The Criminally Underseen Indie Masterpieces of 2018
These 2018 movies were diamonds in the rough. It's time to give them a deserved audience.

Low budgets and no-name actors do not a box-office success make. Indie releases are extremely tricky; a successful one involves the perfect confluence of unpredictable elements, from buzz out of a festival to money for marketing to good weather on opening weekend. As a result, the finest cinema can get lost in the din of Hollywood spectacles.
The following six films were some of the best released last year. Too few people saw them. They weren't underrated, per se; they were generally critically acclaimed, with some top critics hailing one or another as the best of 2018. Despite the accolades or attention received on the festival circuit, though, some of these films grossed as little as $20,000 at the box office. Below, we make a case for their essential viewing.
Madeline’s Madeline
'Madeline's Madeline'Credit: Oscilloscope
The bulk of the film unfolds as Madeline prepares for her theater group's performance. The director, Evangeline (Molly Parker), takes a special interest in Madeline, who she thinks displays prodigious talent. She casts Madeline as the star—of what? The show itself will be written during the process of rehearsal. (This was also true of most of the filmmaking process.) Through a months-long process of intimate and often humiliating theatrical exercises, Evangeline finds the cracks in Madeline's psyche. She mines them, along with Madeline's fraught relationship with her overprotective mother (Miranda July), for the performance—even as it becomes evident that the process is taking a significant emotional toll on Madeline. What began as a mentorship quickly turns vampiric as Evangeline exploits Madeline's story with disturbing fervor.
Madeline's Madeline is an adrenaline-fueled epic that seems to defy creative gravity. It's a meta-exploration of identity and appropriation. It's a feat of cinematic engineering. It left me reeling, with its discordant a cappella chorus and schizophrenic soundtrack still echoing in my ears—and a bitter aftertaste of the creative process.
The Rider
'The Rider'
Just as he coaxes the horse into a life it didn't choose, so must Brady accept a new life he didn't plan for. The Rider begins as Brady sustains a severe skull injury in a rodeo accident. He receives a strict edict from the doctor to never ride again. Director Chloe Zhao met Brady while filming another movie on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where he and his family live. Zhao vowed to make a film with him, but it wasn't until she learned of his injury that she knew she had a story.
The true events of docu-fiction hybrid seem conjured from a lesson in dramatic narrative: obstacle after obstacle is thrown at our hero, a quietly charismatic, soulful cowboy who feels like a specter of the Old West. He tenderly cares for his mentally-challenged sister and is devoted to his disabled childhood friend, who suffered extreme brain damage in a rodeo accident similar to Brady's own. Despite his hard-up circumstances, Brady exudes a natural grace. With horses, though, he truly comes alive. His connection to and love for the animals is his life's purpose.
The Rider is a story about a beloved livelihood that is taken away. It's dripping with empathy in every frame, lensed with a bit of Malickian magic by cinematographer Joshua James Richards. Against the backdrop of the great American prairie, this Native American cowboy must either accept his fate or die fighting it.
Leave No Trace
'Leave No Trace'
Leave No Trace is no exception to this rule. The film is teeming with compassion. Its setting is extreme, but the story, at its core, is simple: it's a coming-of-age tale about the bond between a father and daughter, which comes under threat when their circumstances change and the daughter begins to seek independence. Will (Ben Foster), an army veteran who suffers from PTSD, has been living off the grid in the forests of the Pacific Northwest with 13-year-old Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie). We meet them as they go about their daily routine with a nearly wordless fluency and intimacy: chopping wood, foraging for mushrooms, collecting rainwater, and playing chess to pass the time. As anything in her films, Granik resists a simple idyllic portrayal of this backwoods existence. It's harsh, damp, and physically demanding, and simmering under the surface is a deep sense of anxiety. Living on public land is illegal in the state of Oregon, and Will and Tom's way of life is precarious. Periodically, Will sounds the survivalist alarm; he conducts drills in which he and Tom must separate and hide from unpredictable dangers, chief among them park rangers. But Will can't inoculate Tom from tendrils of modern life forever. One day, a jogger spots Tom, prompting a raid of their camp. Father and daughter are brought in to Portland be interrogated by social services.
