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The 10 Best Films of 1990

These are the best films of 1990 as selected by Slant Magazine’s staff of film writers.

The 10 Best Films of 1990
Photo: 20th Century Fox

“By the current timetable of cultural recycling, pop artifacts tend to look their most dated—no longer fresh and new, but also not yet easily filed as products of their time—roughly 15 to 20 years following their initial conception.” So wrote Slant’s Eric Henderson in his intro to our list of the 100 Best Films of the 1990s. Five years after that list’s publication and we’re feeling, on the 16th anniversary of this site’s inception, a little nostalgic. Which is why, every day for the next two weeks, we’re looking back at one year from the 1990s, to celebrate the films—from the cerebral Iranian puzzle box, to the Hong Kong mixtape, to the American cine-savvy royale, with and without cheese—that inspired many of us to write about film in the first place.

Like we do today with our year-end lists, the year of U.S. theatrical distribution was for the most part used to determine what year a film belonged to. But in cases where a film took more than a year to reach America, the year of its first prominent theatrical engagement, either in its country of origin or beyond, was used. And given the abundance of riches we had to choose from, prior to each Top 10 is a list of 10 honorable mentions—the majority of which were shortlisted for our 100 Best Films of the 1990s back in 2012 but didn’t garner enough support to make the final list. Ed Gonzalez

Honorable Mention: Edward Scissorhands, The Garden, Jacob’s Ladder, The Killer, King of New York, Miami Blues, Pump Up the Volume, Santa Sangre, Trust, and Wild at Heart


The 10 Best Films of 1990

10. Total Recall

The 21st-century America of Total Recall has little in the way of a visual culture: sports, holographic tennis instructors, calming wall-to-wall screensavers, and an inescapable network of TVs broadcasting commercials and rigged news. What Rekall Incorporated offers is a kind of evolved cinema. The company cooks up psychic holidays and escapist fantasies that are realer than the real thing, totally collapsing the virtual into the unreliable mesh of memory—the ultimate Dickian pseudo reality. Fitting then that the film’s emancipating Übermensch is lashed, Ludvico-style, into the Rekall operating chair like a slack-jawed viewer strapped into a movie theater seat. Paul Verhoeven’s first real-deal stab at massively budgeted, star-vehicle blockbuster cinema takes roots as a bottom-up burlesque of its own form. John Semley


The 10 Best Films of 1990

9. Nouvelle Vague

Post-1968, Jean-Luc Godard’s work becomes a tangled web of cinematic, political, religious, and aesthetic allusions, cathedrals of self-reflexivity spoken in a tongue invented and arguably understood solely by the director himself. For its part, Nouvelle Vague stands at or near the pinnacle of Godard’s mature period, extending a perhaps unintentional streak of embarking on each new decade with a work of helpful thematic disclosure, a tact he’s tended to spend much of the subsequent years editing and expanding into hyper-sensory audio/visual explorations. Shot in and around the Swiss countryside he calls home, the film is noticeably rich and dramatic in a manner befitting its personalized origins. Ostensibly a depiction of the underhanded dealings of bourgeois society and, in particular, a young woman haunted by the specter of a man she may have once murdered, the film uses these fairly conventional trappings as a means toward reducing the narrative to a base text, which in this case amounts to an interlocking grid of literary interpolations. Nouvelle Vague, then, may be something of a coded language, but it’s a bracing and beautiful realization of one artist’s splintered past and uncertain future, a new wave all its own. Jordan Cronk

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The 10 Best Films of 1990

8. Gremlins 2: The New Batch

After rampaging through the American dream in his original Gremlins, Joe Dante set his cartoon anarchists free in the headquarters of a multinational corporation for the sequel. While the first film’s creatures functioned as, per Jonathan Rosenbaum, “a free-floating metaphor,” here they’re explicitly the giddy vengeance of the disenfranchised: Their introduction into Clamp Tower is the indirect result of the corporation’s tacky Chinatown development project. Dante, as ever, spins off from this central conceit to poke fun at everything in sight, from Turner and Trump (embodied in Daniel Clamp, with his insatiable hunger for real-estate development and colorized classic films) to narrative convention (the film ceases to even make an effort at plotting following a brief reflexive interlude in which the Gremlins break the projector and Hulk Hogan pops up to scare them into restarting the show) to himself (there are multiple discussions of the completely illogical rules for the Mogwai laid out by Gremlins). While Dante may have made more conceptually and formally audacious films in the ’90s, Gremlins 2: The New Batch is still filmmaking that’s as smart as it is fun. Phil Coldiron


The 10 Best Films of 1990

7. To Sleep with Anger

Charles Burnett sketches the details of the lives of Gideon (Paul Butler) and his family, bridging theatrical dialogue, portentous omens, and presentational acting with a grace that’s so masterful as to appear effortless, capturing enough life and subtext for several films. A boy practices his trumpet next door to Gideon’s home, blowing awkwardly and irritating everyone in his periphery, including other boys who ridicule his struggles. Pigeons fly into the sky in rapturous slow motion. Gideon argues with his wife, Suzie (Mary Alice), about one of their sons. By the time that Harry (Danny Glover) arrives at Gideon and Suzie’s doorstep, Burnett has carefully established this family as a group of decent yet uncertain people who’re haunted by the legacy of American slavery. Chuck Bowen


