Film

Emerald Cities

A scrappy 1983 indie odyssey that abandons plot for collage: a young woman flees the desert, her Santa-suited dad pursues, and they collide with punk bands, street interviews, and apocalyptic TV footage in a fever dream about escape and America's dissolution. It's experimental, ramshackle, funny in spurts, and utterly sincere about its chaos.

If you liked this

Liquid Sky1982

An alien parasite feeds on human pleasure while New Wave aesthetes and punk musicians orbit each other in lower Manhattan. Deliberately weird, visually stunning, and genuinely unsettling—a found-object film that rewires your nerve endings.

But The pacing is glacial, the dialogue is oblique, and it demands you meet it halfway rather than meet you.

Liquid Sky poster

The Decline of Western Civilization1981

Penelope Spheeris documents the LA punk scene with anthropological care and genuine affection: live performances, interviews, teenage rebellion caught raw. A time capsule that's also a manifesto about who gets to be heard.

But The audio quality is tinny, the structure is loose, and punk nostalgia can feel dated fast if you're not already moved by it.

The Decline of Western Civilization poster

Ghostland2018

A French body-horror film about two sisters escaping trauma that refuses to stay one genre—part home invasion thriller, part supernatural descent, part memory puzzle. Visually bold and morally unresolved in ways that linger.

But It's punishing to watch. The violence is intimate and the film offers no catharsis, only survival.

Ghostland poster

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The wildcard

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A Ghost Story2017

Both use collage logic and formal weirdness to ask what gets lost in transit: across deserts, across time, across America itself. Both trust discomfort and refusal to explain.

A man dies, becomes a ghost in a white sheet, and watches time collapse—architectural decay, America's forgetting, grief as a physics problem. Formally strange (long static shots, that famous pie scene) and devastatingly about leaving behind meaning.

But It's slow, meditative, and deliberately frustrating. The sheet costume could play as kitschy rather than haunting.

A Ghost Story poster
More like this (7)

Flirting with Disaster1996

David O. Russell's early comedy about a man searching for his birth parents while everything cascades into absurdity. Eccentric, funny, warm underneath its chaos, with a cast firing on all cylinders.

But The humor is scattershot and it peaks early. Some bits wear out their welcome.

Flirting with Disaster poster

Eating Raoul1982

Suburban swingers are murdered by a prudish couple trying to make ends meet. A sick premise played deadpan and genuinely funny, with a real affection for its characters despite the body count.

But The humor is pitch-black and the budget constraints show. If you need production value, look elsewhere.

Eating Raoul poster

Repo Man1984

A punk-inflected sci-fi comedy about a kid who becomes a repo man in Los Angeles, hunting a glowing Chevy Malibu while the world ends offscreen. Weird, quotable, and endlessly inventive on almost no money.

But The plot is deliberately thin and the tone whips around. Some will find it pointless rather than punk.

Repo Man poster

Stranger Than Paradise1984

Jim Jarmusch's deadpan black-and-white odyssey across America with minimal dialogue, maximum alienation. Ragged and funny in a way that sneaks up on you; influences half the indie films that came after.

But Nothing happens in the conventional sense. If you need plot momentum or warmth, this will feel like watching paint dry.

Stranger Than Paradise poster

Smithereens1982

Susan Seidelman's debut follows a scrappy New Jersey kid who slums toward Manhattan, chasing a rock musician and self-destruction. Gorgeously shot, genuinely desperate, caught between comedy and tragedy.

But The main character is selfish and hard to root for. The ending doesn't resolve anything because real life doesn't.

Smithereens poster

Xtro1982

Both made in the early 80s on nothing, both refuse narrative clarity, both mix punk-adjacent desperation with cosmic wrongness. Emerald Cities treats America like Xtro treats the body: as something being invaded and remade.

A British sci-fi horror film about an alien impregnating a man who gives birth to a grotesque infant-adult. Shot like a nightmare on a budget, grotesque and genuinely unnerving, with a DIY aesthetic that rewires genre rules.

But The plot is incoherent and the FX are crude. It's not bad-movie-fun; it's genuinely disorienting in ways that feel accidental and deliberate at once.

Xtro poster

Synecdoche, New York2008

Both use fragmentation and collage to suggest that coherent narrative is a lie we tell ourselves. Both believe that the only honest way to show America is to refuse to make it make sense.

Charlie Kaufman's film inside film about a theater director whose magnum opus becomes a collapsing replica of reality itself, starring actors playing versions of real people. Infinitely nested, hallucinatory, and about the impossibility of capturing what's actually happening.

But It's opaque by design. The three-hour runtime tests patience and the fragmented narrative will lose you if you need clarity or momentum.

Synecdoche, New York poster

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