, who narrate the story and hope to rescue the girls from their listless confinement.

The first feature by director-screenwriter Sofia Coppola (Francis Ford Coppola's daughter), THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is a mesmerizingly atmospheric film that perfectly captures both the moody tone of the book and the light-saturated feel of the 1970s. Dunst gives a standout performance as the promiscuous Lux, who becomes the sole obsession of high school ladies' man Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett). The movie also includes cameos by Danny DeVito and Scott Glenn. In addition to songs by Heart and Todd Rundgren, the film features an evocative score by the French duo Air.

Welcome to the Dollhouse
Heather Matarazzo plays Dawn, a painfully awkward 12-year-old girl suffering both at school, where she's mocked and despised by her peers, and at home, where her parents ignore her and favor her two siblings, perky Missy and studious Mark. Thuggish schoolboy Brandon's threat to rape her is just another in a long line of humiliations for Dawn in this harsh, caustic, darkly funny portrait of adolescence.

Whale Rider
Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes), an 11-year-old girl in a patriarchal New Zealand tribe, believes she is destined to be the new chief. But her grandfather Koro (Rawiri Paratene) is bound by tradition to pick a male leader. Pai sets out to prove herself worthy of the post.

A Woman Under the Influence
John Cassavetes's A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE is an emotionally devastating drama that charts the mental disintegration of a California housewife. Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) has no emotional or creative outlets. Instead, she pours all her energy into her family, spending her days waiting for her husband Nick (Cassavetes regular and COLUMBO star Peter Falk) to arrive home from work, and anxiously awaiting her children's return from school. This dependence causes Mabel to suffer a nervous breakdown, forcing her to spend time in a mental hospital. Meanwhile, Nick struggles mightily to keep his family together. When Mabel returns six months later, dazed and shaken, a "welcome home" party threatens to trigger another collapse.

As the confused, overwhelmed, and hypersensitive Mabel, Rowlands delivers one of the screen's most excruciatingly honest performances. This can directly be attributed to Rowlands's real-life husband Cassavetes, whose insistence on getting to the inner core of his characters' emotional states defined him as an artist. Falk portrays Nick with a harsh yet delicate pathos that is also honest and heartbreaking. A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE is an awe-inspiring work of art from a maverick American director.

You Can Count on Me
Single mother Sammy (Laura Linney) has remained true to her small town roots, while younger brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo) is a self-destructive vagabond. Terry's prolonged visit prompts Sammy to break out of her suburban shell, as it affords Terry the chance to experience responsible adulthood. Their sibling bond is put to the test when Sammy rushes into an affair with her married boss (Matthew Broderick) and Terry must assume the father-figure role for his nephew (Rory Culkin).