By David Fear. Let's say you go to the movies several times a week, hitting up all the big multiplex releases — your new Mad Max s, your latest Marvel superhero epics, your Star Wars Episode VIIs and Furious 7 s. You regularly log on to your favorite streaming services and check out what's been added to the roster.
Come September, you dutifully check out the Oscar-buzzed biopics and based-on-a-true-story dramas. Occasionally, you may even stop by your local arthouse theater or brave the wild frontier that is VOD, renting an unfamiliar movie on a whim because it has that one actor you like in it. And still, at the end of any given year, you might look back at several prominent Top 10 lists and see titles that produce a giant cartoon question mark over your head.
I knew about Minions, you say, but what the hell is Mustang? There are usually a handful of incredible movies that hit theaters and may slip right under your radar, or depending on where you live, bypass you entirely. So we're shining the spotlight on 15 of our favorite releases that you might have missed: gritty to graceful indies, limited-distribution documentaries and mockumentaries, foreign films ranging from obscure to offbeat to, in the case of Hard to Be a God, downright WTF unclassifiable.
A tale of two intellectual gladiators who inadvertently changed TV news, this extraordinary documentary from Morgan Neville Twenty Feet From Stardom and Robert Gordon looks back at the infamous presidential-convention debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. Besides the sheer pleasure of watching this vintage clash of the titans, you get a first-hand look at the ground-zero moment of today's television partisan punditry: The minute Vidal starts yelling and Buckley threatens to "sock" his opponent in the jaw, this history lesson instantly goes from time capsule to crystal ball.
Having inexplicably lost her sight, a young woman Ellen Dorrit Petersen , spends her afternoons stuck in her apartment, writing on her computer. Several other characters — her distracted husband, a single mother, a disturbed porn addict — keep floating directly or indirectly into her orbit, each suggesting a world outside her window that's seriously out of whack.
