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The 10 Best Films of 1992

These are the best films of 1992 as selected by Slant Magazine’s staff of film writers.

The 10 Best Films of 1992
Photo: Warner Bros.

“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: Candyman, Dead Alive, Europa, Light Sleeper, The Living End, The Match Factory Girl, One False Move, Rebels of the Neon God, The Stolen Children, and Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America


The 10 Best Films of 1992

10. The Last of the Mohicans

Considering Michael Mann’s recent decade-long foray into the realm of frenetic digital filmmaking, it’s easy to forget the director once specialized in sweeping genre spectacles like The Last of the Mohicans. Mann’s ravishingly kinetic and romantic adaptation of the classic James Fenimore Cooper novel envisions the dawn of American democracy in a deeply felt love affair between an embattled British woman (Madeline Stowe) and a colonial backwoodsman (Daniel Day-Lewis) raised to manhood by a Mohican father. Their burgeoning relationship develops within the context of the bloody French and Indian War of 1757, a volatile and dirty conflict that spawned the rise of guerilla warfare in the new world. Mann’s precise battle sequences begin in epic long shot, only to cut in closer to the carnage with each tomahawk swipe and musket shot. The close-contact action is always swept along by the film’s beautifully fluid score, which feels elementally connected to the dense forests and rolling hills of the Hudson River Valley. It all leads to a profound and deeply cinematic climax during which two characters’ devastating mutual sacrifice feels like the birth of a nation, and the demise of something far more spiritual. Glenn Heath Jr.


The 10 Best Films of 1992

9. Glengarry Glenn Ross

It looks as though the unforgiving top-down system of quotas and steak knives and deadbeat leads has chewed up these tired and ever-weary salesman, ready to spit them out after years of dedicated service, all because, in the immortal words of Alec Baldwin’s brass-balled inspirational speaker, “a loser is a loser,” but the joke is that some guys just can’t cut it. The waft of desperation hangs around Jack Lemmon’s has-been schleper of land, permeating every word of his pitch, that affected put-on smile and plasticised ’50s charm almost painful to endure. But through the torrents of rain outside and Mamet-speak inside there are glimmers of light and vitality and talent: Witness Pacino, the poet laureate of sales-speak, as he zeroes in on his mark, the grace of the approach a thing of beauty. It’s a con, but we’re drawn to it for the same reason we find all cons seductive: The game, when played well, is an appreciable art. And we love to see people lose. Calum Marsh

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The 10 Best Films of 1992

8. The Player

I lost it at the movies long before seeing The Player, but this impeccably crafted poison love letter to Hollywood made me look at them differently. Robert Altman’s bemused condemnation of a world that wants to know only itself, where no private jab stays private and a lunch is a negotiation for status, is ultimately our own. We love these wolves because they gave us some of richest cine-memories of our lives; even their most absurd pitches (“It’s Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman!”) speak to a desire to please audiences. But they repulse us at the same time, because they treat their moviemaking license as sociopathic triumphalism. There are references in this heavily coded satire I’m still unlocking, and for every wink and nod that continues to strain for reason (the delivery boy who knows Absolute Beginners but mistakes Alan Rudolph for Martin Scorsese) there are a dozen others that still send me to the moon, such as Detective Avery’s Freaks-referencing grilling of Griffin Mill. In one of the funniest, most sardonic scenes the movies have ever seen, an interrogation as calculated and condescending as some of the worst movies Hollywood have ever given us, even the good guys become wolves. One of us, indeed. Ed Gonzalez


The 10 Best Films of 1992

7. Lessons of Darkness

In repurposing footage of burning Kuwait oil fields in the aftermath of the Gulf War, Werner Herzog crafted a stunning vision of apocalypse that doubles as a commentary on madness and the inexorable nature of human folly that allows for the perpetuation of armed conflict. Although long stretches of Lessons of Darkness are given to mind-blowing aerial shots of the decimated landscape set epically to Wagner and Mahler, Herzog also affixed a minimal narrative to the movie, about a planet destroyed by nuclear war, a story the director relates in his legendary Germanic drawl. Marking the most perfect synthesis of fiction and documentary in the Herzog oeuvre, the movie draws its power from the interplay between the two modes, bringing us back to ground level (both literally and metaphorically) as the film stops to listen to the real-life testimony of two women who’ve suffered horrible fates as a result of the human cruelty that finds its greatest expression in war and for which the director finds an astonishing visual correlative in the flames spewing from the black pools of oil which the firemen reignite, if only to have something to put out again. Andrew Schenker


The 10 Best Films of 1992

6. Life, and Nothing More

In Life, and Nothing More, Abbas Kiarostami charts the subtle human complexities and traumas within a region devastated by natural disaster, quietly developing theme by focusing intensely on the patterns of ambient sound. The lean plot consists of a film director and his son navigating the devastated roads of Guilan, Iran after an earthquake has left the region riddled with broken infrastructure. Crushed cars, massive boulders stripped from mountainsides, and deep crevasses help realize the mise-en-scène. Kiarostami’s protagonists experience countless moments of eerie reflection while considering their own survival, usually during long tracking shots that snake through the rubble-strewn roads with effortless precision. Here, Kiarostami bravely reflects on his own relationship with the non-professional actors/people he so often depicts, specifically calling attention to the segments of everyday experience that his medium of choice often ignores. The brilliant final image, without the hindrance of words or rhetoric, sums up Life, and Nothing More, and perfectly in one fell swoop as tragedy, comedy, hope, and fulfillment. Heath Jr.


