Buffalo '66

Director: Vincent Gallo

1998 / 110min / 35mm

Gallo’s brash and hysterical writer-director-composer-star feature debut packs a passel of personal obsessions—prog rock and the Buffalo Bills, among others—into the story of maladjusted ex-con Billy Brown (Gallo, careening wildly between vulnerability and megalomania) and the tap dancer (Christina Ricci) that he kidnaps to play his wife for his dreaded homecoming to parents Ben Gazzara and Anjelica Huston. Filmed on reversal stock with high-saturation color to ape the appearance of NFL Films highlight reels, it’s one of the most aesthetically influential films of the decade—and one of the funniest. While many more heralded titles of its day have been forgotten, it continues spanning time.