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The 10 Best Films of 1996

These are the best films of 1996 as selected by Slant Magazine’s staff of film writers.

The 10 Best Films of 1996
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: Bottle Rocket, Citizen Ruth, Flirting with Disaster, From the Journals of Jean Seberg, The Funeral, Mahjong, The Man on the Shore, Rendezvous in Paris, Portrait of a Lady, and The Cable Guy


The 10 Best Films of 1996

10. Ashes of Time

Ashes of Time doesn’t starve for hyperkinetic genre calisthenics: In an early sequence, a warrior (Tony Leung Ka Fai), his mane and robes flowing for the tilted camera, slashes the air with his sword and precipitates an earthquake that vanquishes an army of horsemen. Wong heightens action tropes the way Sergio Leone found arias in western showdowns, though in his version of the Hong Kong martial-arts netherworld the mandatory melees play second fiddle to the characters’ melancholic languor. Asked to deliver a sword-fighting extravaganza, Wong perversely blurs, fractures and pixilates the choreography while having his all-star cast lounge around in overlapping reveries, soaking in the director’s themes of memory, being and love. (The “tumult of the heart” referenced in the opening Buddhist crawl is the focus.) No less than the romantics of his later films, Wong’s ancient warriors are obsessed with time and passion; icons out of old Shaw Brothers movies, they find the rigidity of their archetypal roles gradually eroded by the transience of their emotions. Radically (almost maddeningly) disjointed but never less than intoxicating, Wong’s most obscure film is a trance worth falling into. Fernando F. Croce


The 10 Best Films of 1996

9. La Cérémonie

The highlight of Claude Chabrol’s late career, La Cérémonie is a taut, chilling thriller that’s nearly perfect in every regard. The story, based on Ruth Rendell’s novel A Judgement in Stone, sets up increasingly uncomfortable class tensions that pit a wealthy family against their new maid, Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), and her new friend, Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), a postal worker the family distrusts. Thanks to stellar performances and a masterful script that Chabrol co-wrote with psychologist Caroline Eliacheff, La Cérémonie gives us characters who are elusive but nonetheless understandable; in the absence of details about Sophie and Jeanne’s culpability regarding their possibly murderous backgrounds, we still feel as if we could make up our minds about them. No second is wasted: Every line, scene, object, and expression makes narrative sense, connects with something else, or adds subtext (differences in the way characters watch TV speaks volumes about their place in the world). Illustrative of this connectedness is one of La Cérémonie’s best lines, a kind of blackly comic and ironic double entendre when you consider the film’s violent finale. After a priest scolds Jeanne for wicked behavior at a clothing donor’s house, she asks, “You don’t want our help?” To which the priest responds, “Maybe you should get some help.” Kalvin Henely

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The 10 Best Films of 1996

8. Goodbye South, Goodbye

Perfectly poised between motion and stasis, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1996 triumph watches as its small-time gangsters alternate between just hanging around, waiting for something to happen, and traveling (via train, motorcycle, whatever) in lovingly composed compositions that bring both modes indelibly to life. Boredom and desperate economic transaction are the defining features of the film’s characters—and arguably of the late-20th (and early-21st) century—and Hou’s achievement is to get at this itchy restlessness while giving the viewer ample space to luxuriate and observe. If Hou’s distanced, long-take aesthetic was one of the defining modes of 1990s cinema, then it never feels more purposeful than in this film, whose exactly modulated rhythms speak to the experience of not simply a few Taiwanese hustlers, but to a shared sense of global discontent. Andrew Schenker


The 10 Best Films of 1996

7. The White Balloon

A director with a special talent for pulling the rug out from under his audience, employing unexpected tonal shifts and fourth-wall-collapsing left turns, Jafar Panahi crafts films in which deceptively gentle subject matter masks withering critiques of his nation’s rule of law. Like his countrymen Abbas Kiarostami, Majid Majidi, and Mohsen Makhmalbahf, he subverts the censorship of an oppressive political system by cloaking these attacks in seemingly innocent children’s tales. The White Balloon contains probably the slyest, most bracing of all Panahi’s reversals, as the story of a small girl hunting for a big goldfish on New Year’s Eve briefly gives way to that of a balloon-selling Afghan child, who we then realize has been lurking at the film’s margins all along, selling his wares while more fortunate kids run about in search of a pet. It’s a reminder that for every family just scraping by, there are others who are in even worse shape. Jesse Cataldo


The 10 Best Films of 1996

6. Vive L’Amour

There’s a certain tendency among art-house movies to use long takes of their protagonists crying as an emotional, sometimes even narrative, climax. A strange habit, perhaps, and one that few use to fuller effect than Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour, a film in which a shared loneliness would unite the characters if any were aware how close they are to others in the same situation. That the three leads all unknowingly live in the same Taipei apartment amplifies this irony, but not in a way that makes us laugh; ditto the title, which similarly underscores just how alone everyone is. From this communal isolation comes a great deal of beauty as well, much of it wordless as people drift past one another like ghosts. Tsai trusts his actors (not to mention his audience) enough to let their gestures and expressions mostly speak for themselves, hence the cathartic importance of the scene alluded to above: In a film so beautifully restrained, such an outwardly emotional act as this speaks volumes. Michael Nordine


