“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: Bulworth, The Eel, Gadjo Dilo, Genealogies of a Crime, The General, Henry Fool, Happiness, Khrustalyov, My Car!, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and Sonatine
10. Sombre
Since his startling debut feature, Sombre, Philippe Grandrieux has become one of cinema’s most audacious chroniclers of society’s underbelly, maybe even its best articulator of heightened sensations; despair and ecstasy erupt from the fabric of his films with a blistering, almost physical intensity. One doesn’t expect such tender, almost mawkish declarations of love from Grandrieux’s characters. And yet, the delicacy of the language is of a piece with the filmmaker’s general preoccupation with the fragility of the human psyche. Sean Nam
9. The Hole
Tsai Ming-liang details an unnamed couple’s love among the ruins as an extended pas de deux set against cold concrete structures and accompanied by the consistent drone of an alternately oppressive and liberating deluge, though he takes welcome time out for a few stock-company walk-ons (observing the elder, former martial-arts actor Miao Tien wandering past numerous abandoned grocery marts in search of the proper bean sauce—which Lee informs him has been discontinued—is one particularly hilarious and heartbreaking moment out of many) before returning his focus to the lovers’ dual fantasia. It culminates in an ending of transcendent beauty with Lee Kang-sheng literally lifting Yang Kuei-mei up where she belongs—above and beyond the surrounding malaise and decay and into an illuminating, musical embrace for the ages. Keith Uhlich
8. Drifting Clouds
The cinematic world of Aki Kaurismäki is, like any true auteur’s, immediately recognizable: Infused with a deadpan humor that nearly balances out a cynical worldview, his films stand with Finland’s working stiffs (who are prone to an exaggerated stiffness), sympathetic characters set against colorful, slightly askew backdrops. Drifting Clouds, a succinct, deceptively simple tale of an unemployed married couple struggling to find work, is a fine distillation of this sensibility, notable for being one of Kaurismäki’s finest and most accessible films. Though the couple, potently played by Kati Outinen and Kari Väänänen, find themselves caught in downbeat circumstances, and the film is dedicated to Matti Pellonpää, a Kaurismäki regular who died before production started (and whose real childhood photo substitutes as a picture of the couple’s deceased child), Kaurismäki keeps his mournful film buoyed with humor. When Väänänen’s dissatisfied husband character demands his money back for a film he didn’t like, he’s reminded that not only did he not pay for it, he needs to pick up his dog from the concession stand. Like Chaplin before him, Kaurismäki uses this kind of bittersweet humor not only to laugh off the economic blues, but as the panacea for life. Kalvin Henely
7. Fireworks
It would probably be unthinkable for a cop’s wife in an American movie to have cancer, or for his sister to be a junkie—as it would distract from the action. But not in a Japanese film. Kitano obliterates both of those unthinkables in Violent Cop and Fireworks, and Takashi Miike does the same in his 1999 collage of the policier and the yakuza thriller, Dead or Alive. (Miike may have appropriated the impassive hero’s home situation from Fireworks: It’s the daughter that’s sick in the Miike film, but his wife wears the same mask of quiet patience.) But even if you scoured the vaults of all the world’s film archives in order to draw up a list of a hundred cop movies in which the hero’s wife has an ailment that’s treated as a major narrative thread, it’s a safe bet that none of them will spend such an extraordinary time looking at paintings. Jaime N. Christley
6. Babe: Pig in the City
The success of Babe was unprecedented, not unlike its own central underdog character, but the audiences that flocked to the charming original couldn’t seem to take George Miller’s brilliant, twisted sequel. Drunk on more than a little of the then-brewing pre-millennium tension, 1998’s Babe: Pig in the City carries its predecessor’s torch into darker, quixotic territories, bursting at the seams with folkloric witticism and hellzapoppin’ imagery. Babe the sheep-herding pig must conquer the slings and arrows of the titular everycity (complete with the Statue of Liberty, the Hollywood sign, and the Sydney Opera House) when the bank threatens to take away his beloved farm, located as it is, “just a little to the left of the 20th century.” Singing mice and a noble, quotable duck are the most memorable of the film’s Homeric cast of outcast animals, and throughout their alternately delightful and frightful adventures, there’s no shortage of insight into life’s hardships and joys. Rob Humanick
5. Flowers of Shanghai
Flowers of Shanghai capped off a remarkable decade for Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, a period over which he would consider a wide-range of historically veiled yet vital instances in China’s evolutionary advancement. Marked by a patience and fluidity he’d spent the last 15 years perfecting, the film both refined and predicted the stately demeanor he’d carry into the new millennium. This simultaneous feeling of arrival and transience was reflected in the film itself, a lushly rendered fever dream detailing the changing role of prostitution and companionship in late-1800s, fin de siècle Shanghai. Confined to candle-lit, golden-hued quarters, these courtesans and the masters they serve are reflected upon in meditative visual strokes, Hou’s camera gliding amid their mansion’s chambers with a gentle sense of the inevitable. A formalist masterwork, Flowers of Shanghai brought Hou’s aesthetic to its logical and most sublime plateau up to that point, richly rendering the specificity of his unique serenity, the revelatory texture of his quietly disarming observations. Jordan Cronk
