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Nineties New Queer Cinema icon Gregg Araki has not directed a feature since leaving Eva Green’s body frozen in the suburban snow globe of “White Bird in a Blizzard” in 2014. Since then, the DIY taboo buster has gone the way so many indie directors have to: by applying their personality to TV shows. In Araki’s case, that includes directing episodes of “Dahmer” and “American Gigolo.”

The iconoclastic Southern California filmmaker — known for “The Doom Generation” and “Mysterious Skin” and celebrated for his stylishly drawn stories of youthful sexual identity coming to bloom — also wrote and directed the 2019 series “Now Apocalypse.” Now, he’s teaming up with Karley Sciortino, the co-writer on that Starz show about sex and aliens in LA, for a new movie titled “I Want Your Sex.”

Araki revealed the project in early May, and it’s set up at Black Bear, most recently the production...

In a typical scene from “An Endless Sunday,” three teenage delinquents wander beside a canal. They end up killing a frog with a brick. Another group of children slightly younger than they are are also mucking about, and one of them is playing the recorder, blasting out a wobbly but recognizable version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the second movement. It’s a musical cue that in cinema, when accompanying youths up to no good, evokes Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” While this Italian debut feature from Alain Parroni has more in common stylistically with Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey,” there’s a streak of nihilism and disregard for the future that would call to mind Kubrick’s droogs even without the audio shout-out.

The teens here are a trio: moody lunkish Alex (Enrico Bassetti) and his girlfriend Brenda (Federica Valentini), who acts older than she is but looks younger,...

Strand Releasing is restoring Gregg Araki’s 1997 cult film “Nowhere,” bringing stars James Duval, Christina Applegate, Debi Mazar and Mena Suvari into 4K. This is the final addition to the restoration of Araki’s 1990’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy. In addition to Strand, the Bureau Sales and French producers Why Not are assisting on the project.

“I’m so gratified that these films are finding a new generation of viewers and seeing them projected at theatres and venues across the globe,” said Araki. Select scenes omitted in the original theatrical “Nowhere” release for MPAA rating purposes will be restored in this new director’s cut.

“Nowhere” is a black comedy take on teen drama. Araki mashes together decades of teenage television and movie tropes and wraps them up in this intense 24-hour snippet into the lives of Los Angeles college students. “Sexy, psychedelic, dementedly funny, with a sensational soundtrack…it’s like ‘Clueless’ with nipple rings,...

Indie filmmaker Gregg Araki’s wild, violent, and erotic “The Doom Generation” has been mostly available on middling DVD releases and occasional repertory prints since its radical release in 1995. Araki’s fifth feature film and the second in his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy — bookended by “Totally Fucked Up” and “Nowhere” — “The Doom Generation” will soon re-open in 4K thanks to a new restoration. Watch the new trailer, an IndieWire exclusive, below.

In Araki’s chaotic road trip nightmare, headed home after a wild night at a Los Angeles club, young lovers Jordan White (James Duval) and Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) pick up a dangerously handsome drifter named Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech). Jordan doesn’t see a problem with offering Xavier a quick ride, but his acid-tongued girlfriend thinks he’s a creep. When Xavier inadvertently kills a convenience store clerk, they are forced to go on the run, traversing a bizarre and ultra-violent America.

When you think about scrappy, micro-budget, guerrilla filmmaking of the ’90s, you think of Gregg Araki films. Shot on shoestring budgets with little more than his own two hands, Araki’s films were marked by a certain kind of radical punk rock aesthetic that mirrored the grunge era in music.

Described as a gay “Thelma and Louise,” he began the decade with “The Living End” (1992), a sexy road trip comedy about two young guys living with HIV. After making a splash at Sundance with that film, (and with the help of visionary longtime producer Marcus Hu), he churned out a trio of erotically charged teenage dirtbag films, dubbed his Teenage Apocalypse trilogy: “Totally Fucked Up” (1993), “The Doom Generation” (1995), and “Nowhere” (1997).

At the forefront of the New Queer Cinema, an enduring queerness ignites all of Araki’s films, though he certainly had fun toying with expectations. If every rebellious teenager wanted...

Director of Mysterious Skin and Kaboom is keeping indie pop alive by featuring new music and remixes by his favourite bands

This week sees the DVD release of two films from the singular talent of Gregg Araki: 1993's Totally Fucked Up and Kaboom, his most recent. It's always tempting to look for patterns and themes in a director's work, but in Araki's case, there's little that connects them all. The disenfranchised gay teens of Totally Fucked Up don't share much common ground with the silly stoners of his later comedy Smiley Face; and it's hard to reconcile the serious, subtle Mysterious Skin with the knockabout thrills of Splendor and Kaboom.

But for all the hallucinatory imagery, ambisexual cavorting, drug taking, violence and other shocking facets of Araki's work, there's one element that runs through them all: the music. When he says that "Kaboom is my most autobiographical and personal...

Going into the festival there were a select few films that I had earmarked as definites for viewing: Wall Street 2 was top of the list, and closely following it was Gregg Araki’s Kaboom, a delightfully intriguing prospect for anyone familiar with Araki’s body of work.

Araki is one of those indie-darling, festival veterans who has never really cemented the promise his earlier works showed into a sustainable breakthrough into mainstream cinema, even despite great critical acclaim for Mysterious Skin, and even some of his lesser known productions. And I for one always lamented a cross-over that might bring with it more Araki films, but I seems that I grossly underestimated the director.

No-one who left the mid-afternoon screening could possibly have been left in any doubt that Araki has no intention of ever making that breakthrough, or that he positively wallows in his classification as a fringe film-maker.