Independent Spirit Awards Best Film winners ranked

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ well-played yet pandering and thoroughly predictable road trip romp was the rare Sundance comedy hit to generate box office commensurate with its Park City hype. Its mildly quirky brand of humor would be right at home on a random episode of “Modern Family," while its let-your-freak-flag-fly message is as shopworn as its profane grandpa character (a typical Alan Arkin performance that robbed Eddie Murphy of a Best Supporting Oscar for “Dreamgirls”). The Spirit voters went with this over Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth."

Michel Hazanavicius’ ahistorical piffle is a breezy tribute to the silent film era designed to delight people who know little to nothing about the subject — a group that includes a majority of people who currently work in the film industry and vote for these accursed awards. As predicted at the time by folks with a modicum of taste, this win has aged poorly when you consider that Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” and Alexander Payne’s grooved pitch to the middlebrow throng, “The Descendants,” were right there to stave off the shame of honoring the feature-length equivalent of “The Brady Bunch” episode in which they shot a silent movie.

Lee Daniels’ adaptation of the book that’s right there in the title bashes you over the head with unremitting cruelty exactly like a television set dropped from three stories onto a young woman and her Down syndrome-afflicted baby named Mongo. This actually happens in "Precious." Desperate people who are devoid of hope and caught in an endless cycle of abuse do horrible things to their loved ones, but until Precious escapes her wretched circumstances, the outrageous violence and misery of Daniels’ film feel like an unholy homage to the films of John Waters and Abel Ferrara. And when the film does let in a ray of sunshine, it’s so bright that it feels like a goof.

The feigned one-take gimmick of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Birdman” dazzled audiences with its look-ma-no-cuts-in-theory audacity, and it’s carried off with such technical élan that, at first, you believe you’ve witnessed something profoundly cinematic. But this tale of a washed-up movie star seeking artistic redemption on Broadway can’t decide if its protagonist is worthy of ridicule or redemption, which leaves it feeling empty and mean-spirited.

Dance the despair away! David O. Russell’s adaptation of Matthew Quick’s novel about fractured people kinda-sorta fixing each other is well intentioned and brilliantly acted by the quartet of Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jacki Weaver and Robert De Niro, but the dance competition is such a hoary dramatic device that it drains the film of its early spontaneity. “Bernie," “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and freakin’ “Moonrise Kingdom” (one of the best films of this decade) were all far more deserving.

Nicolas Cage blew everyone away with his maniacally committed portrayal of an emotionally destroyed man drinking himself to death in the gambling mecca, but in light of the many unhinged performances that followed it, the bizarre outbursts that once felt wincingly desperate (“I’m a prickly pear!”) now come off as a little shticky. The film itself would be a completely unrewarding wallow were it not for Elisabeth Shue’s fierce turn as the prostitute who finds a kindred damaged spirit in Cage’s doomed alcoholic.

As far as uplifting, based-on-a-true-story schoolroom dramas go, you can’t do much better than Ramón Menéndez’s film about East L.A. math teacher Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos). It’s rigorously formulaic, but it never pretends to be anything other than “'Rocky' of the classroom” (an actual pull-quote from the time). Indeed, Olmos and his young cast (including Lou Diamond Phillips) make studying to take the AP calculus exam feel as stimulating as training for a heavyweight fight. There’s nothing wrong with convention when it's coupled with conviction.

The physical and mental torments of a career in the ballet are grist for psychological and body horror in the hands of Darren Aronofsky. Thematically, this is the most straightforward work of Aronofsky’s career, which renders it something of a single-serving film. There’s nothing more to pick over and little to relish, save for the climactic “Swan Lake” performance. The artist’s struggle with perfectionism and purity of expression got a far more frightening and invigorating going over in Aronofsky’s gonzo masterpiece “mother!”

There isn’t a more masterful conjurer of moods working today than Sofia Coppola, and she strikes a mystifying balance of ennui and romantic longing in this drift through the unsettled lives of two American strangers (Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray) stuck for a brief time in the inexplicableness of modern Tokyo. Years ago (e.g. in Ron Howard’s “Gung Ho"), this cultural displacement would’ve been played for broad, what’s-wrong-with-these-people laughs; here, it’s a rich cornucopia of new experiences that shakes these new friends/quasi-lovers out of their melancholic stupor. The film feels ephemeral when you’re watching it, but, man, does it ever linger.

