“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: The Delta, Face/Off, Family Name, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, Gabbeh, The Game, The Ice Storm, L.A. Confidential, Nanette and Boni, La Promesse, and Public Housing
10. Cure
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a filmmaker for whom genre is merely the starting point for more oblique, existential questions about character and society, and none of his works are as hauntingly mysterious as Cure, a 1997 serial-killer thriller that cares less for typical police-procedural machinations than for raising confounding suggestions about what compels individuals and cultures to embrace and commit violence. Those issues are filtered through a detective’s investigation of a series of murders linked by the fact that each victim has had an “X” slashed into their throat, and which are eventually revealed to have been perpetrated by different strangers all working under the apparently hypnotic orders of a madman who answers queries with only more queries. That this lunatic seems to be the embodiment of larger societal decays becomes more apparent during a second half that operates at a detached remove and is tangled in identity-crisis horrors, culminating with a provocative final shot that remains a preeminently tantalizing talking point. Nick Schager
9. Happy Together
“Let’s start over.” One might argue that this haunting line, first uttered during the breakneck opening of Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, encapsulates the director’s entire oeuvre in three simple words. Past and present heartache blurs any hope for the future in Wong’s intensely heated melodrama about two lovers (Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Leslie Cheung) from Hong Kong who escape to Argentina, hoping a change of scenery will save their self-destructive relationship. While Happy Together is just as formally audacious as Chungking Express, and every bit as emotionally devastating as In the Mood for Love, it’s also uniquely sad. Wong doesn’t create one of those classically weepy romances tragically hindered by social formalities or hierarchies; his two characters are simply mired in a stagnant and masochistic relationship from which they can’t or want to escape. But their extended downfall is devastating nonetheless, mostly because the performances by Leung and Cheung are so deeply felt and psychologically intertwined. Happy Together, which envisions emotional addiction as a series of heightened freeze frames, jump cuts, and pop-music cues, is melancholia incarnate. Glenn Heath Jr.
8. Lost Highway
The lynchpin of David Lynch’s transition to full-bore, intensely intangible abstraction, Lost Highway is his first film to exist entirely under the sway of dream logic, rather than just feeling strikingly dream-like. Pushing further the successes of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which upended the expectations of the sequel by first embarking on an startling digression, then progressively imploding the format of a series of which he’d long grown tired. Lost Highway does the same for narrative structure, indulging in a two-part story that’s a puzzle box of discarded noir tropes and horror-movie cues, with a sense of creeping dread signaling Lynch’s move beyond the realm of traditional storytelling. Once again cataloguing the dark passage of a protagonist discovering the capacity for evil within himself, the film achieves this transformation through a baffling bit of character-swapping, one of the many subtly disconcerting elements in this influential work of mad, disturbing beauty. Jesse Cataldo
7. The River
The purest distillation of Tsai Ming-liang’s signature approach to filming contemporary urban experience, The River finds the director’s perpetual stand-in, Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), achieving a maximal state of estrangement, if not from the desiccated environments that mirror his own tightly constrained mental states, than at least from all the people that populate that world. Stripping his art of such superfluous elements as camera movement, music, and visual clutter, Tsai follows his protagonist as he fills in as a film extra, appropriately playing a dead body floating in a polluted Taipei river. Perhaps as a result of this dip, Hsiao-kang develops increasingly debilitating neck pain and, along with his father with whom he barely exchanges a word, he begins seeking various cures. Tsai’s symbolism, as always, is suggestive without demanding definitive readings, a means to heighten our sense of disjunction, whether between family members or between characters and their poisonous environment. A final misguided attempt by Hsiao-kang at release proves at once shocking and pictorially stunning in its red-tinged chiaroscuro. Finally, however, there’s no cure; in Tsai’s jaundiced vision, life is destined to go horribly, banally on. Andrew Schenker
6. Irma Vep
The first, and most successful, of Olivier Assayas’s engagements with the world of global capital (present here in the form of an international coproduction, which also describes the film itself), Irma Vep is one of the few films explicitly about filmmaking that manages to transcend its inevitable narcissism. Maggie Cheung, superstar Hong Kong actress, is Maggie, superstar Hong Kong actress, brought to Paris to star in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires directed by past-his-prime René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The big showstopper, a dreamy nighttime sequence set to Sonic Youth in which Cheung dons her character’s black latex catsuit and steals a diamond necklace from another guest at her hotel, manages to make the tired theme of the collapsing divide between acting and living seem exciting again. But Assayas’s big ideas, fundamentally pessimistic and conservative, only come out in the final sequence, as the sacked Vidal’s footage is revealed to be a shock of avant-garde provocation modeled on Isidore Isou’s On Venom and Eternity: Even this once radical form can be squeezed by the weight of global corporate dollars into the shape of narrative resolution. Phil Coldiron
