Made several years before Lawrence Kasdan’s better-known The Big Chill (1983), John Sayles’s directorial debut is a sometimes funny, sometimes melancholy look at the lives of a group of formerly radical friends who gather for a reunion in New Hampshire, ten years after they had been arrested in Secaucus, New Jersey, while driving to a demonstration in Washington, D.C. Sayles, in what has become his trademark style, underplays the drama of these rather ordinary lives, giving us a group portrait of people settling uncomfortably into the middle-class existence they once abhorred. Lacking Chill’s melodrama, Return of the Secaucus Seven is a film about a baby-boom generation growing old before its time. Sayles produced the film independently for a reported $60,000; to save money, the film was shot in twenty-five days, almost entirely in one location and with an ensemble cast of unknowns (including David Strathairn and Sayles himself). Sayles coaxes from them some wonderful performances and some very real dialogue.

—Jan-Christopher Horak

• Written by Sayles. Photographed by Austin de Besche. With Bruce MacDonald, Maggie Renzi, Adam LeFevre, Maggie Cousineau. (110 mins, Color, 35mm, Permission IFC Films. Preservation funded by Anarchists’ Convention.)