This first-rate newsroom drama about The Boston Globe’s uncovering of the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal is as absorbing as it is infuriating. Tom McCarthy’s unfussy visual approach allows his dream-team ensemble cast (Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Brian d’Arcy James, Liev Schreiber and John Slattery) to shine. It’s the kind of compelling, thought-provoking adult drama that studios used to make (and is now considered “peak television”).

Martha Coolidge’s adaptation of Calder Willingham’s autobiographical novel is an unusually nuanced (particularly for 1991, but even now) drama about blossoming female sexuality wreaking havoc in the house of a well-off family in the repressed South during the Great Depression. Laura Dern followed up her gloriously overheated turn in David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” with this more modulated portrayal of an orphaned teenager struggling with her surging desires. As in Lynch’s film, Dern gets to set off thespian fireworks with her mother, Diane Ladd.

After striking out commercially with his studio-backed labor of love, “The Fountain," Darren Aronofsky stripped it all down and delivered his spare cinematic version of “Nebraska” (Springsteen, not Payne). Mickey Rourke gives his best lead performance since “Johnny Handsome” as a regretful, beaten-down pro wrestler desperate for redemption and/or forgiveness. This being an Aronofsky film, you’re prepared for the worst result, but he gives his gnarled grappler a lovely moment of grace before cutting to black.

The first (and still best) Jason Reitman/Diablo Cody collaboration comes on strong with the quirk, but once you acclimate to Cody’s stylized dialogue you’re rewarded with a funny and deeply moving teen pregnancy comedy. Ellen Page followed up her breakthrough performance in “Hard Candy” with an iconic portrayal of an eccentric teenage girl who appears to have lucked into an ideal married couple for her unborn child. Cody should write a spinoff wherein Jason Bateman’s try-hard geek has become a bitter, MRA Twitter troll.

Bill Condon’s tremendously moving portrait of “Frankenstein”/”Bride of Frankenstein” director James Whale showcases two stellar performances from Ian McKellen and Brendan Fraser as, respectively, Whale and his handsome young gardener (whom the gay filmmaker would like to sketch). McKellen flirts with his straight employee but given his age and increasingly infirmed state, these advances are harmless. Fraser does agree to pose for Whale’s sketches, which forms the basis for an unusual friendship between the two men. The tragedy of Whale’s never-fully realized talent hangs over the film, leaving us with a frustrating “what if?”

Alexander Payne shed the mocking tone of his first non-satire, “About Schmidt," with this painfully funny ode to oenophilia. Paul Giamatti is magnificent as a middle-aged divorcee whose only source of happiness in this world is the vino, which he liberally imbibes. It’s a lovely character study that delves into the lives of its supporting characters; they’re all in wheel-spinning situations, and they’re at that age where getting any kind of traction seems less and less likely. Giamatti’s soliloquy on the delicate majesty of pinot noir is as fine a piece of writing as anyone has put to paper this decade.

Robert Duvall is electric as a Pentecostal preacher on the run from the law after he murders the youth minister sleeping with his scheming wife. The film was a long-gestating labor of love for Duvall, and it’s a blessing that he stuck with it. There hasn’t been a more sincerely ecstatic portrayal of true religious belief — seriously, there’s not a pandering or snide bone in its body — in American film history. 

Donald E. Westlake pours us three thick fingers of Jim Thompson straight, no chaser, and it goes down rough as hell. John Cusack stars as a dumb, down-on-his-luck schemer who lives in the shadow/fear of his ice-cold conwoman mother (a god-level Anjelica Huston). Cusack is stupid in love with a deadly sexy operator (Annette Bening), who’s also way more talented at the grift than he is. Stephen Frears doesn’t pull his punches in depicting this vicious, sleazy world; these are savage folks who spare no one — not even kin.

American audiences were finally ready to confront the brutal, battlefield reality of the Vietnam War in 1986, and Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” showed it all: torture, fraggings, the murder of innocent civilians, Charlie Sheen droning on about Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger fighting for the “possession of my soul." It’s heavy-handed as hell, but a heavy hand was required to drive home to Reagan-era moviegoers the foolishness of going to war with an enemy we do not understand (on its territory). People left the theater shook up and then reverted to their bloodthirsty, short-sighted worst 15 years later.

