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The 10 Best Films of 1994

These are the best films of 1994 as selected by Slant Magazine’s staff of film writers.

The 10 Best Films of 1994
Photo: Miramax

“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: Arizona Dream, Barcelona, Bhaji on the Beach, The Blue Kite, Casa de Lava, A Confucian Confusion, Heavenly Creatures, Latcho Drum, Natural Born Killers, and What Happened Was…


The 10 Best Films of 1994

10. Cronos

Cronos has the sense of play that characterizes Guillermo del Toro’s American productions like Blade II and the Hellboy features. In these films, del Toro isn’t pressured to dramatize all of Spain’s collected weight of atrocity, and so he’s freed to inform his hunger for mythology and monster movies and literature with audaciously amusing perversity. Cronos lacks the polish of later del Toro works, and it’s all the more lively and moving for its rawness—for the way its shoestring surreal-ness corresponds loosely and tellingly with the protagonists’ desires. Chuck Bowen


The 10 Best Films of 1994

9. Vanya on 42nd Street

The agitated emotions of Anton Chekhov’s personages become veritable landscapes in the hands of André Gregory’s assembly—entities as “readable” as they are squirmily unwatchable. Larry Pine as Astrov, for example, is noxiously vacant, shriveling under a lifetime of guilt behind the scalpel and seeking to save man instead by detachedly planting trees; he encompasses both a farce and a tragedy on his own. (Chekhov was, himself, of course, a frustrated man of medicine.) Furthermore, since the performance takes place in the dilapidated, pre-Disney renovated Amsterdam Theater, once the pride of Broadway, there’s a sense in which the actors become solemn, thankless “stewards” of a now-barren dramatic tradition, just as Vanya works the soil of his brother-in-law’s estate in vain. Insofar as the film Vanya on 42nd Street documents this effort, it’s a kind of shrugging elegy for an urban-cultural era that, by the ’90s, was long gone. Joseph Jon Lanthier

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The 10 Best Films of 1994

8. Ed Wood

Tim Burton, an imaginatively unhinged visual prankster who occasionally moonlights as a major director, never before or ever again exhibited the astonishing range of talent he displayed in Ed Wood. The film is an example of that most rewarding sort of artistic mastery: It feels effortless, and there’s no deadening sense of “craft” that often kills Oscar winners. The tone, in particular, walks a fine tightrope between comedy and despair that never falters, which is notably impressive in a scene in which the faded star Lugosi (Martin Landau) pleas to Wood (Johnny Depp) to allow him to kill them both off in a blaze of intended glory. Bowen


The 10 Best Films of 1994

7. Calendar

Repetitive by design, Atom Egoyan’s precisely structured chamber film has an experimental constitution but a romantic heart, positioned as a direct conduit to the piercing pain of loss. Playing out across an economic 74 minutes, it hops between two discretely divided sections: 12 scenes set amid the quiet splendor of the Armenian countryside, interspersed with 12 set inside the cramped apartment of the unnamed protagonist (played by Egoyan himself). Employing a static camera, the film depends entirely on the placement of people and objects within its carefully defined tableaux. In the Armenia sequences, a flirtatious guide instigates the growing rift between Egoyan’s character and his wife as he works on a calendar shoot of old churches. In the home scenes, dinner dates with a dozen women are sabotaged by the intercession of a conveniently located phone and some inconvenient answering-machine messages, a scenario that grows more acute through repetition. Imagining both national and personal history as inescapable specters exerting a marked influence on our current lives, Calendar is a pointed inquisition on the eternal toll taken by the past. Jesse Cataldo


The 10 Best Films of 1994

6. Red

Red, the final chapter of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s homage to the French tricolor flag, was perhaps always destined to be the most striking of the three films; red, after all, is the most innately dramatic of the three colors. Coming off the heels of Blue and White, the film is particularly bracing, and the longer you consider its self-reflexive and labyrinthine self-awareness, the more Kieślowski and cinematographer Piotr Sobociński’s exquisite chromatography astounds. As in all of Kieślowski’s films, his microcosmic scrutiny of the world, sans judgment, suggests all things happen at once at a sub-cosmic level, embodying the notion of the filmmaker as a loving god. An opening phone call that echoes Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” sets the tone for this kinetically charged investigation of the spectrum of morality, a fitting swan song for a filmmaker intent on going out with a bang. Near-death experiences and unlikely friendships are just the springboards for his final gospel (Kieślowski would retire after this film, dying but 22 months after it premiered), and in Irene Jacobs’s soul-wrestling performance as Valentine, Red finds the necessarily enigmatic, literally hyperbolic figure on which to project its richly multifaceted metaphor of choice. Rob Humanick


