The 10 Most Anticipated Movies at Rooftop Films' 2014 Summer Series

If you've lived in New York for more than a year and haven't heard about Rooftop Films' Summer Series, you're slipping. Every year from May through August, Rooftop Films kicks off a summer-long film festival that showcases some of the most promising, the most bizarre, and the most inspiring new independent movies. It's an event unlike any other. What sets it apart from the dozens of film festivals nationwide is its unique approach to screening its films. Rather than packing audiences into stuffy theaters, the folks at Rooftop plan events inspired by each movie, like inviting an all-girl rock group to perform at this year's screening of We Are The Best. "I'd get bored if we showed conventional films with any regularity in a conventional way," says Rooftop's program director Dan Nuxoll.

The Summer Series kicks off this Friday, with its annual This Is What We Mean By Short Films party. But if you can't make that, surely you can make one of Rooftop's exceptional screenings. Might we suggest Five Star or The One I Love? Two of the best movies we recently got to check out at this year's Tribeca Film Festival.

Just like last year, Rooftop's lineup is packed with incredible films we can't wait to see. Complex got a chance to speak with Nuxoll about our 10 most anticipated movies at this year's Rooftop Films Summer Series.

As told to Tara Aquino (@t_akino)

RELATED: The Complex Staff Lists Their Most Anticipated Summer Movies
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Director: Gillian Robespierre
Stars: Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffmann, Gabe Liedman
Screening date: May 17

Dan Nuxoll: We had shown a short version of that film several years ago and Gillian was extending it to a feature film and we'd given her a grant to help her out, so we're really thrilled to finally being screening it. Jenny Slate's been such an interesting and slightly controversial character now for awhile, and I think this role is perfectly made for her. She really delivers. She's certainly believable. The thing that's so exceptional about this film and this performance is that there's so much heart to them. Jenny is so charming and witty and there's a real vulnerability there. It's a great script that Gillian wrote and she had written the role for Jenny, so it all came together for her.

Director: Jim Mickle
Stars: Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, Don Johnson, Vinessa Shaw
Screening date: May 21

Dan Nuxoll: It's fantastic. I'm such a big fan of Jim Mickle's other films. The thing that sets this apart, though it's certainly a genre film and delivers in terms of being a thriller, is that Michael C. Hall's performance takes this to another level. He's exceptional in it. There's a simmering, moody power to what he brings to it that you don't really see a lot in thrillers these days. We'll have Michael and Jim at the screening as well so it's gonna be great.

Director: Lukas Moodysson
Stars: Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin, Liv LeMoyne
Screening date: May 22

Dan Nuxoll: This is the first film we've shown by Lukas Moodysson and he's been one of my favorite directors for quite some time now. This one is a little more heartwarming because it's a little bit more optimistic than his recent darker fare. The performances by the girls in it are really great.

This film is another one that the context in which we're showing it adds a little bit more to the event as well. We'll be holding a live performance by a band called PetalWar which is actually an all-girls rock band that was formed at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls.

Director: Adam Rifkin
Stars: Giuseppe Andrews, Vietnam Ron, Big Ed
Screening date: June 20

Dan Nuxoll: A really fun film! It's also a grantee. We had shown some of Adam Rifkin's films and also films produced by Mike Plante, so we knew those guys pretty well. They had actually applied for a grant from us awhile back and we saw a whole bunch of Giuseppe's movies which are all amazingly fun and funny. So we'd given a grant to them. They were originally not sure if they'd do the project as a series of short films like a web series or in a feature film construct.

Giuseppe is a great character; he's unlike anyone you've ever met before. His films are some of the weirdest films I've ever seen. They're insane. One of the things we really responded to as an organization is the way in which he creates these communities by making these films. He's working with this rag-tag collection of individuals and pretty much all of them live in the trailer park he was living in. The experience of making these films with him changes their lives. These are people who don't really have an outlet of that sort, people who don't have a lot to be excited about generally, but Giuseppe just adopts these unique and eccentric characters and gives them something.

Director: Linda Västrik
Screening date: June 27

Dan Nuxoll: There were a good number of interesting documentaries that came around this year about various central African tribes. The Yaka/Mbendjele have been sort of living in the same mode for centuries and their lives are beginning to be encroached on and in the near future will definitely be transformed by modernity as they will no longer be able to live the way they're living.

The first half of the film has this anthropological feel to it where you really just come to understand the way their lives are lived and you're there with them as they're going through their daily rituals. But as the film goes along, it follows this one woman who's trying to have a child. Then the story really takes off. There's a mythic quality to it and you begin to realize how important these various changes in their lives are. Things like giving birth to a child, which obviously are important to all of us, become these life or death struggles in this context. The ending is really tremendous.

