Agora was magnificent. And made me cry.
Not sure if it counts as “obscure” but I loved, loved, loved Dean Spanley.
Fan Chan - for a nostalgic look back at life in the 80s in Southeast Asia. the kinda movie you would laugh and cry at if you had been there.
Do yourself a favor and watch The Living Wake. It’s a bit uneven, but is often brilliantly funny (“So you see, they have this book called the Bible. It tells the story of a man named Jesus, a Mexican fellow I presume. I haven’t read it yet, but I hear it’s quite popular.”)
My all time favorite obscure movie, though, is Kissing Jessica Stein. Very sweet, heartfelt and often very funny.
The Believer starring Ryan Gosling as a self-hating neo-nazi teenager. It’s a good movie.
Is Diva obscure? I don’t know, but I really enjoyed it back in the '80s.
I recently DVR’d a movie on the IFC channel because I thought it might be interesting, called The Good, The Bad, The Weird. It’s a Korean western, set in 1920’s Manchuria, and it’s loosely based on The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.
That was enough to get me to watch it. It turned out to be much better than it sounded, with great action sequences, good acting and interesting direction. There’s a chase scene near the end that was really very good.
Maybe because I’m a sucker for oddball westerns, but I really liked it, and I had barely heard of it before encountering it on cable.
Tim
“toy geek”
I don’t know about “last”, but:
Withnail and I , and consequently
Wah-Wah
The Station Agent
The Quiet Earth
Connie and Carla
No Man’s Land
Nowhere Boy
Me and Orson Welles
Great “little” Australian films, probably only obscure by international standards:
Red Dog
Muriel’s Wedding
Picnic at Hanging Rock
The Last Days of Chez Nous
The King of Comedy is another “obscure” Scorsese film.
I would be willing to bet many students in an American film class would draw a total blank on it, and even among film buffs very few would have heard of it or seen it, so yea that sounds obscure.
I realize obscure is kind of open to interpretation, I just meant it as a film most people have never heard of or seen. So obviously Taxi Driver or 2001 do not qualify.
Winter’s Bone, recent, well-reviewed film, but not a blockbuster or anything. A young backwoods woman in the Ozarks confronts her community about the disappearance of her meth-maker father. “Loved” is a strong word. I enjoyed it.
Wild Target, a British black comedy with Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt, Rupert Grint, Martin Freeman & Rupert Everett. It only did over $3 million box office and was a critical flop, so I’m assuming obscurity. Pity, it’s actually hilarious.
I finally got around to watching a full edit of Fassbinder’s Ali:Fear Eats the Soul. I’d watched around half of it before, and just hadn’t been able to get hold of it since. Brilliant.
Chungking Express-
Quirky little dramedy Chinese language movie about a lovesick cop and a woman who is a rather inept would be drug smuggler. Has some funny scenes but won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. The standout element to me is the natural filming style and the amazing location shooting in the Chungking Mansions Chungking Mansions - Wikipedia which is fascinating. Its part movie and part travel show.
Depends on what you mean by obscure, it might be what I’d call ‘Cult’ ignoring those which have become popular now (Blues brothers for instance).
Still not available on dvd: Hawks, the 1988 Black comedy with Anthony Edwards and Timothy Dalton, escaping their wards while dying of cancer. A suprisingly cheerful and funny film.
Man bites dog, 1992 Black and white belgian satire about a film crew following a serial killer with a sympathetic and sometimes helpful way…
I very much enjoyed The Call of Chthulu, which is an amateur silent film done by a Lovecraft fan group. It’s on Netflix Watch Instantly and quite a fun little piece.
The Troll Hunter was an enjoyable way to spend a couple hours. It’s actually one of those movies that you secretly hope they make a sequel to.
Thankskilling is so wonderfully bad that it’s good. “Gobble gobble, Motherf—er”
Tucker & Dale Vs Evil was a hilarious and fantastic send-up of the redneck horror genre and also had a lot of heart.
The Trip by Michael Winterbottom with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
It’s actually an edited version of a British TV miniseries about two friends who go off for a week on a restaurant reviewing jaunt. Nothing much happens, but it’s wonderful fun.
It made it into limited release here in the States but I think it still qualifies as obscure.
Hm. Most obscure and best was probably Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. Hilarious parody that reverses all the standard horror movie tropes.
Premise: a bunch of young attractive college students head into the woods for recreation. Also heading to the lake are buddies Tucker and Dale, some very rural folks who just bought a run-down lake house together so they can fish and drink beer. The college kids freak out and think T&D are stalking them. Things really go south when one girl in the group slips and hits her head, and T&D rescue her and take her back to their house to recover. The kids, seeing this, think T&D are psycho-murderer hillbillies, and begin trying to “save” her. T&D, unaware of any of that, engage in all sorts of activities that look suspicious, and the kids usually end up accidentally killing themselves as they attack Tucker and Dale. For once, the guys in the filthy overalls are not the killers. Funny as hell. Alan Tudyk, who played Wash on Firefly, plays Tucker.