In Indie: An American Film Culture, Michael Newman defines indie cinema as the “Sundance–Miramax” era. Although Newman acknowledges the impossibility of declaring a definitive origin and conclusion, he does propose that the 1989 US Film festival (later renamed Sundance) at which Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Soderbergh, 1989) was screened and Disney's shuttering of Miramax in 2010 are events that help to construct a historical frame in which to situate indie cinema (1–2). Indie suggests that indie cinema is best understood as a “cultural category” which includes “a cluster of interpretive strategies and expectations” that are shared by film industry personnel, critics, audiences and so on (11). Newman proposes that indie cinema's audience use “viewing strategies” to understand and engage with indie cinema (11) and it is this argument that provides the book's structure; Part One discusses the discourse surrounding indie cinema, with the remaining sections examining the specific viewing strategies that the author identifies as being “characters as emblems, form is a game, [and] when in doubt, read as anti-Hollywood” (29).

Newman's definition of “indie” is an umbrella term for numerous categories of independent cinema, ranging from films produced by speciality divisions to no-/low-budget DIY productions. Consequently, the author unintentionally simplifies the various ways audiences interpret and understand these subsections of indie cinema. In line with this, Newman overemphasizes how the study's three slogans “signal a distinct conception of Off-Hollywood cinema” (29). For example, the viewing strategy “form is a game” could just as easily be applied to Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010) as it could to Memento (2000).

A major strength of Indie is located in chapter 2, in which Newman undertakes a detailed investigation of the institutions that contribute to the formation of indie discourse, an area which other studies have sidelined. What is particularly interesting in this chapter is the way in which Newman examines institutions such as prominent film festivals and indieplexes from angles such as their origins, funding, operations and market position, and also his utilization of sources such as the press and people operating within the institutions, as well as academic publications.

The author then charts the rhetoric surrounding characterization in indie cinema, a rhetoric which generally assumes that indie films are character-driven, which contrasts with Hollywood's plot-driven films. Whilst acknowledging this concept's limitations, Newman does find it useful in its ability to “encourage us to think about different films (and kinds of films) in certain ways” (90). Following this, there is a discussion of “play” in indie cinema, which examines pastiche in the films of the Coen Brothers and narrative play in films such as Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994). Whilst Newman pays particular attention to how various films engage in “play” with audiences, and vice versa, he only hints at how technological change could impact on such notions. It seems peculiar that Newman outlines the “replay” value of such films whilst skirting over the impact that DVD and the Internet have had on this. The study concludes with a discussion of indie cinema as anti-Hollywood, and concentrates on exploring “authentic” indie films such as Happiness (Solondz, 1998) and the “de-authentication” of films such as Juno (Reitman, 2007). Whilst the indie-cinema-as-anti-Hollywood concept is not particularly groundbreaking, the author's dissection of the role of indie tastemakers in deciding what is “authentic” indie treads ground other studies have not.

The recent interest in indie cinema has seen other work, such as Deidre Pribram's Cinema and Culture: Independent Film in the United States, 1980–2001 (2002), that also explore independent cinema within similar historical boundaries. And whilst Pribram's study offers a more intricate examination of the various constituents of post-1980 American independent cinema than Indie, what Newman's study contributes to this field is an innovative discussion of indie cinema in terms of how audiences understand it, their viewing strategies and the culture in which these strategies emerge.