Movie #24 of 2026:

Clerks (1994)

Even on a rewatch decades on, Clerks feels like a marvel. Filmed in black-and-white on a shoestring budget in the adjoining convenience and video rental stores where writer-director Kevin Smith worked at the time, it captures the aimless Gen X burnout spirit of works like Office Space (1999), but filtered through the particular malaise of the young and working-class. The plot is just a random day of Seinfeldian nothingness in that life, from open to close — albeit with certain events unfolding to provide a semblance of structure, especially in the romance department.

The writing is very clever and funny (not to mention frequently off-color), although it ping-pongs between sounding naturalistic and too heavily stylized to be believed, and not every actor is equally up to the task of delivering it. Given that aspect, the relatively static camera work, and the creative ways of reducing costs by describing outside developments in the dialogue more often than showing them directly, there’s the feeling of a stage play throughout, which ends up fitting the mood of the piece entirely. In another cost-cutting measure, the story is supposed to be set during the daylight hours but was clearly shot overnight while the real shops were closed, adding a further impression of unreality and oddball night owl energy to the affair. Smith brings a lot of his own experiences and perspective to the script as well, mostly in the inane interactions with rude customers across the shift, but likewise in a few pointed jabs at people like guidance counselors.

Some of this is timeless, as though the essence of it could still be happening in businesses now or at any point in the last half-century, but it also seems quintessentially 1990s in a way, and not only from the matter of the videotape rentals. The conversations on nerdy pop culture subjects like whether independent contractors were working on the second Death Star when the Rebels destroyed it in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi may be commonplace on the internet today, but they were far more of a rarity in the pre-Reddit era and helped viewers feel like we were all in on the joke and members of the same private club. That’s the element that most presages the auteur creator’s subsequent career too, far more than the sad-sack protagonist and his inexplicable hold over multiple women. (This film does not remotely pass the Bechdel test, but it does feature a woman having sex in the dark with a corpse she mistakes for her living ex-boyfriend. All off-screen, but you can understand why the MPAA initially wanted to give this an NC-17 rating before relenting and settling on R. The nineties, am I right?)

Dante exasperatedly repeats his refrain, “I wasn’t even supposed to be here today!” at several key moments, and the original intended ending would have culminated in his getting killed by an armed robber just before finally closing up to go home. The finished production pulls back from that darkness, which is probably for the best, but still doesn’t do anything to suggest a future for these characters beyond their current dead-end jobs. Many of them would recur nonetheless, most notably the breakout drug dealers Jay and Silent Bob (the latter played by Smith himself), but none of those more typical Hollywood projects that followed could ever quite carry the same despondent attitude of this one.

★★★★☆

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