http://mppldev.org/books-movies-more/lists-and-suggestions/?category=movies+%26+tv+&list=2025+Movie+Bingo%3A+Independent+Films
List: 2025 Movie Bingo: Independent Films
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
"Strange things are afoot in Bad City. The Iranian ghost town, home to prostitutes, junkies, pimps, and other sordid souls, is a place that reeks of death and hopelessness, where a lonely vampire is stalking the town's most unsavory inhabitants. But when boy meets girls, an unusual love story begins to blossom...blood red. ... A joyful mash up of genre archetypes and iconography, its prolific influences span spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, horror films and the Iranian New Wave ... the first Iranian Vampire Western."-- Container.
Checking status…
Reservoir Dogs
They were the perfect strangers, assembled to pull off the perfect crime. Then their simple robbery explodes into a bloody ambush, and the ruthless killers realize one of them is a police informer. Now, they have to figure out which one is the snitch.
Checking status…
Ghost World
Two recent high school graduates wreak havoc on all who cross their path, until an oddball loner looking for Miss Right comes into their lives. These social misfits learn the hard way that life after high school gets even weirder than they thought it would.
Checking status…
Dear White People
A sharp and funny comedy about a group of African-American students as they navigate campus life and racial boundaries at a predominately white college. A sly, provocative satire about being a black face in a white place.
Checking status…
Poison
This film interweaves three tales that build toward a devastating climax. The first tale, Hero, tells a bizarre story of suburban patricide. Horror, the second tale, deals with a mad sex experiment that unleashes a disfiguring plague. Lastly is the tale, Homo, which explores the obsessive sexual relationship between two inmates.
Checking status…
Girlfriends
When her best friend and roommate abruptly moves out to get married, Susan, trying to become a gallery artist while making ends meet as a bar mitzvah photographer on Manhattan's Upper West Side, finds herself adrift in both life and love. Could a new job be the answer? What about a fling with a married, older rabbi? This 1970s New York time capsule from Claudia Weill captures the complexities and contradictions of women's lives and relationships with wry humor and refreshing frankness.
Checking status…
Serial Mom
Beverly Sutphin is a seemingly perfect homemaker who will stop at nothing to rid the neighborhood of anyone failing to live up to her moral code.
Checking status…
Hoop Dreams
This documentary follows two inner-city basketball phenoms' lives through high school as they chase their dreams of playing in the NBA.
Checking status…
Donnie Darko
An edgy, psychological thriller about a suburban teen coming face-to-face with his dark destiny. Donnie Darko is a delusional high-school student visited by a demonic rabbit with eerie visions of the past, and deadly predictions for the future.
Checking status…
Tangerine
It's Christmas Eve in Tinseltown and Sin-Dee is back on the block. Upon hearing that her pimp boyfriend hasn't been faithful during the 28 days she was locked up, the working girl and her best friend, Alexandra, embark on a mission to get to the bottom of the scandalous rumor. Their rip-roaring odyssey leads them through various subcultures of Los Angeles.
Checking status…
She's Gotta Have It
When it comes to love, Nola Darling has gotta problem: she's just gotta have "it." And she's having a hard time deciding who'll give "it" the best. Choosing between a romantic-but-possessive nice guy, a flashy-but-vain fashion model and a fast-riding but faster-talking bicyclist, Nola finds that lessons in love can be enlightening, heart-rending, but mostly, exasperating!
Checking status…
Blue Valentine
An honest, moving and uninhibited love story. The uncompromising portrait of Dean and Cindy, a young married couple who have grown apart, taking one night away from their daughter to try to save their relationship. Highlighted by provocative scenes alternately intimate and intense, the film captured audiences and critics alike.
Checking status…
Afterschool
Robert would rather surf the web watching videos than make friends at his prestigious boarding school. So when he's forced to take part in a campus activity, Robert naturally chooses a filmmaking class, which has the added attraction of Amy, his sort-of girlfriend. When they unintentionally videotape the accidental overdose of two popular girls, Robert becomes the least likely person imaginable to be assigned the task of creating a soothing memorial tribute.
