Clerks

Director: Kevin Smith

1994 / 92min / DCP

Smith’s first feature, famously paid for with maxed-out credit cards and shot on black-and-white 16mm stock in the convenience and video rental shops where its writer-director was working day jobs, is one of the great hang-out movies, a grubby, profane slice of American neorealist comedy about killing time while doing crummy jobs, starring Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson as disgruntled cash register jockeys in suburban New Jersey. Contains Smith’s finest foul-mouthed arias of dialogue, many of these interpreted by Jason Mewes’s gravel-voiced Jay. (“He speaks some English, but he cannot speak it good like we do.”)