Robert Altman followed up his comeback critical/commercial success — to call it a return to form, as many did, was to admit to having skipped 1990’s “Vincent & Theo” — with this ambitious, Los Angeles-set interweaving of nine Raymond Carver short stories (and one poem). It was Altman’s last big grasp for a massive multicharacter epic on the order of “Nashville," and it’s a mostly exhilarating examination of unsettled, unhappy and sometimes cruel people. It’s cynical without being misanthropic; Altman is genuinely fascinated by these fouled-up folks and seems sympathetic to their plight even though he believes they — and we — are all utterly doomed.

Todd Haynes gets under the hood of Douglas Sirk’s “All That Heaven Allows” and soups up the fine-tuned melodramatic engine with an explicit acknowledgment of homosexuality that would’ve driven moviegoers screaming from theaters in the 1950s. It’s a brilliant reconsideration of a long-disrespected genre that never once feels like a shallow exercise in subversion or nostalgia. These characters live in a gilded domestic cage, restrained from acting on their hearts’ desires for fear of renouncing the facile greatness of their American lives.

Alexander Payne in straight-up satire mode is still the best Alexander Payne. The filmmaker and his frequent co-writer Jim Taylor brought Tom Perrotta’s scathingly funny novel to vitriolic life, presenting an Omaha, Nebraska, high school as a scorched earth political battleground. It’s a sordid contest of pettiness, jealousy and naked ambition that drags all of its combatants — Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein and Jessica Campbell — into the muck. In other words, it’s aged beautifully.

A group of Northern California high school kids discovers one of their friends has murdered his girlfriend. Their benumbed reaction to the crime reflects their general aimlessness; nothing much matters aside from hanging out, getting drunk/stoned and hooking up. Working from an unflinching screenplay by Neal Jimenez, Tim Hunter gets hauntingly grounded performances from Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye and Daniel Roebuck and pulls off the miracle of not letting Crispin Glover and Dennis Hopper turn their scenes into the World Series of Weird. “River’s Edge” may feel Lynchian at times (his frequent DP Frederick Elmes shot it), but it never drifts into the surreal. This is all very real. That’s why it’s so damned unsettling.

How do you follow up one of the best films of the decade? If you're Barry Jenkins, make one almost as transcendent! This adaptation of James Baldwin's 1974 novel is a crushing tale of a young man accused by corrupt/racist law enforcement of a crime he didn't commit. Jenkins imbues the film with a resilient sense of hope in the face of inevitable injustice; his characters cannot believe this is happening to them, and, yet, of course it is. When it all falls apart, you feel absolutely gutted. And yet the characters will endure. The task left to us: Fight for them and people like them.

Steve McQueen’s unsparingly bleak pre-Civil War drama about a free African-American Northerner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) kidnapped and sold into slavery landed as the non-grindhouse complement to Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained," and its harrowing depiction of America’s original sin was undeniable to Spirit and Oscar voters. It’s a film that should be screened in every classroom in the United States.

Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s visually and aurally dazzling meditation on identity centers on the rough upbringing of a gay black child fending for himself in a world that largely abhors who he is. The film carries the charge of discovery and leaves us feeling gutted, as we realize there are thousands of Chirons out there trying to survive childhood, and in doing so often make the decision to be someone else to get by.

1989 was a watershed year for American independent cinema, as evidenced by the nominated films that didn’t win the Best Film that year: Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy," Nancy Savoca’s “True Love” and Jim Jarmusch’s “Mystery Train." But Steven Soderbergh’s debut feature, “sex, lies and videotape," was an indie phenomenon that had already won the Sundance Audience Award and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or prior to triumphing at the Spirit Awards. The only thing that’s aged about Soderbergh’s seriocomic study of sexual politics and dysfunction is the hardware in the title; both Spader and Soderbergh would be shooting on iPhones. 

