Budget: $475K
Focus Film “Brick” is about a teen kid (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who gets embroiled in a crime ring mystery after his high school girlfriend disappears.
The neo-noir cult classic brought in $3.9 million at the box office. At Sundance, it won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision.
Monsters
Budget: $500K
Slimy, tentacled, extraterrestrial CGI monsters inhabit this film. The beasts got to Earth after a NASA research probe crashed. The failed mission sent its sample of alien life free to roam the planet.
The British sci-fi thriller flips the usual plot of aliens abducting humans around. Humans abduct aliens in "Monsters." It earned over $4 million but, consider; it was made with barely a half-million dollars. It did plenty well to go to sequel. Monsters also earned director Gareth Edwards enough acclaim to win major Hollywood blockbusters "Godzilla" and "Rogue One."
Buffalo '66
Budget: $1.8M
Starring Christina Ricci, Rosanna Arquette, Vincent Gallo, and Jan-Michael Vincent and directed by Gallo, this low-budget flick isn’t afraid to emulate a B-movie. It’s a crime drama and a comedy with a rocking soundtrack that includes Yes and King Crimson. It was made for a drop in the bucket, and it about doubled its investment.
Gallo plays Billy Brown, who served his time and comes back home. He finds a girl at a club (Ricci) and takes her home to his family, so they will think he is responsibly married. Things get dicey when he falls in love with her.
Another Earth
Budget: $150K
In this movie, another world is possible. Earth has a clone. It floats above Earth similarly to another moon. Even stranger, the other Earth has you on it. It’s a replica of all life.
Rhonda (Brit Marling), a young astrophysicist who was just accepted into MIT, hypothesizes that life on the other planet is behind ours, meaning she may be able to relive and repair a disastrous moment in her life. The budget movie won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. It brought in almost $2 million.
An Inconvenient Truth
Budget: $1M
As a documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth" did extremely well. It’s one of the top-grossing documentaries of all time. Chock full of futuristic disaster scenarios as the result of unabated global warming, it will have you on the edge of the seat as much as any sci-fi post-apocalyptic thriller.
Monster storms will kill us; low-lying coastal areas will be underwater, no matter how big the population was. The worst refugee crisis known to man could happen. It’s scarier because it is the truth. That is the premise of the movie. Former vice president Al Gore explains why.