Linda Västrik embeds herself so completely in the tribe and you could practically feel the dirt on your skin as you're watching it. They're hunting for honey in the trees, killing these eels in the river, and you're right there with them up close.

Watch the trailer here.

Director: Joe Swanberg
Stars: Lena Dunham, Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, Joe Swanberg, Mark Webber
Screening date: July 10

Dan Nuxoll: We've been big fans of Joe's for a long time. This is definitely a different film for him in certain ways. It's kind of his most conventional family drama in terms of the arc of the story, and at the same time, he brings to it fantastic performances from everyone. Melanie Lynskey is exceptionally good playing Joe's wife. Anna Kendrick is always really great. Lena Dunham gives this fantastically natural performance. Little Jude Swanberg kills every scene he's in. It's as if he was raised in mumblecore, which I guess in a way he was. [Laughs.]

The thing that I always responded to in Joe's films was the individual honesty that he brings to each of these works. This is more in that vein than ever before. It's really straight emotional truth and he really captures what these characters are going through in various stages of their lives.

Director: David Zellner
Stars: Rinko Kikuchi, Nobuyuki Katsube, Shirley Venard
Screening date: July 12

Dan Nuxoll: This has been a passion project of the Zellner brothers for a long time. What's really interesting about this film is that it builds around a lot of what they'd done previously, where they were exploring these emotional truths but doing so in these stories that have this slightly surreal, fairytale aspect to them. Kumiko takes that to a whole 'nother level, where it feels like it's epic myth. The production values are just through the roof. It's one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. It has an incredible score by The Octopus Project.

All of that combines to make this movie about this woman searching for this lost treasure that can't possibly exist. It elevates it to the level of myth, where perhaps she's actually searching for something much deeper than that. The ending, especially, comes together in this fantastic crescendo, mixed with the array of the wintery fields in Minnesota where she's hunting for the treasure. It just feels like a Kurosawa film.

Director: Desiree Akhavan
Stars: Desiree Akhavan, Rebecca Henderson, Scott Adsit, Halley Feiffer
Screening date: July 31

Dan Nuxoll: Desiree is a really smart and charming and funny woman. She's had a lot of success with her web series, The Slope, which put her on the map. What sets the film apart is that she is funny, she's queen of the one-liners, but beyond on that, the film is also a very personal and painful story about a woman going through a break-up and trying to figure out what her sexuality really means to her, what this broken relationship did to her. She's trying to figure how she's going to be the person she needs to be and do so without being terrible at it. That movie also starts out one one-liner after another, but it moves into honest discussions about what she's going through. Desiree's going to be a star.

Director: Hitoshi Matsumoto
Stars: Mao Daichi, Lindsay Kay Hayward, Hairi Katagiri
Screening date: August 1

Dan Nuxoll: It's fantastically weird. I didn't know what to make of it at first. Nothing could've really prepared me for this movie. It's so funny and savagely entertaining. As it goes along, it becomes increasingly bizarre and surreal. The first time I saw it, when the movie ended, I was like, "Well that's really great, I think." [Laughs.]

I was talking to one of our programmers the day after we watched it and as we were discussing it, we just realized that there were dozens of unforgettably funny and bizarre and kind of terrifying moments throughout the movie that we couldn't get out of our head. That's the moment we realized that this is a truly distinctive comedy and I guarantee no one has seen anything like it. There's this wacky Japanese sense of humor that I don't think any Americans fully understand. Everyone in the world should be forced to watch this movie. [Laughs.]

I'm still working on setting up the screening, but I will say that I've been making more visits to BDSM dungeons than I ever thought I would, so we'll see where it ends up. [Laughs.]

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour
Stars: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh, Mozhan Marnò
Screening date: August 2

Dan Nuxoll: It's the best movie of the year. It's certainly my favorite. It grabbed me within five minutes of watching it. Lily, the director, is such a distinctive character in every way. It just came out of nowhere. No one knew what to expect going in. The premise sounds interesting and like it would be a pulpy, fun lark of some sort with a political twist because it's set in Iran, but once you actually watch it, stylistically it's astonishingly well put together. It's the coolest movie you could possibly imagine. It's hard to believe it's made by someone who hasn't made dozens of feature films before.

You don't really expect there to be a lot of emotional content to the film because it starts out in such a deliriously cool way. But as it goes along and the relationship between the main characters build, there's so much emphasis put on the emotional content of these characters even as they're going through these slightly absurd scenarios. It just creates this viewing experience that I don't even know what to compare it to. It'll be a total cult hit for years to come.