August is nearly over, and the summer movie season limps, gasping, across yet another annual finish line. This marks the end of a yearly period – from mid-May until the week before Labor Day – that Hollywood treats us to an endless fusillade of teen-friendly, effects-driven, PG-13-rated action spectaculars that, by August, have left most audiences gasping for air. This summer saw the release of three (3) big-budget comic book movies, an enormous super-sequel featuring robot dinosaurs, an Americanized pop remake of a 1954 Japanese monster flick, a wonderfully goofy film about talking apes taking over the world, a bonkers film wherein a woman evolves into a supercomputer with the help of illegal drugs, an effects bonanza starring four teenage mutant The Hulks, and a dumb movie for little girls about a friendly demoness.
Related: The 10 Best (and 10 Worst) Summer Blockbusters of 2014
And while the glut of the summer season is grabbing all the trade papers’ headlines, and raking in billions of dollars, and setting the internet ablaze, the world of independent and limited-release films has been – as is their wont – quietly accumulating all the praise. Small-release films are rarely beholden to the season in which they come out. They are released whenever they can grab whatever small number of screens they manage to, and can often quietly explode in the background, behind all of the more obvious explosions of typical summer fare.
The Summer of 2014 saw the release of some rather notable indie, foreign, and limited-release features, some of which will likely prove to be some of the best films of the year. You likely all saw Guardians of the Galaxy (current financial tally: over $502 million), but how many of these awesome, thoughtful, fun, provocative, wonderful indie flicks did you see?
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly Trolling articles here on Crave, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
The Ten Best Indie Films of Summer 2014
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Ida (May 2nd)
Pawl Pawlowski's quiet Polish drama does something resounding and daring, and it was something that critics the world over responded excitedly to: it dares to be quiet. Released on the same day as The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Ida was the film critics implored you to see instead. The film is about a young orphaned woman named Anna, preparing to take her vows and enter a convent, who is confronted by a long-lost aunt. The aunt reveals that Anna's real name is Ida, and that her birth parents were Jewish victims of Nazi violence. I don't know about you, but that sounds like high drama to me. Ida is one of the most celebrated films of the year.
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The Dance of Reality (May 23rd)
Cult icon Alejandro Jodorowsky returned to filmmaking after a 22 year hiatus with this surreal, half-remembered meditation on his own childhood. Jodorowsky led a fascinating life in a small town in Chile, and his father (played by Jodorowsky's own son Brontis) was a complex tyrant. Jodorowsky appears to give advice to his younger self. The Dance of Reality is part magical realism, part psychological realism, and part surrealism. It is arty, oblique, ambitious, and unerringly grand.
Watch CraveOnline's exclusive video interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky.
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We Are the Best! (May 30th)
There are many movies aimed at teenage girls these days, but they all tend to cater to immature, death-twinged romantic angst, or emotional release through acts of revolutionary violence in a future dystopia. How refreshing, then, to have Lukas Moodysson's We Are the Best!, a film about a trio of Jr. High-aged girls who behave like, well, actual 13-year-olds. The three girls at the center of this wonderfully warm film are bratty, full of themselves, and are convinced they have just formed the best band in the world, despite not having a name, and knowing only one song. Sweet, punky, puckish, and sincere, We Are the Best! is one of the best films of 2014.
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Chef (May 30th)
Although it's impossible to read this film as anything other than a treatise on director Jon Favreau's own career, Chef is still a sweet little snack that forces me to crack out tired critic's words like “heartwarming” and “feelgood.” Favreau plays a chef who has, for many years, been forced to make mandated bland food like Iron Man 2... I mean like chocolate lava cake. When he starts up his own food truck, he finds bliss. The end. A filmmaker returns to his indie roots, and finds happiness. Not complex, not deep, but Chef will make you feel really, really good. Also hungry.
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The Signal (June 13th)
Although William Eubank's little-seen sci-fi curio The Signal is riddled with narrative problems, it's difficult not to be wowed by the sheer potential on display. Eubank has made a low-budget genre film with that rarest of qualities: an original voice. It's thrilling to see this tale of abducted teens, bizarre robot limbs, and mysterious government conspiracies just because you won't be able to predict what happens next. It's atmospheric, visually interesting, and – for sci-fi fans longing for more – finally unique.
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All Cheerleaders Die (June 13th)
Although Lucky McKee's latest horror film – which he co-directed with Chris Sivertson – is not as good as his 2011 masterpiece The Woman, All Cheerleaders Die is still a wickedly lurid feminist fantasy resting comfortably somewhere between grindhouse exploitation and spirited spoof. When a team of cheerleaders dies in a car wreck, a jealous lesbian Goth resurrects them using black magic. Now, of course, the cheerleaders are all evil succubi who drain men of their life force. Self-aware, fun, silly, and sexy, All Cheerleaders Die is an enjoyable goof.
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Borgman (June 20th)
Alex Van Warmerdam's Borgman doesn't make sense... but it kind of does. This Dutch obscurity plays out like a genuine nightmare, making leaps of dream logic that only the irrational part of your brain can understand. When the titular mysterious drifter (who is seen living in underground caves) insinuates himself into the remote home of a bourgeois family, he begins an unknowable plot to somehow upset the family order, and perhaps kill them all. We see unexplained surgeries, creepy trips to remote oubliettes, and other images that seem scary, although it's hard to explain why. Borgman is one of the most thoughtful and easily one of the scariest films of the year.
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Life Itself (July 4th)
No critic was able to review Life Itself, Steve James' documentary about Roger Ebert, objectively. Ebert's influence on just about every working film critic is far-reaching and profound, and critics attending screening of Life Itself not to watch a movie and review it, but to pay mental homage to one of the central Elder Statesmen of our craft. Luckily, the film is also excellent, giving us a warts-and-all view of Ebert's illness, his early alcoholism, his often gigantic ego, his tempestuous relationship with Gene Siskel, and his hard-earned and self-built reputation as a newspaper man. I'm a critic, and Life Itself just made me miss Ebert all the more. I'm not sure if I'll ever really get over losing him. And I never even met him.
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Snowpiercer (July 11th)
Although the concept is ridiculous on paper, Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer is nonetheless a stirring and original dystopian class examination that is clearly paying homage to filmmakers like Terry Gilliam. In the summer season of clean and slick actioners, it's nice to have a sci-fi film that is odd and grimy. In the distant future, the world has been turned to an arctic wasteland. Humanity's only survivors live on an enormous train that is constantly circling the globe. The poor live in the back, and the rich live up front. Chris Evans plays the poor revolutionary who fights his way to the engine, only to discover the truly awful things that happen up there. Crazy, weird, and wicked fun, Snowpiercer is a cult film in the making.
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Boyhood (July 18th)
A rapt recollection of childhood, growing up, and change, Richard Linklater's Boyhood is one of the best – if not the best – film of the year. Famously filmed over the course of 12 years using the same actors, we get genuinely from Boyhood what so many film try to fake: the bigness of ordinary life. We see someone actually growing up, and, along the way, get to ponder both the small and the big moments that made him, and, by extension, the ones that made us. This is a movie about a child who could have turned out bad, but who managed to live through alcoholic stepfathers, flighty parents, bad relationships, and some occasional good times to be a whole, tentative adult. Boyhood was universally praised on its release, and proved to be one of the highest rated films of the year. For once, I agree with the hype.
