Zach Vasquez
Studio movies of the last 20 years have been driven and defined by fake nostalgia. Endless remakes and reboots and sequels and prequels and sidequels. Superhero movies, video game movies, toy movies; movies about every true-crime phenomenon or celebrity tragedy. Movies about brand-name consumer goods. Movies about people’s favorite childhood snacks.
It’s a dire time for American cinema. As ever, if it has any sort of future, it’s through the independents. For the longest time, this seemed to be a dead-end too, thanks mostly to the drying up of funds and screening opportunities, but also, undeniably, indie filmmakers’ endless navel-gazing, lack of imagination, and disinterest in the aesthetic qualities of their medium.
But, over the last few years, things have started to change. A new movement of independent American cinema seems to be emerging, one that not only prioritizes such bygone ideas like mood and visual richness, but also is about something.
And that something is: nostalgia.
In this case, it’s nostalgia in the literal sense, via the ancient Greeks who coined the term. Nostos (to return home) + algos (a painful condition) = “a painful yearning to return home.” (You can also go with the famous Mad Men version – “The pain from an old wound” – if you prefer.) What the filmmakers behind three of the best films of the last five years—Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, (2020), Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024), and Eephus (2025)—understand is, to use a famous title, you can’t go home again.
Every era of indie cinema comes with shared stylistic and thematic concerns, from the gritty progeny of Cassavetes in the ‘70s to the No Wavers of the ‘80s to the Spikes, Mikes, slackers and dykes of the ‘90s to the miserable mumblecorers of the Aughts and Teens. This newest iteration, which has yet to be given a name, pulls from each of these movements, as well as other influences, including slow/transcendental cinema, Altman-esque ensemble drama, Terence Davies-ish Impressionism, and even Lynchian surrealism, turning out films that are mundane yet magical, hilarious yet hard-nosed, cynical yet warm.
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets occurs over the closing shifts of a shuttering Las Vegas dive bar. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point observes an extended Long Island family’s final yuletide gathering at their recently sold ancestral home. And Eephus charts the last game of a Massachusetts amateur baseball league before their historic field is torn down and replaced by a new middle school.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point and Eephus come out of Omnes Films, a Los Angeles-based filmmakers collective whose mission statement champions “passionate, ambitious works made by friends that favor atmosphere over plot and study the many forms of cultural decay in the 21st century.”
Omnes Films was co-founded by Miller’s Point director and Eephus producer Tyler Taormina, and lists amongst its members Eephus director, Carson Lund, who also served as director of photography on Miller’s Point (as well as Taormina’s debut feature from 2019, Ham on Rye). Beyond their shared pedigree, those films feel spiritually linked. Both are large ensemble tone pieces, strange in equal measure although Eephus leans more into a hangout comedy vibe (think Richard Linklater in Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some! jock mode), while Miller’s Point has an eerie, at times spooky mood (think the dreamy Linklater of Slacker or Waking Life).
Certainly they have more obviously in common with one another than than the hardscramble faux-documentary Blood Nose, Empty Pockets (written, directed, and shot by by brothers Bill IV and Turner Ross), which embraces more of a traditionally docu-drama style, although I am far from the only person who made a connection between it and Eephus, no small part of which comes from a shared influence: the 2001 Tawainese masterpiece Goodbye, Dragon Inn.
The cultural decay mentioned in Omnes Films’s mission statement is central to all three films, all of which also feature a cast of colorful and eccentric but still deeply believable working-class characters desperately and futily trying to hold on to their rapidly eroding way of life. Despite their geological differences, you can easily imagine the beer guzzling squad that makes up Eephus’s Riverdogs getting their post-game load on at BN, EP’s The Roaring ‘20s, pulling up a stool next one of the Balsano clan from Miller’s Point.
It is easy, and not entirely wrong, to see these films as a response to American late capitalism. That is a subject explicitly dealt with in BN, EP, which is set in 2016, shortly after Donald Trump has been elected President for the first time (the bar at its center is called The Roaring ‘20s, after all), and it seems pretty obvious that’s what Taormina and co. are getting at when they talk about “cultural decay in the 21st century.”
But these films are not just—or even mostly—political responses to our current era. They are dealing with universal ideas. There is a temporal ambiguity to Miller’s Point and Eephus: the former intentionally mixes technology and decor in order to recreate the feeling of memory, while Eephus is meant to take place in the ‘90s, even as certain signifiers of today (such as newer model cars) keep pushing in from the outside world.
People die and places change, regardless of whatever economy we’re living in. In the end, all we’re left with is our memory of them, and the pain that comes from remembering.
“Eephus” is available digitally today. “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” is streaming on Kanopy, Hoopla, and MUBI. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is available for digital rental or purchase.