The 10 Best Films of 1996

5. Conspirators of Pleasure

Nearly a decade before John Waters let it all hang out to surprisingly tepid, normalizing effect in his A Dirty Shame, Czech animator Jan Švankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure catalogued multiple sensual perversions that all make head-butting look like a backseat handjob, from violent papier-mâché poultry role play to compressing bread into pellets and then snorting them like cocaine through a set of giant tubes. Leaving aside the political subtext (the film’s frantic, motley masturbators are, indeed, “conspirators” in a sense), this is the erogenous zone depicted as a kind of uncanny valley, where every slurp, lick, and moan is recognizable, but mischievously flung from its normal context—and, of course, what is masturbation but sex without context? No doubt many viewers will find Švankmajer’s spank-meter on the far side of their OkCupid enemies rating, but to those of us who regard sexuality as both human existence’s greatest mystery and its startlingly primary driving force, the Buñuellian Conspirators of Pleasure is painful comedy. Eric Henderson

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The 10 Best Films of 1996

4. Fargo

You could blame Shep, who told them that Jerry would be there at 7:30, and they’d been waiting over an hour, but that was a mix-up, and the Béla Tarr-esque opening image, showing Jerry’s car emerging from a wintry, snow-blind wall of dirty white, seals everyone’s fate to the tune of Carter Burwell’s funereal, mythic strings and percussion arrangement. With an apparently career-long ambition to restore film noir and black comedy to the popular imagination, the Coen brothers, as has been their habit, lay out a plan of narrative action in broad, sometimes caricature-heavy strokes, then work backward across it, plumbing for details and emotional truths. None of the chaos and mayhem that follows as a result of Jerry Lundegaard’s convoluted plan—to hire a pair of psychotic lowlifes, neither of whom even knows the other very well, to kidnap his wife, in the hopes of collecting enough to wipe out his debts—takes flight on its own power, without the grounding of sadness and longing that boils under every other scene that tends toward violent grotesqueries and teasing, provincial humor. Jaime N. Christley


The 10 Best Films of 1996

3. A Moment of Innocence

Culminating in one of the most breathtaking final freeze frames this side of The 400 Blows, A Moment of Innocence is Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s fabricated attempt at an authentic mea culpa. Or his complex, tortured admission that such an attempt would be impossible. Either way, you know his penitence must be real, because Makhmalbaf’s distancing techniques give his audiences every reason to mistrust his intentions as he works with young actors to recreate the life-altering moment that sent him to prison for four years (he stabbed a police officer under the Shah prior to the Islamic Revolution). A Moment of Innocence knowingly skirts the line between documentary and fictitious representation as Makhmalbaf recruits the man he stabbed into selecting actors to represent them during that fateful moment, and the dialogue it draws between the past and the present (as both Makhmalbaf and his young actors attempt to right wrongs like Dr. Sam Beckett) emerges as if not an explanation for the cycle of violence, then at least an empathetic reckoning. Henderson


The 10 Best Films of 1996

2. Breaking the Waves

Re-watching Breaking the Waves in the wake of Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, and Antichrist, it’s become retroactively clear that Lars von Trier’s 1996 landmark represents both the defining moment in his career and his oeuvre’s chief anomaly, thanks to the titanic central performance by Emily Watson (in her first feature film). Watson’s Bess, the intractable, naïf, dependent, fearless new bride in a simple Scottish town with perhaps the world’s staunchest Christian population, believes her prayer for her oil rig-working husband Jan to come back to her is directly responsible for the paralyzing accident that sends him home. Bess’s decision to do her immobile husband’s bidding—to sleep with strangers and arouse him with her subsequent reports—is both subordinate to his will and defiant in the face of religious patriarchies. Of the many transgressions in von Trier’s works, few seem as genuinely dangerous as this story of a simple-minded girl who maintains a direct line of conversation with God and is fucked to death. And among a long string of actress who fought von Trier and paraded their scars, Watson represents the exception. Having yielded to the steamroller, Bess emerges stronger and purer than all. Henderson


The 10 Best Films of 1996

1. Crash

In David Cronenberg’s Crash, the automobile transcends its usual associations with masculinity and status-symbol expressionism to become a psychological, near-literal extension of the body. The sensational obviousness of the subject matter has remained the biggest (usually only) point of discussion for what may be Cronenberg’s most underappreciated effort, a reductive perspective that overlooks the film’s necessarily disturbing and equally profound inquiry into human desire, however self-destructive. Foreboding shots of populated highways set the tone: These are avatars made decimators—and liberators—of the flesh. Sex and death have long walked a sticky line together in horror films, but Crash isn’t the Canadian formalist’s usual brand of New Flesh savagery. Beneath the blood, sweat, metal, glass, and semen, the film is tragic romance that goes out of its way to humanize something brutish, and cars are just a convenient package for exploring our tendency to kill ourselves, whether in the short or long term, imagined or real. The violence here is usually better anticipated than experienced, but for some—namely, Elias Koteas’s rustic, bemused mechanical fetishist Vaughan—the desire overwhelms the consequences. In the long run, most of us are no different, if considerably little less kinky about it. Rob Humanick

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