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The 10 Best Films of 1991

These are the best films of 1991 as selected by Slant Magazine’s staff of film writers.

The 10 Best Films of 1991
Photo: Fine Line Features

“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: Chameleon Street, Days of Being Wild, The Double Life of Veronique, La Femme Nikita, Hangin’ with the Homeboys, JFK, Life Is Sweet, Madonna: Truth or Dare, Poison, and The Silence of the Lambs


The 10 Best Films of 1991

10. Naked Lunch

Anyone who classified William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch as “unfilmable” clearly didn’t have David Cronenberg in mind when they read it, because the raw material of that gonzo epic couldn’t be more up his alley: bug powder, talking typewriters, sadistic doctors, orgies-cum-bloodbaths, talking assholes, bountiful supplies of heroin, children “watching with bestial curiosity” as “flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony,” the lot of it a bizarre mélange of grotesqueries and nightmare visions inflected with the insight of Freud and a bit of folkloric William Tell grandeur. And so Cronenberg, naturally, bursts the whole thing apart from inside, transforming a trip through the mind of Burroughs into an oblique biopic about him, plopping the author into the text and letting him run wild. The film takes symbols and words and characters from the novel and imagines speculative real-world corollaries, drawing a through line from the drug-induced hallucination to the mundane thing that produced it. Calum Marsh


The 10 Best Films of 1991

9. Point Break

Embracing and crystallizing countless macho-genre tropes in a way that’s simultaneously amusing and awesome, Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break provides the same type of high-octane thrills sought by its story’s crew of president mask-wearing, extreme sports-loving bank robbers. Those villains are led by Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi, a surfer guru whose new age-y ethos (and long, flowing blond locks) are so inviting that even former football star turned undercover cop Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves)—sporting, without question, the best protagonist name in the history of action cinema—can’t fully resist his charm. Throw in Gary Busey as Utah’s sidekick, Lori Petty as the girl that woos Utah, and a host of robbery, skydiving, and wave-riding sequences that Bigelow helms with clean, forceful vigor, and it’s a film whose sillier elements find a way to coexist with its legitimately kick-ass action—never more so than in a superb foot chase through back alleys that concludes with an unsuccessful Utah firing his gun into the air and screaming in inadvertently hilarious frustration. Nick Schager

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The 10 Best Films of 1991

8. La Belle Noiseuse

In a career consisting almost solely of highly taxing and demanding works, La Belle Noiseuse would paradoxically prove to be Jacques Rivette’s most immediate and accessible film, a brisk four-hour sprawl of simmering emotion and artistic benediction. At once a celebration of the love of art and the art of love, the film explores in arrestingly simple fashion a series of interpersonal ruptures provoked by a single, otherwise harmless decision. When Marianne is volunteered by her boyfriend to pose for a respected, aging painter, her initial reluctance is temporarily alleviated by friends and acquaintances before a series of extended modeling sequences turn from unspoken tension to psychological foreplay (“I want everything. The blood, the fire, the ice. All that is in your body…I want the invisible”) to compassionate and deeply affecting spiritual sympathy between artist and subject. Rivette stages these passages with a patient, reverent touch, allowing desires to brood while outside relationships strain from unforeseen conflict. An unassuming, quietly shattering work, La Belle Noiseuse examines passion at the level of art, yielding passions as lasting for its characters as they are for its audience. Jordan Cronk


The 10 Best Films of 1991

7. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

The slick, digitized T-1000 to the 1984 original’s grungy, analogous exoskeleton, Terminator 2: Judgment Day set the standard for modern Hollywood’s F/X-driven mega-productions and cemented James Cameron’s dystopian vision as modern science-fiction’s saga par excellence. The 1991 sequel is best remembered for the groundbreaking CGI and puppetry work that brought its liquid metal villain to life, but all that cybernetic glamour would be for naught without the film’s overreaching humanitarian concerns: the insistence that, even at the brink of self-induced extinction, mankind is still worth saving. Replicating the chase-movie structure of its predecessor (and brilliantly echoing that film in many telling details), the equally breathless T2 suggests a maestro at the helm of a full orchestra, conducting the whole exhilarating piece without a single note out of place. The film itself is something of a perfect machine, albeit one with a beating, bleeding heart to go along with its relentless apocalyptic swell, the central, unlikely nuclear family anchoring the action with genuine emotional heft, saving the world and earning our tears in the process. Rob Humanick


The 10 Best Films of 1991

6. Barton Fink

Enter the headspace of Barton Fink (John Turturro). One of the Coen brothers’ more oblique mash-ups, Barton Fink combines classical Hollywood satire, healthy doses of surreal imagery, and psychological horror straight out of Roman Polanski’s “apartment trilogy.” (Fortunately for the Coens, Polanski headed the jury at Cannes that year, clinching them the Palme D’Or.) Drawing on the experiences of lefty playwright Clifford Odets during his sojourn in 1940s Tinseltown, Barton Fink adumbrates that old saw about commerce versus creativity with ready wit and a savage eye. (As Tony Shaloub’s harried mid-level producer phrases it over lunch at the commissary: “Throw a rock in here, you’ll hit a writer. And do me a favor, Fink. Throw it hard.”) On another level, how better for the Coens to overcome a case of writer’s block than writing about a writer suffering from writer’s block? Precisely that sort of meta-circularity is emblematic of their working method. Then there’s the doppelganger-like doubling consistently established between Barton Fink and fellow Hotel Earle resident Charlie Meadows (Coen axiom John Goodman). Indeed, a shamelessly psychological reading of the film would posit Charlie as some kind of projection or manifestation of Barton’s violently roiling unconscious. Budd Wilkins


