It may change your life. It may change your career. Or it could just give you a few more things to argue about on your way home.

Clerks follows a day in the life of Dante Hicks, checkout-boy extraordinaire, as he ends up spending the day largely behind the counter of the Quick Stop market in Red Bank, New Jersey. He manages to flee to a funeral, a top-of-the-range video store and a roof-top hockey game during the course of the day, but otherwise he's stuck all day behind the counter, facing down the customers and dealing with his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, his best friend who works at the Video Store next door and the drug-dealing duo of Jay and Silent Bob.

Anybody who's ever worked retail will immediately be able to relate to this film-and anybody who hasn't will be able to finally sympathise with the poor schlubs stuck behind the counter at your local corner store. While the situations are recognisably similar to Kevin Smith's other films (the repressed hero and his loudmouth best friend, attempting reconciliation with his girlfriend and her sexual past/present), there is a rawness and directness that the later two films of the Jersey Trilogy lack (the film is rated R for language).

This is where it all began, a quiet micro-budget film made in a supermarket late at night where the director worked.

Semi-sequel to the phenomenal $27 575 cult classic Clerks, Mallrats follows the same style, with different characters. All three of the films link up through association, and of course through Silent Bob and his sidekick Jay (director Kevin Smith and friend Jason Mewes). Mallrats is probably the best of the three, a good budget film, without being as bloated as the last film, Chasing Amy.

The film follows friends T.S. and Brodie (London and Lee) as they hang out at the mall, eating at the food court, walking around, aimlessly talking about their ex-girlfriends. Brodie's ex, Ren (Doherty), now endlessly annoys him through her association with a men's store manager Shannon (Affleck). T.S's ex, Brandi, is to be a contestant on her testosterone-pumped father's (Michael Rooker) rip-off 'Dating Game' show.

This movie is about characters and plot, and what it attempts to do is brilliant. This is American independent film making at its best, making social commentary with laughs.

This third film in the trilogy of New Jersey films by Kevin Smith looks at his usual field of comics, videos, the Holy Trilogy (Star Wars IV, V, VI) and other similar pop culture elements through the eyes of comic artist/writer Holden McNeil (Affleck), his partner in crime, Banky (Lee) the writer/tracer and Alyssa Jones (Adams), a female (and thus very strongly in the minority) artist and writer of comics and the girl with whom Holden falls in love. Unfortunately, Alyssa is a lesbian, and Banky may or may not 'love [Holden] in a way he is not yet ready to deal with.' The relationship that develops between Alyssa and Holden becomes extremely threatening to Banky and serves to force the previously shallow writers of 'Bluntman and Chronic' to reconsider their relationship and their place and attitudes in the world.

Although this film is shot in the occasionally strangely amateur style of Smith's and contains his trademark stream of profanity-peppered dialogue, this is still a very effective love story made for the cynical, and arguably less than entirely socially able, twenty-somethings in the nineties.