5. Boogie Nights
Still Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film, Boogie Nights is also his most purely enjoyable: Tracing a Goodfellas-like progression from the golden age of porn in the 1970s to the shot-on-video lowlights that followed in the ’80s, the film is so pleasurably well-made that for much of its running time it can be difficult to realize just how dark it’s gradually becoming. But then, in his gunshot of a transition between decades, PTA gives us our most abrupt clue yet as to what his film’s latter half holds in store for us. It may be in its later sequences that Boogie Nights truly whips it out in a way few other films dare, but hindsight (not to mention subsequent viewings) reveal just how present the tension between its more brooding and glitzy traits was all along. The result is a big, bright, shining star of a movie, and one whose stature—unlike that of its characters—hasn’t faded with time. Michael Nordine
4. Jackie Brown
After Reservoir Dogs’s gut-punch fatalism and Pulp Fiction’s mesmerizing dynamism, Quentin Tarantino surprised everyone by going all Douglas Sirk on audience’s asses with Jackie Brown. The film’s crime-saga façade hides an emotionally complex love story between the titular Jackie (Pam Grier), a sexy stewardess embroiled in a dangerous drug ring, and Max (Robert Forester), an old-school bail bondsmen who can’t help but fall head over heels for her imposing beauty. This amazingly sincere pair resides at the center of a sublime and mournful melodrama draped in jive talk, double-crosses, and thematically resonant soul music. Fate and chance seem to inspire every vibrant scene, from the audacious set piece inside the Del Amo Mall to the final parting moment shared between two lovers who never were. Like most films that examine the mysteries and disappointments of unrequited love, Jackie Brown ends with a fleeting goodbye and an infinite sense of yearning. Yet this one stings. No single moment in the Tarantino canon has held so much unresolved emotion. Heath Jr.
3. Mother and Son
The notion of cinema as a kind of living artwork is omnipresent in Mother and Son, a quality reinforced thematically by the titular figures’ methodical, heartbreaking march toward shuffling off this mortal coil, and stylistically via director Aleksandr Sokurov’s elemental use of perspective and image distortion to collapse both space and time. The effect is often that of a literal moving picture, and Sokurov’s somnambulistic use of the camera frequently suggests a master painter pausing for minutes, if not hours or days, between each devastating brushstroke. This slanted and enchanted subversion of traditional composition is both a testament to and elevation of the universal language of cinema, and Mother and Son’s elemental purity is such that it often suggests a weathered artifact left over from some forgotten civilization. Life and death merge in the film’s isolated, windswept landscapes, where the fully grown child now tends to his ailing parent much as she surely did to him in the first years of his life. So is the circle of life regarded with a seemingly eternal gaze, at once life-affirming and fearless of that which lies beyond. Rob Humanick
2. Starship Troopers
It seems fitting that it took stumbling upon an obscure Soviet-era concept for me to feel like I had the vocabulary to talk about Paul Verhoeven with any degree of accuracy. That concept is stiob, which I’ll crudely define as a form of parody requiring such a degree of over-identification with the subject being parodied that it becomes impossible to tell where the love for that subject ends and the parody begins. And so there, in 32 words, is the Hollywood cinema of Paul Verhoeven. Starship Troopers then has to be a bad movie, insofar as that means that the acting is not dramatically convincing, the story is hopelessly contrived, the special effects are distractingly garish in their limb-ripping and bone-crunching, because the point isn’t to do better than Hollywood (that would run counter to Verhoeven’s obvious love of these cheap popular forms), but to do more of Hollywood, to push every element to its breaking point without caving to the lazy lure of ridicule. The result is a style that embraces a form as fully as possible only to turn it back against the content, and one of the greatest of all anti-imperialist films. Coldiron
1. Taste of Cherry
It’s baffling that anybody anywhere could watch Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, love it enthusiastically, and then suggest that its life-affirming pomo coda be excised, as throngs of broadsheet admirers did after the film’s premiere at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival (even more perplexingly, Kiarostami actually heeded their advice, lopping off the ending for its theatrical run in Italy). Those precious final moments—a meta-textual break from the action, shot on video, in which the cast and crew are shown preparing a scene from the film to the sounds of “St. James Infirmary”—are a grand and graceful move beyond the text of both film and life, a liberation from a hero’s grave and a narrative’s closure. That’s where the long journey into night and death bring us: We awaken in daylight, outside the world of the film, rejoicing in the action of cinema. It undercuts nothing; it expands on, enriches, enlivens all that came before it. It’s the ultimate coup: A few minutes of Handycam video transform a very good film about death into a great film about life. Calum Marsh
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