The Spirit Awards had it all over the Oscars in 2006: Not only did they give “Brokeback Mountain” Best Film over “Crash," but they also didn’t even nominate  Paul Haggis’ “everyone’s a racist!” claptrap. Ang Lee’s cowboy romance still resonates deeply due to Heath Ledger's and Jake Gyllenhaal’s skillful playing of Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s delicate, dance-around-the-issue seduction. Ennis’ final moment with Jack Twist’s jacket is downright pulverizing.

Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” is one of the most chillingly effective works of socially conscious horror since George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead," which automatically puts it in the conversation for one of the 10 or 20 greatest horror films ever made. Its instant penetration of pop culture with clever concepts like “the sunken place” or the hypnotic power of a silver spoon clinking on a porcelain teacup made the movie an undeniable awards contender despite its historically disreputable genre. People who’d never deconstructed a movie in their life dug deep into “Get Out." Maybe now they’ll realize there are hundreds of classic horror films waiting to be broken down in the same manner. What a gift this movie is. 

For moviegoers who’d never experienced a wuxia film before, the breathtakingly graceful combat of Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” was a revelation. (Audiences erupted into applause after the first set piece.) For those who’d gorged on the “Once Upon a Time in China” series, “Fong Sai Yuk” and “The Bride with White Hair”…well, we had to admit that there was a delicate artistry here that even those masterpieces lacked. The novelty of wirework was quickly cheapened by studio action merchants like Joel Silver, which makes the lush romanticism of Lee’s film something to be savored. 

Joel and Ethan Coen were on the ropes after the massive financial failure of “The Hudsucker Proxy” when they went back to cold-around-the-heart basics with this quirky true-crime flick based on a crime that never occurred. Yes, the Minnesotan accents are out of control. No, we have no text-supported theory to explain the Mike Yanagita scene. Of course, it’s an incredibly mean-spirited movie. A case could be made that it’s not even top-five Coens, which is just further proof that they’ve arguably been the most prolifically great directors of their generation. 

Quentin Tarantino’s magpie brilliance introduced a generation of young moviegoers and filmmakers to non-linear storytelling, the power of vintage needle-drop cues, the adorable lameness of John Travolta, the comedic value of obscure pop culture references and the oratorical splendor of the word “mother****er” as uttered by Samuel L. Jackson. The downside to “Pulp Fiction” is that it inspired a flood of generally tone-deaf imitators; the upside is that it’s still a ceaselessly inventive, moment-to-moment marvel that gave QT the clout to make “Jackie Brown” his best film to date.

Hollywood had practically exiled Robert Altman by the early ‘90s, when he threw this wonderfully unexpected haymaker that lampooned the reductive practices of the major studios. It’s a goof on the industry as a whole (e.g. the self-righteous, neck-beard screenwriter funeral is played for a laugh), but the idea of packaging and extreme creative compromise being laid bare in a movie featuring cameos from Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis — which meant casual moviegoers would check it out — was a righteous middle finger from an old pro who still had plenty of fight left in him. The opening tracking shot that tells you it’s setting up the entire movie like Orson Welles — another Hollywood pariah — did with “Touch of Evil” is exquisite, shot-calling shade.

This is quite possibly the best screenplay of the last 20 years and a mind-bending piece of neo-noir that announced the arrival of a master filmmaker. Christopher Nolan’s thriller is built around a protagonist (Guy Pearce) with a non-specific form of memory loss — a fun spin on the hero being poisoned in “D.O.A.” In this case, you’ve got a narrator who’s reliable insofar as he’s tattooed major events on his body: He’s not up against the clock; he’s up against his inked-up recollection. It’s an ingenious narrative engine, and it pays off with alarming precision. For screenwriters, this is the mountaintop.

After the commercial failure of “The King of Comedy” and the aborted production of “The Last Temptation of Christ” at Paramount, Martin Scorsese hopped off the studio grid and made an independent film. “After Hours” is an all-night odyssey about an office hack who believes he’s found the perfect girl only to discover he’s stumbled into a SoHo hell. Also, our protagonist is a bit of a jerk who deserves most of the indignities that are thrust upon him. Despite the character’s moral failings, Griffin Dunne is a perfect everyman; you forgive him his shortcomings and root for him to escape this downtown nightmare. But there’s no relief in sight. This is both an invigorating time capsule of a bygone art scene and a cautionary tale for I-Bankers who want to get freaky. It's Scorsese at his most desperate and his very best.