Checking status…
Minding the Gap
Weaves a story of skateboarding, friendship, and fathers and sons into a coming-of-age journey of courageous vulnerability.
Checking status…
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Faced with an unintended pregnancy and a lack of local support, Autumn and her cousin Skylar embark across state lines to New York City on a fraught journey of friendship, bravery, and compassion.
Checking status…
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu = Portrait of a Lady on Fire
France, 1760. Marianne is commissioned to paint the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Because she is a reluctant bride-to-be, Marianne arrives under the guise of companionship, observing Héloïse by day and secretly painting her by firelight at night. As the two women orbit one another, intimacy and attraction grow.
Checking status…
Wanda
Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, the film takes up with a distant and soft-spoken woman, who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men, one being a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme.
Checking status…
Blood Simple
A jealous husband hires a detective to murder his wife and her lover.
Checking status…
Shadows
The story of an interracial romance and the obstacles it puts on family relationships. When appearing on Jean Shepherd's radio program Night People, Cassavetes mentioned the improvisation work he had done with his acting class, and asked for funding to film it. When listeners actually sent in money, he worked up a script based on the classwork, and with additional funding filmed his story of three siblings, two of whom can pass as white.
Checking status…
Stranger than Paradise
Eddie and Willie's inert lifestyle is suddenly intruded upon by Willie's Hungarian cousin. At first she's a drag, but the cousin has a few surprises for her American friends.
Checking status…
Inland Empire
When an actress falls in love with her co-star, she finds her life is becoming much like the film she is starring in, which is based on a Polish film that was never finished due to horrible tragedies.
Checking status…
Wendy and Lucy
Wendy is a down-on-her-luck girl who's hoping to turn things around for herself with a summer job in Alaska, but finds herself stranded with no money in a small Oregon town.
Checking status…
Man Push Cart
Every night while the city sleeps, Ahmad, a former rock star in his native Pakistan, drags his heavy cart along the streets of New York. Every morning, he sells coffee and donuts to a city he cannot call his own. One day the pattern of this harsh existence is broken by a glimmer of hope for a better life.
Checking status…
Sex, Lies, and Videotape
"Housewife Ann feels distant from her lawyer husband, John, who is sleeping with her sister, Cynthia. When John's old friend Graham comes to town, Ann is drawn to the soft-spoken outsider, eventually uncovering his startling private obsession: videotaping women as they confess their deepest desires"--Container.
Checking status…
You Can Count on Me
Sammy is a single mom living in a small Catskill town with her eight-year-old son. A lot happens all at once to Sammy as she, sort of, picks up with an old boyfriend, gets a new boss and her wayward brother finally shows up after months of no communication. A crisis of sorts ensues when the son meets his estranged father.
Checking status…
Primer
Everything you think you know about modern science is about to unravel in this critically acclaimed film about two young engineers and the consequences they face when they invent a machine that enables them to travel back in time.
Checking status…
Medicine for Melancholy
Two African American twenty-somethings have a one-night stand. And a night they barely remember becomes a day they will never forget. A tale of sex, race, bicycles and modern urban life. Deals with the challenge of being a minority in a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco.
Checking status…
Slacker
Richard Linklater's Slacker presents a day in the life of a subculture of marginal, eccentric, and overeducated citizens in and around the University of Texas; a prescient look at an emerging generation of aggressive nonparticipants.
Checking status…
Uncle Boonmee
A unique tale of a man embracing life's greatest mystery. Choosing to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside, Boonmee is visited by his dead wife as a ghost, and his lost son as a strange hairy beast with red glowing eyes. They've come to guide him to his final resting place, a cave where his first soul began. With a wry sense of humor and a humanist spirit, it's a magical tale of reincarnation, karma, and nature.
Checking status…
Metropolitan
When a group of young sophisticated high society friends in New York take in a new member with more humble origins, they begin to learn what life is like outside their sheltered world.
Checking status…
Winter's Bone
Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly sets out to track down her father who put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared. If she fails to find him, she and her family will be turned out into the Ozark woods. Challenging her outlaw kin's code of silence and risking her life, Ree hacks through the lies, evasions, and threats offered up by her relatives and begins to piece together the truth.
Checking status…