The 10 Best Films of 1990

6. Central Park

The variety and sweep of pre-Giuliani New York are on vivid display in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary via the microcosm of the eponymous expanse. One of a handful of essential films shot or released in the late 1980s and early ’90s that take the city’s evolution from drug-addled, subculture-rife urban sphere to obsessively regulated, Middle America-friendly metropolis as either text or subtext, Wiseman’s film deserves to be considered the quintessential New York movie of its moment—or perhaps any moment. Communists hold rallies in the park, an eccentric man teaches Shakespearean elocution, people roller skate, while in nearby buildings the Central Park Conservancy discusses how to regulate bike-riding and local residents weigh the merits of building a new tennis clubhouse. The conclusions are inescapable, though in Wiseman’s continued refusal of explicit authorial commentary, they’re left for the viewer to stumble across on his or her own. The changing conception of the city may make things more cosmetic and safer, but it threatens to efface the unique vibrancy of the town that is the film’s true subject and which has its glorious moment, in all its diversity and wonder, across the three unforgettable hours of Wiseman’s masterpiece. Andrew Schenker


The 10 Best Films of 1990

5. White Hunter, Black Heart

A gut-busting takedown, an elegantly articulated anecdote, a pithy critique of intolerance, a shocking stab of misogyny, some expertly ratcheted dramatic tension, and a handful of infinitely quotable one-liners—all somehow contained within a single scene in Clint Eastwood’s White Hunter, Black Heart, a show-stopping centerpiece which finds Eastwood himself, as a thinly veiled John Huston stand-in, taking a buxom blonde to task after she makes a vile anti-Semitic remark. It’s a standout number that steals the show, but it’s the scene immediately following, in which Eastwood’s John Wilson cooly drops a racial epithet before diving headlong into a drunken fistfight, that most clearly elucidates the film’s central theme. A sophisticated interrogation of hardlined American machismo, White Hunter, Black Heart is about our tendency to romanticize emphatic brutality, how we find the distorted charm of rogues seductive when we ought to be repulsed. Deeper still, we see the seeds of Western imperialism scattered across the African wild, apparent in the way Eastwood’s smarmy, likeable thug imposes himself on the land and on its resources. That the hero here is a director shows surprising self-awareness; that Eastwood cast himself in the role, confronting decades of influence and undermining his persona, is a stroke of genius. Calum Marsh

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The 10 Best Films of 1990

4. Miller’s Crossing

“Friends is a mental state,” sneers Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), an ambitious Italian gangster battling for control of an unnamed East Coast city in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1930s-set Miller’s Crossing. This casually threatening statement has deeply ironic and philosophical undertones, indicative of this crime film’s nasty worldview and cutting sense of humor. Johnny’s target is Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), a wise-talking gambler who pivots into survival mode when Irish patriarch Leo (Albert Finney) kicks him to the curb over a woman. Much of the film deals with the untrustworthy nature of friendship, how it can be used to manipulate, deceive, and ultimately destroy. The Coens have always had the gift of gab, and in Miller’s Crossing their dapper men and slinky women unload period-era colloquialisms as if their mouths were automatic weapons. But the film’s most lasting moments are dialogue-less explosions of revenge and solace, the most famous being the classic “Danny Boy” sequence where a nimble and ruthless Leo dispatches four armed men with a Tommy gun. Like the Coens, the man’s a true artist with his weapon of choice. Glenn Heath Jr.


The 10 Best Films of 1990

3. Metropolitan

“The cha cha is no more ridiculous than life itself,” says debonair but “tiresome” Manhattan socialite Nick Smith (Christopher Eigeman), and neither are debutante balls, black-tie tuxedos, the tenets of Fourierism, or life among the “urban haute bourgeoisie,” a loose cluster of affluent intellectuals content to drink, date, and sling clever barbs back and forth for hours. For sure, it’s all rather droll (“I don’t read books; I prefer good literary criticism,” and so forth), but perhaps less apparent are the depths of melancholy coursing through it, occupying its silences, filling the negative space between witticisms. Tom Townsend, U.H.B. outlier and our gateway into this world, finds an abandoned box of childhood toys beside his father’s front steps, the loaded bric-à-brac of an adolescence lost and never to be regained, and in one wistful look there’s more longing and sadness than in the whole of the dozens of refined indie comedies Metropolitan inspired. Marsh


The 10 Best Films of 1990

2. The Decalogue

A 10-part series on the Ten Commandants might sound like a tedious chore, but Krzysztof Kieślowski’s routinely heartbreaking series of parables is less interested in the faithful application of these rules for living than all the shades of grey they fail to account for, turning each aphorism into a complicated moral puzzle. Scuffling around the darkened corners of the human soul, they present ethical behavior as a spectrum that lacks obvious definitions, a confusion The Decalogue tempers through the insistent bellwether of human decency. From the story of a man skipping out on his family to help an ex-lover find her missing husband on Christmas Eve in part three, to the tale of a woman plotting to abduct her own child in part seven, Kieślowski eschews easy answers and neat conclusions, filtering all the action through the shared location of a single housing block, presented as an inter-linked system of sad stories waiting to be told. Jesse Cataldo


The 10 Best Films of 1990

1. Goodfellas

The heir apparent to The Godfather II, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (co-penned by Nicholas Pileggi, based on his 1986 book Wiseguy) is a blast of nostalgia, thrills, and censure, all of it swirling around the true-life tale of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), a hood born and bred in Brooklyn who slowly works his way up the mafia ladder to be a bigwig before, inevitably, crashing and burning. Scorsese’s style here is so exhilarating that—as with his famous tracking shot of Hill entering a nightclub—it’s become part of the modern cinematic playbook, just as Joe Pesci’s “What do you mean I’m funny?” rant has, alongside Robert De Niro’s Taxi Driver monologues, grafted itself onto the pop-movie psyche. Bolstered by Liotta’s ambitious ruthlessness, De Niro’s snake-like menace, and Pesci’s loose-cannon ferocity, the film sells crime as sexy and exciting before devolving into a speed-rush nightmare of paranoia, betrayal, and failure—in the process setting the template for the legion of gangster-cinema knock-offs that followed in its wake. Nick Schager

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