4. The Last Days of Disco
The period of the early ’80s that The Last Days of Disco covers, as Matt Keeslar’s Josh, a mentally ill assistant district attorney, notes in the film, is a combination of ’60s-era free love coming to an end (Chloë Sevigny’s Alice gets two STDs) and the beginning of ’90s cynicism (the film ends with disco dead and nearly all the characters on unemployment). This seems as fine description as any of the cultural shifts taking place beneath the well-heeled shoes of Whit Stillman’s lovable and gently mocked yuppies, two of whom, a manager for a Studio 54-like nightclub and a junior ad executive who sneaks clients into the disco, contest to being classified as such, though they admit it’s certainly not bad to be any of the things the word stands for. It’s that signature Stillmanesque dialogue, as witty and sharp as the electric gab from the screwball comedies of the ’30s and ’40s, that makes The Last Days of Disco so enjoyable; it offers some of Stillman’s most memorable writing, including a delicious discourse on the harmful example set by the relationship in the seemingly benevolent Lady and the Tramp. And including a lawyer’s suggestion that Bambi sparked the environmental movement and Alice’s line that Scrooge McDuck is sexy, that’s actually the third odd, but endearing connection the characters in The Last Days of Disco draw between themselves and Disney films, the effect of which brilliantly attests to the absurdity of this new class of adults. Henely
3. The Big Lebowski
Taking potshots at a plethora of satirical subjects ranging from the first Gulf War to “vaginal” art, Kraut rock, and the porn industry (not to mention bowling), The Big Lebowski may be the densest, most intricately woven Coen brothers film yet. Scene after scene rolls down the lane packed with eminently quotable one-liners, evincing a structural classicism that harkens back to the heyday of the screwball comedy. And yet there’s an unshakeable shaggy-dog quality to the narrative, quite in keeping with its “stoner noir” takedown of post-Chandler L.A. (The obvious precursor here: Robert Altman’s smart-ass genre deconstruction The Long Goodbye.) The acting is uniformly spot-on, anchored by Jeff Bridges’s effortless-seeming incarnation of the Dude (“Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing”), and buttressed by Sam Elliott’s 10-gallon turn as the Stranger, while John Goodman swipes the show with his uproarious pastiche of writer-director John Milius. Although he’s allotted no more scenes than a bowling bowl has holes, John Turturro’s hair-netted, mock-Hispanic intimidator (“Don’t fuck with the Jesus!”) threatens to outdo even Goodman. Budd Wilkins
2. Rushmore
Wes Anderson’s oppressively set-designed films may resemble stuffy dioramas more than any semblance of reality, but the heightened versions of kid lit he explores in them contain a distinct emotional through line, with characters inventing their own bubble kingdoms to block out the harsh realities of the outside world. Rushmore served as our initial introduction to this style, after the comparatively helter-skelter Bottle Rocket, and the singular character of Max Fischer—preternatural overachiever, frustrated genius, and nasty martinet—is still probably the most realistic distillation of the director himself, who himself uses these cute capsule realities to avoid confronting the messier vagaries of life. Yet despite their borderline preciousness, Anderson’s worlds aren’t idylls, containing bittersweet stories that build to the inevitable intrusion of real, muddled emotions, deteriorating the sanctity of these color-coded, fussily framed worlds. It’s this condition that grants Rushmore an autumnal air of melancholy. Jesse Cataldo
1. The Thin Red Line
Terrence Malick could make a film about anything and it would still be about everything. Even so, it’s difficult to imagine a setting more conducive to his life-and-death ruminations than Guadalcanal Island, host to an oft-forgotten WWII battle that took place in 1942. That The Thin Red Line’s backdrop is an arguably inconsequential skirmish is no coincidence: Malick’s film is about war like Citizen Kane is about newspapers, which is to say that gunfire and explosions interrupt the soldiers’ lyrical pondering rather than the other way around. A lot emerges from the dozen or so narrators’ overlapping voices (memories of dying relatives, longing for the homestead, questions about what awaits them if and when they fall), none of which is more remarkable than the almost transcendent calm that colors even the most desperate of situations. Malick has seen another world, and in sharing a glimpse of it with us he provided viewers with the war movie to end all war movies, which is especially amazing given that The Thin Red Line is in some senses not a war movie at all. Michael Nordine
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