The 10 Best Films of 1992

5. Unforgiven

Clint Eastwood had spent the better part of a decade investigating and deconstructing his iconic Man With No Name/Dirty Harry persona when he made Unforgiven, which remains—20 years, and countless thematically similar films, later—his ultimate statement on the ramifications of violence. Again strapping on his gun belt and saddling up for a tale of Wild West vengeance and regret, Eastwood assumes the role of an aged outlaw convinced to shrug off retirement and reteam with his old partner (Morgan Freeman) to help avenge a whore victimized in a town run by a wicked sheriff (Gene Hackman). Those three actors lend the material a gravity that’s furthered by Eastwood’s concise, unfussy direction, which places the focus on his protagonist’s moral struggle with his own brutal past while also allowing tension to mount slowly, until, in the wake of a murder, it erupts in a conclusion of explosive intensity that only augments the final, overarching sense that violence, even when justified and necessary, never proves to be a means to any sort of positive end. Nick Schager

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The 10 Best Films of 1992

4. Bad Lieutenant

The crime at the center of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant sounds so sleazily sensationalistic that it borders on exploitation material, yet it was apparently “ripped from the headlines” of ’80s NYC: A young nun is raped at the altar by two local hoodlums, who proceed to vandalize and further profane the church. As anyone familiar with Ferrara’s Ms. 45 will doubtless recall, looks can be dangerously deceptive, so it comes as no surprise that Bad Lieutenant is at bottom an unabashed morality play, albeit one so steeped in degradation and willful self-destruction, epitomized in scenes like the notorious traffic-stop shakedown, that it was easy for contemporary viewers (those, at least, not already daunted by its NC-17 rating) to overlook its redemptive aspects. As the eponymous corrupt cop, Harvey Keitel burrows down to the marrow of his character in a performance so fierce and fearless that it’s often downright discomforting to behold. Keitel’s climactic showdown at the scene of the crime with a hallucinated Christ (“Where were you? You rat fuck!”) stands as a prime example of laying one’s soul bare on celluloid, long before the actor codified his regimen of tics and twitches (inarticulate yowls, gut-shot grimacing) into by-the-numbers emotional shorthand. Budd Wilkins


The 10 Best Films of 1992

3. Husbands and Wives

A chronicle of a split foretold, Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives catalogues the insecurities that rock a marriage when another dissolves. Sally (Judy Davis) and Jack (Sydney Pollack) announce their breakup, and Judy (Mia Farrow) elevates the pair’s amicable decision to the level of tragedy. And when Sally’s husband, Gabe (Allen), falls for a student who loves older and men and looks for reason (read: God) in Time magazine, something close to tragedy ensues. The film is shot like a documentary, though Allen’s camera doesn’t observe marital chaos so much as it queasily instigates it. The thoughtful framing, as in a scene in which the viewer adopts Gabe’s point of view as he and Judy spar over a diaphragm, is a paranoiac’s gaze, and it’s unparalleled in Allen’s canon, matched only by the dialogue’s funny, sad, often depressing insights. Allen understands the emotionally fragile, confusing period after a breakup: the jealousy of an ex-lover finding love with another too soon; the desire to return to an ex-lover when a new lover disappoints; and the comfort we find in a loveless but comfortable state of constancy. Metabolically, it’s everyone’s rhythm. Gonzalez


The 10 Best Films of 1992

2. The Long Day Closes

The culmination of the autobiographical process begun in his famous trilogy of short films and continued in what remains his masterpiece, Distant Voices, Still Lives, Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes edged the British filmmaker toward slightly more approachable territory. With its golden, sparkling light and obvious emotional entry point in young Bud (Leigh McCormack as a young Davies), it’s much more inviting than the muted, diffuse world of Distant Voices. As in the earlier film, and his latest (fully fictional) feature, The Deep Blue Sea, Davies uses a sort of sliding-frame approach to narrative, constructing discrete scenes of personal and social life (the conversation between the two is Davies’s great concern) and stringing them fluidly together through both sound and camera movement. If The Long Day Closes doesn’t strike me as quite as emotionally perceptive as Distant Voices, I can’t deny that it features the pinnacle of his formal approach, a four-minute sequence set to Debby Reynolds’s “Tammy” that ties the entirety of life for an 11-year-old boy in 1950s Liverpool—play, cinema, church, school—into one modestly grand movement of the camera from right to left. Phil Coldiron


The 10 Best Films of 1992

1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

The prospect of a movie tying up the world of Twin Peaks following its ratings-driven implosion and apocalyptically open-ended finale offered a shot at critical and commercial redemption to everyone involved. Instead, David Lynch filmed a prequel, one that could only end in the brutal rape and murder of Laura Palmer, the mysterious crime that set the series moving. Moreover, a prequel that relegated Agent Dale Cooper, the show’s most popular character, to a strange aside featuring David Bowie, and took an hour to even introduce the residents of Twin Peaks. This opening, setting a more immediately paranoid tone against the show’s aw-shucks surrealism, follows Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland as they investigate the murder of a drifter named Teresa Banks, a process that leads them to dancing cousins, gruff waitresses, asshole local cops, lipstick graffiti, and an even more haggard than usual Harry Dean Stanton. When the film finally arrives in Twin Peaks and Angelo Badalamenti’s iconic title song ambles onto the soundtrack, it plays as a tremendously dark joke, the relief of getting to what we all came for barely masking the awful reality of what that actually is. What follows is the most terrifying hour and a half in American cinema, David Lynch’s suburban Inferno. Coldiron

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