Tom insists she and her father have never been "homeless," and, thanks to Granik's even-handed approach to the material, that feels true. From what we've seen, Will isn't indoctrinating his daughter. In fact, he's educated her beyond public-school standards. Nor is Will intentionally depriving Tom of normalcy. He's doing what every good parent aims to do—protecting her and showing her love. It's just that he perceives the modern world as unhealthy and has, in effect, chosen to opt out. The film's central, heartbreaking conflict comes when Tom, as she is increasingly exposed to the "real world," begins to wonder whether it's really all that bad out there.
Leave No Trace is a thing of understated humanist beauty. It asks complex questions about modern life, freedom, and parental responsibility, but it does so implicitly, and without the trappings of didacticism. The nuance is baked into the story; the critique exists in situ. Seeing things as they unfold organically with the characters, in Granik's signature docu-realism style, takes us on a wrenching emotional journey in which their problems become ours to wrestle with. We watch Tom mature, and it dawns on her that "what's wrong with you isn't wrong with me," as she tells her father. Rather than rebel, she carefully weighs her options for independence, and even considers various compromises. But Will is allergic to civilization, and none can be had. Here, loving may have to come at the price of letting go.
November
'November'Credit: Oscilloscope
In one surreal scene, reminiscent of the opening of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, an empty horse and buggy carts a body. In another, supernatural servants called Kratts, made from animal skulls and rusty rakes and knives, threaten to kill their masters if they are not put to work. At the heart of it all is Liina (Rest Lest), an idealistic young farmer who yearns for a local boy's (Jorgen Liik) affection; alas, he is, in turn, captivated by the arrival of a German baroness (Jette Loona Hermanis), whose existence seems unmarked by hardship, despite the fact that she sleepwalks on the roof of her castle—often nearly plunging to her death.
The film is glued together with the stuff of moral fables; the characters are punished for greed, laziness, and insolence, among other mortal sins. But mostly, November is a spectacularly detailed, richly sewn tapestry of surreal cinematography (shot by Mart Taniel in black and white and infrared on a menagerie of different cameras, lenses, and formats, both film and digital). High-contrast lighting makes even the human townsfolk look like specters in a dark, hostile world where anything might happen—communion with dead relatives resting in saunas included. The luminous moon looms over every frame of November, each of which stands alone as a striking photograph from the otherworld.
Wildlife
'Wildlife'Credit: IFC Films
When Jerry leaves, Jeanette begins to unravel. The seeds of discontent were sown long ago, but Jerry's departure—experienced as an abandonment—tips her off the edge. All this is seen through the eyes of Joe, a watchful, introspective son who just wants his parents to be happy. Joe may not know what to make of Jeanette's erratic behavior, but to the audience, it's clear she's rebelling against her role as a housewife. She acts selfishly, prioritizing the intoxicating taste of independence rather than her responsibility as a good mother to Joe.
Dano, along with cinematographer Diego Garcia, gives the actors room to create nuance. They ruminate, process, and observe, often in silence or with little dialogue. This approach eschews melodrama in favor of the quiet stuff of small heartbreaks. Eventually, the fissures give way. In the film's final scene, a simple gesture has heartrending implications. It depicts a youngster who hasn't yet internalized one of life’s harsher truths: that sometimes broken things can’t, and shouldn't, be put back together.
We the Animals
'We the Animals'
A ten-year-old half-white, half-Puerto Rican boy growing up in rural upstate New York, Jonah is the youngest of three. His raucous older brothers, Manny (Isaiah Kristian) and Joel (Josiah Gabriel), exude all the hallmarks of bourgeoning masculinity; Jonah, meanwhile, is quiet, sensitive, artistic, and likely queer. We peer into his subjectivity through hand-drawn animations that flit, flash, rip, and explode across the screen with a fervor that Jonah is unable to express in his daily life. All around him, storms are brewing and subsiding. Jonah's parents (Raul Castillo and Sheila Vand) are hot-headed; one minute to the next, a loving family dinner can devolve into a scene of domestic abuse. His siblings taunt, exclude, and support him in equal measure. One day there's food on the table; the next, they're scrounging the neighborhood for scraps, like pack animals.
Zagar captures Jonah's volatile environment in expressionist, lyrical scenes crafted with the fabric of memory. The camera, often handheld, remains at a child's height, evoking a sense of unmoored discovery. Like the experience of childhood itself, scenes bleed into each other—a patchwork of a reality half-understood, but deeply felt for a lifetime to come.