I saw “Seconds” in a theater when it was first released.
Also, I saw a lot of movies last year, including the “big” ones. My favorite was “Once.” Nothing moved me more. And the music! That’s a whole 'nuther story.
LOVE this thread!
My favorite movie in this category is Zero Effect starring Bill Pullman, Ben Stiller and Ryan O’Neal. Pullman is simply fascinating as quirky detective Darryl Zero. Top notch soundtrack too including the likes of Elvis Costello, Dan Bern, Nick Cave and Jamiroquai among others. You might figure out “the twist” early in the movie, but its so much fun watching Pullman and Stiller you won’t care. (For those who don’t like Stiller, he’s not doing one of those “DodgeBall”-like characters, he plays the straight man.)
Good luck getting that one from Netflix!!! 
Brick: Starring a bunch people I’ve never heard of. To find out who killed the woman he loved and why, high schooler Brendon delves into the seedy underworld of the local drug trade to find his answers. The dialogue reminds me of old detective movies from the 30s and 40s and includes using the word “bull” to mean police and the phrase “duck soup” made at least one appearance. It even has a friggin’ femme fatale. Good movie.
Dark City: Starring Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, and Jennifer Connoly. A bunch of aliens shove a bunch of humans into a big mysterious city for an experiment. I liked it but most people I’ve talked to never heard of this movie.
Marc
I doubt many Americans have seen Dog Soldiers. A great little horror film, even for someone like me who doesn’t go for Horror.
Rabbit Proof Fence
Rosenstrasse
The little kid from 3rd Rock From the Sun grew up to be an accomplished actor and made three great, amazing movies in a row - Mysterious Skin, Brick, and The Lookout. All three are worth checking out.
I would add Woman in the dunes. A photographer falls down a desert sand dune and discovers a small group of people living in the dunes, in a constant battle against the advancing wall of the sand. There is no way out, since crawling up the sand dune is an exercise in futility. This 33 year old movie just recently became available on Netflix.
Waterboys.
A Japanese comedy about High School swimmers. That’s all you should know before you see it.
It’s the only region 2 DVD I own.
I rented this movie based on advice I got in a thread just like this one a few years back, and it is amazing. It’s one of the main reasons I love the SDMB.
Memory of a Killer is the movie I keep dusting off and dragging out whenever this topic comes up. Just a hell of a good movie all around. I also like to drag out The Quiet Earth, but someone beat me to it this time. (RIP Bruno Kirby).
One, Two, Three A funny, brilliantly paced Cold War comedy. Full of wonderful quotes. Very obscure, which is a shame.
Nice Girls Don’t Explode A fun little flick about the ultimate smothering mother. Good times! (Really!)
1776 makes history fun, and feels more real to my non-historian eyes than “real” history. A very witty show.
House Of Games. David Mamet’s debut as a director (he wrote it, too), and a terrific psychological thriller.
The Mighty - a very touching, and badly promoted, film about a friendship between two teenage outcasts.
*Amores Perros *. (Marketed as ‘‘Love’s a Bitch’’ in English.) The film takes place in Mexico, but the landscape somehow remains a familiar one. It is beautifully acted and directed, one of those movies about unrelated characters’ lives intersecting around a key event. Think of it as Crash without all the preachy bullshit.
I really liked Primer. For more obscure sci-fi, try Pitch Black (the superior prequel to The Chronicles of Riddick) and Equilibrium, an action-packed movie about a dystopian future, which I admittedly rented to see Sean Bean, but it turned out to be pretty good.
The Station Agent is a quiet little movie starring Peter Dinklage as a dwarf who moves into an abandoned train station, intending to live as a hermit, but finds himself drawn into the lives of his quirky neighbors.
The Dish - A radio dish antenna in rural Australia is slated to be a key link in the video feed of the Apollo 11 moonwalk - only things aren’t exactly going smoothly for the staff. Sweet, funny movie.
Proof. (An Australian film from 1991. Not the same-titled US film from a few years ago.) A brilliant and touching yet very funny film about a blind man who takes photographs of random things, a restaurant worker who he forms a friendship with, and the woman who works as his housekeeper but is secretly in love with him.
It stars Hugo Weaving & Russell Crowe before he became famous in the US. Weaving gives a tour de force performance as the blind Martin. Never in the film does he look like an actor pretending to be blind, he looks like he really is blind!
A couple of gay rom-coms, if anyone’s interested:
Trick, a film about the tribulations that one nerdy young gay man has in trying to get together with a bar dancer.
Big Eden. Arye Gross as an up-and-coming New York artist who returns to his tiny Montana hometown to care for his ailing grandfather and finds more than he bargained for. It’s really a sweet little film, and we get to see Louise Fletcher play an actual sympathetic character.
Neither film has anything terribly explicit (although, ironically for movies about gay guys, the only nudity we see is a woman in Trick).
Seconded. I had nearly forgotten this movie until you mentioned it here, and now I think I’ll put it on my Netflix queue for a re-watch. Thanks!
Au contraire, cherie.
I’d second a bunch of recommendations in this thread, as well: Idiocracy, Primer, The Station Agent, Amores Perros, House of Games. (But if you’ve seen a lot of David Mamet, the latter may fall a bit flat.)
I remember that film. I was in high school, and actually ditched class to go see it because I was so excited by the previews. I waited for months and months, checking online every few days to be sure it was still on schedule for release. I built myself up so much for it that it couldn’t help but disappoint me.
The Voldermort/Dumbledore duel in the last Harry Potter flick reminded me of the final battle from Dark City, by the way. Did you get the same impression?