The 10 Best Films of 1994

5. Bitter Moon

Roman Polanski’s 1992 epic of erotic obsession, jealousy, and control was not only a return to form for a director who wasn’t particularly productive during the 1980s, but a career-defining film for the kink-minded auteur. Presented as a lurid story narrated by a wheelchair-bound American (Peter Coyote) to a honeymooning Brit (Hugh Grant) aboard a cruise, the film mercilessly dissects Polanski’s signature themes as he presents a story of a wealthy U.S. national living in Paris, falling in love with a lovely French woman, indulging in erotic play of all kinds, becoming bored, treating the woman miserably, and, finally, becoming her physical and psychic captive. There’s enough material in the story-within-a-story to fuel two feature films and the teller spares no detail, but this is just the setting to an even more turbulent course of events that plays with and picks apart notions of American vulgarity, British reticence, and French eroticism. In its unflinching look at the fractured extremes of human desire and behavior, Bitter Moon is high art disguised as sensationalistic trash. Andrew Schenker

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The 10 Best Films of 1994

4. Chungking Express

Stylish, romantic, and self-consciously cool, Chungking Express is like an impressionistic watercolor hung on the wall of a trendy dive bar: It’s a taste of the foreign art house for hip domestic crowds still acquiring a taste for it, and it remains Wong Kar-wai’s most widely popular import by far (courtesy at least in part of Quentin Tarantino, whose Rolling Thunder arm of Miramax helped introduce it to North American audiences). Its surfaces, of course, are enormously seductive, the frame fit to burst with the vibrancy and restlessness of free jazz, but it’s Chungking Express’s generous, sentimental spirit that makes it more lastingly resonant. A fleet, delirious love story of the highest order, its major heart is ultimately proof positive that a slight film needn’t be a minor one. Calum Marsh


The 10 Best Films of 1994

3. Hoop Dreams

The ’90s saw an influx of films set in American ghettos, and at least three notable ones were filmed in Chicago: Candyman played on audiences’ fears of miscegenation and the areas of cities where they’d never venture into; Public Housing traced the complex relations between poor residents and the government supporting them; and Hoop Dreams marvelously captured the hearts and souls of two poor African-American families through their sons’ aspirations of Nike-sponsored basketball glory. We take it for granted in today’s digital world, but filmmakers Steve James, Peter Gilbert, and Frederick Marx broke ground by filming on video (which, over the five-year production, visibly evolved from Beta to Beta SP), a financial necessity that bolsters the doc’s striking rawness. Culled from footage of young Arthur Agee and William Gates, NBA hopefuls who must try and overcome the constrictions of their disadvantaged class, Hoop Dreams brims with an astonishing wealth of material that’s both heartbreaking and uplifting—and the way events unfold over the film’s longitudinal-study span defies human writing capacity (Stuart Klawans famously quipped that the script was written by God). This is the standard to which all socially conscious documentaries are compared. Kalvin Henely


The 10 Best Films of 1994

2. Pulp Fiction

Accept no substitute. Jackie Brown may very well be the greater film: pleasure-giving, tender, coolly assured, yet impossibly delicate. But Pulp Fiction seems like a chapter heading in a massive tome on the history of the cinema. Quentin Tarantino’s influences are well-catalogued, of course, earning him praise and condescending dismissal from various, breast-beating quarters of the critical world. For fans like me, there’s “before Pulp Fiction” and “after.” It didn’t invent cinephilia, obviously, but it seemed to revitalize it and recruit from the younger generation in large numbers. Lament fanboy culture all you like, or decry the “movies aren’t great anymore, only cool” phenomenon whose DNA can almost certainly be traced back to the “Royale with cheese” conversation, but lots of young moviegoers were blown away—and continue to be blown away—by Tarantino’s breakout hit, and it’s helped connect them to movies in ways that were, before 1994, simply not on their itinerary. Its elusive, addictive thing-ness remains fresh today, a potent brew of genre and visceral pleasures, a catalogue of comedy (black, visual, low-brow, shock, awkward pause, etc.), structured to feel like a party that went all night and well into the morning. Jaime N. Christley


The 10 Best Films of 1994

1. Sátántangó

Sátántangó sits at the axis of the 1990s like an immovable, miserable monolith. Béla Tarr’s seven-and-a-half-hour monument to suffering and deceit is, by most accounts, one of the bleakest films ever made. From another angle, however, Sátántangó is a comedy of darkly epic proportions. So, a dire evocation of Hungarian society, one seemingly sapped of all hope for cultural advancement, or an existential black comedy reveling in the despair and stupidity of a community spellbound by the reappearance of their village’s prodigal son, a self-styled prophet preaching a doctrine both hypnotizing and hazardous? For Tarr, the two are inextricable, perhaps one in the same. As we sit, equally entranced, as an overweight doctor drinks himself comatose in real time, or as a little girl tortures a cat just to feel something other than total loneliness, it’s impossible not to smirk in recognition at the hopelessness of such masochism, the absolute inevitability of this emotional and physical state we’ve chosen to call life. Tarr claimed at the time that he intended Sátántangó to represent the end of cinema, and though the medium lives on, it’s difficult to argue that it has again reached similar heights of psychological and spiritual transcendence. Jordan Cronk

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