By K.C. Georges
A&E Editor ’06

Before you go out on Friday night and spend eight bucks on a movie you don’t even want to see, take a look at what other smaller films are playing around town. Recently, the entertainment industry has seen a huge rise in popularity of small and independent films. As one of the bigger cities in the country, Atlanta is lucky enough to receive a sizable number of these lower-budget pictures.

Local theaters like Barrett Commons and Town 16 normally have films with bigger buzz. The little seen “Monster,” which features Charlize Theron in her Oscar award-winning role, is one of these movies and was filmed in just 27 days. “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” another critically-acclaimed yet largely un-hyped film, tells the tale behind Vermeer’s mysterious painting of the same name. It also features the breakout actress of the year Scarlett Johansson.

Atlanta also boasts theaters that show small films almost exclusively. United Artists’ Tara Theatre is a great place to find movies that you won’t get to see anywhere else. Right now it houses not one but two movies that everyone should see. “In America” is the critically-acclaimed tale of an immigrant Irish family in the 1980s. “The Cooler” features William H. Macy as a man who’s unlucky at cards until he finds himself lucky in love, and the movie features Oscar-nominated Alec Baldwin as his violent and domineering boss.

If you don’t feel like driving all the way out to a movie theater, your local Blockbuster is also a great place to find the movies that you never saw or didn’t come to theaters here. Gems like “Lost in Translation,” a film that didn’t need a huge budget or months of filming to be absolutely wonderful, and “American Splendor,” a picture about which critics couldn’t find a bad thing to say, are easy to find at video stores thanks to great reception after their releases. You can also find unknown documentaries like “Capturing the Friedmans” and limited release features like the emotionally draining “21 Grams.”

So please, please, please seek out some indie films. They’re treasures buried among the mounds of plotless and pointless big-budget productions, and I promise you they’ll be ten times better than “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.”