A Belated Best of the 90s
May 20 '02
The Bottom Line Here are ten films from the 90s which, in my first decade of serious filmgoing, enlightened me more on the possibilities of cinema than any others.
While the 90s have been over almost 2 1/2 years, I'll post my list anyway, if only to satisfy my own sense of closure. Living far from the major moviegoing cities of the US, I haven't been able to catch up with all the decade's masterpieces until more recently. In addition, creating a list now allows me the benefit of hindsight which a list made in the immediate aftermath of the 90s would not have afforded me. So here it goes, in alphabetical order.
After Life (Hirokazu Kore-Eda, 1999)
The film asks, "if you could only choose one moment from your life, what would it be?" Instead of a bunch of pseudo-religious hogwash, the film is philosophically fascinating, a non-sectarian vision that provokes deep thought, conversation, and in the end, emotion.
The Celebration (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998)
Well, if the Dogma 95 thing didn't end up working after all. Un-credited director Vinterberg creates a perfect story for the stylistic impositions, a chaotic family event where the emotional rawness is only magnified by the lack of cinematic gloss.
Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1995)
In addition to providing the audience with a wonderfully prickly subject, director Terry Zwigoff has managed to make a fascinating documentary, wherein R. Crumb's guarded, enigmatic nature isn't so much cast off but rendered transparent by the unblinking camera.
Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1996)
The decade's best film, it traffics in equal parts dream, history, hallucinations, and iconography in sounding the death knell for the Western as we know it. The genre that made John Wayne a star is now hanging from the gallows, and watching DEAD MAN is like watching the Western's life flash before our eyes.
Exotica (Atom Egoyan, 1995)
Egoyan's obsessions with fractured time, pain, and memory have given us a number of wonderful works, but none so indelible as his portrait of the lives surrounding a Canadian gentleman's club. The bits and pieces of the lives we see in the film circle around until the climactic scene, where the film's key is poignantly, perfectly revealed.
La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)
Nobody makes long films like the French, and this one, at 4 hours, is plenty long. The secret is to allow time to fade into the background, to immerse yourself in the film and become caught up in its own rhythms. In the end, there is no more hypnotic film about the deliberate, frustrating and endlessly fascinating act of creation than LA BELLE NOISEUSE.
The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)
Not only the best film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar™ in the 90s, but also by far the best film directed by a woman this decade. Mindless superlatives aside, however, the film itself is a beautiful and wholly original vision of isolation, be it geographical or self-imposed, with wonderful performances and images that stick in your mind for days afterward.
Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (François Girard, 1994)
I've never been a fan of the conventional biopic; luckily, this one's as unconventional of a biopic as I've seen. Splintering the life of the great and eccentric pianist Gould into little bits, the film addresses the impossibility of complete insight into the subject's life, while nonetheless distilling his essence into a filmic form.
Trois Couleurs trilogy (Krzystzof Kieslowski, 1993-4)
As in his landmark DECALOGUE, the late, great Kieslowski captures all the psychological messiness of life in this, his final work. The wonder of the film is that it's not so much about how people believe in the principles of "liberty, equality, and fraternity", so much as how they strive for them without seeming to think about it, as part of their underlying natures. Kieslowski will be missed.
The War Zone (Tim Roth, 1999)
After the decade's misanthropic, whiny glimpses into suburban dysfunction, here was a film that called into question the underlying idea of family. In Roth's directorial debut, a family struggles with the idea of staying together in the wake of the father's abuse of his daughter. The film manages to be both poetic and heartbreaking, with haunting images which seem to comment on the plights of the characters. Unforgettable.
Honorable mentions: Breaking the Waves, Fallen Angels, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, JFK, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Monsieur Hire, The Player, Rushmore, Schindler's List, Topsy-Turvy
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hkoreeda
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Member: Paul Clark
Location: Ohio
Reviews written: 35
Trusted by: 9 members
About Me:
What's the polite term for "unemployed wannabe critic"?
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