The 10 Best Films of 1991

5. Paris Is Burning

Some documentaries explore their subjects with the rigor of an anthropological study, inviting audiences to peer into lives or a system like detached impartial observers. Paris Is Burning, by contrast, plunges us into the world of ball culture like it’s an inclusive party to which we’re welcome to belong. The ever-increasing remoteness of the time and place of its setting lends the film the necessary significance of a historical document, informally ratifying its status as a snapshot of a subculture’s golden age before the decline, but its portrait of drag, balls, and voguing (and the legendary practitioners of same) isn’t articulated from a remove. This film exists, crucially, well within the borders of the world it celebrates, joyously flaunting its triumphs and touchingly sharing its pain—and though it often brushes up against tragedy, the vision of life it offers is practically utopic. Marsh

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The 10 Best Films of 1991

4. The Lovers on the Bridge

Whatever your take on Léos Carax’s brashly overdriven pastiche style, or more specifically this scruffed-up reimagining of L’Atalante (and about a million other things), it’s hard to deny the irrepressible grandeur of the scenes where the director truly commits himself, rocketing into inspired stylistic tangents. The Lovers on the Bridge contains the most singularly transcendent of these Caraxian moments (the unbelievably orchestrated bridge dance/water-ski interlude), in addition to a host of others that defiantly stand out, from Denis Lavant’s fire-swallowing performance to his destruction of a procession of subway posters, a surging sequence that culminates with his deformed dragon of a protagonist setting a man ablaze. A collection of gaudy set pieces strung together by a thin connective tissue of film references and nihilistic romance, Carax’s film carries the ragged banner of the New Wave, looking fitfully to the future while keeping one foot in the past. Jesse Cataldo


The 10 Best Films of 1991

3. My Own Private Idaho

Its drug-fueled portrayal of queer experience notwithstanding, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho might be the perfect cinematic time capsule for 1990s aimlessness, universal in its details, itself something of a collection of artifacts and relics not unlike those referenced and relied on by its characters—souls in search of an identity, some of them simply lost without a clue. The filmmaker’s third feature revels in the weird, the spontaneous, and the unlikely: The encroaching future is regarded with amusement in folksy time-lapse transitions (the theremin adds a dash of sci-fi to the “anything goes” proceedings), roads seem to have faces while buildings fall from the sky, and Keanu Reeves gives a turn of calculated introspection and distant coolness. Van Sant’s search for the self is expressed most fully through River Phoenix’s performance as a narcoleptic prostitute (a turn indicative of great but tragically unfulfilled things to come), but similarly introspective is the filmmaker’s scintillating cultural potpourri, drawing on everything from Eisenstein to Shakespeare to The Simpsons. Humanick


The 10 Best Films of 1991

2. A Brighter Summer Day

Shaping the petty squabbles of youth gangs and the domestic woes of members’ families into an operatic cycle of people in exile, A Brighter Summer Day slowly accumulates its small individual parts into an epic story of the perils of displacement, with the suffering of the film’s parents passed down to their confused, embittered children. Forced out of their Chinese homeland by the communist revolution, the adults in Edward Yang’s film spend their time pining for their lost land, waiting for old scars to heal and adjusting to a new way of life. Their children, born into exile, spend their days roaming the streets, recreating the struggles of the past through brawls and territorial disputes, assembling into gangs for connection and shelter. Ten years before his equally, if not as nakedly thrilling, Yi Yi, Yang masterfully employs period music, neatly bisected compositions, and oppressively lurking shadows to show how a small flame of frustration can flare up into a terrible act of violence. Cataldo


The 10 Best Films of 1991

1. Close-Up

No one but Abbas Kiarostami seemed capable of recognizing the political provocation of Hossein Sabzian’s affront to realism in cinema when he took on Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s namesake. At its simplest, Close-Up tackles Sabzian’s moral justification for taking on Makhmalbaf’s identity (for him, it arose from his love of the arts), but the film’s genius isn’tt that it suggests that there’s no legal or moral justification for Sabzian’s actions, but that Sabzian’s defense is impossible to fathom unless the spectator can share the man’s passion for art as cultural and intellectual emancipator. Just when you think you’ve figured the film out, a credit sequence challenges, blurs, and complicates any perception the spectator may have of realist cinema: Close-Up, cinema’s definitive film-on-film primer, may be based on a true story, but its actors are all playing themselves. Even if one doesn’t share Sabzian’s passion for the purity and urgency of his country’s cinema, one understands it, how taking Makhmalbaf’s name meant becoming part of an elite group of men responsible for indoctrinating people to art and, as a result, the world. Kiarostami, a man without judgment, sees in this story both the glory and sadness of a man who must pretend to be another man in order to be seen and heard. Ed Gonzalez

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