The Top 10 Movies of the 1990s

1. The Piano (1993) Dir. Jane Campion. I have yet to be more moved by any motion picture, and I have yet to see four characters so rigorously, roundedly, fairly portrayed in a drama this compassionate and intense. For all its narrative eccentricity and technical adventurousness, nothing in The Piano feels dishonest or unnecessary, an amazing feat in a decade that kept trying to find new things for movies to do. Campion returns to what movies have always done well—she tells an incredible, beautiful, harrowing, and dreamlike story—but she tells it with such strength and clarity of vision as to prove that cinema, at the end of its first century, can fulfill that classic mission better than ever.
   
   
2. Close-Up (1990) Dir. Abbas Kiarostami. One of the first Iranian features to grab deserved global attention, Close-Up remains the best of the lot. A brilliant docudrama that, using all the actual personalities involved, replays a notorious scam in which a working-class nobody passed himself off as one of Iran's greatest directors, Close-Up is a real-life Talented Mr. Ripley, plus much more. Alternately playful and poignant, it's the perfect visual artifact of a decade in which images were unprecedentedly powerful and unprecedentedly vulnerable.
   
   
3. Boyz N the Hood (1991) Dir. John Singleton. Singleton's blazing directorial debut has a genuine tragic vision, a sense of community that doesn't miss a detail and a probing, no-bull intelligence that recognizes the full import of all those details. The screenplay of Boyz N the Hood—astonishingly, the first that Singleton ever wrote—does not avoid humor or sentiment at necessary moments, but never does the writer-director distract himself from the lean, haunting thread at its center. Boyz N the Hood ends with equal parts outrage and hope, though in retrospect, especially in the milieu Singleton so memorably documents, the 1990s warranted more of the anger and did little to foster the hope. Perhaps that's why the film seems more affecting and more invaluable as each year goes by.
   
   
4. Taste of Cherry (1998) Dir. Abbas Kiarostami. The only director whom I believe delivered two genuine masterpieces in the last decade, Kiarostami won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for this deceptively simple, visually austere tale of a hopeless soul driving in the hills outside Teheran looking for someone to assist in his suicide. That the film is neither as bleak or as artily inaccessible as it may sound is a tribute to this incomparable director's invigorating ability to tell challenging stories with a minimum of distraction, a precision of style, and a Bressonian gift for drawing stunning performances out of amateur non-actors. The greatest treat of the decade's second half.
   
   
5. Pulp Fiction (1994) Dir. Quentin Tarantino. The unique thrill of this work of art is evident not only in its enduring pleasures (the flawless soundtrack, the neon colors, the sublime performance of Samuel L. Jackson) but in the comparative pallor of the rash of films that attempted to emulate it. Don't blame Pulp Fiction or Tarantino for the fact that they had so many ersatz imitators. The fact that Jackie Brown was such a different film, and a real winner on its own, quieter terms, builds my confidence that Tarantino himself is a career magician interested in more than taking the same ride over and over. But what a ride it was!
   
   
6. GoodFellas (1990) Dir. Martin Scorsese. One of modern American cinema's great directors didn't slow down at all in the 1990s, but his best film of the decade was undoubtedly the earliest. GoodFellas was perhaps the first film about mobsters since The Godfather to step out so vibrantly from under that prodigious predecessor's example. It's still The Family, and it has the same outsize, operatic grandeur of Coppola's Corleones, but Scorsese's Mafia dynasty equalled the energy of their conspiratorial furies with dizzily ecstatic moments of joy. Scorsese kept pace with his own electric cast in conveying that joy, crafting a film that clearly takes exuberant pleasure in telling its own story.
   
   
7. Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Dir. Stanley Kubrick. I'm convinced if the ad campaign hadn't whetted the public's appetite for a fleshy fantasia, more people would have been pulled into the totally different but no less entrancing world that Eyes Wide Shut actually creates. In truth, none of Kubrick's films enjoyed upon their first appearance the high regard that almost all of them have attained in years following. I'm only sorry that Kubrick won't be around to hear the belated accolades for his last major accomplishment, a definitive vision of both the elegance and vulgarity of eroticism.
   
   
8. Fargo (1996) Dir. Joel Coen. Five years have passed, and still no one knows whether this thing is a comedy, a thriller, or a drama. Perhaps the confusion about Fargo's genre springs from the radical unawareness evinced by its characters, whether out of unpretentious confidence or unredeemable stupidity, in how they are perceived. Frances McDormand won an Oscar in one of the decade's tightest Academy derbies, but the hilariously controlled work of her costars William H. Macy and Steve Buscemi and the exquisite coolness of the whole picture should share equally in what I predict to be an enduring legacy.
   
   
9. The Crying Game (1992) Dir. Neil Jordan. Like Eyes Wide Shut, a sometime-erotic thriller that shanghaied the expectations of its audience, but at least viewers of this film went in prepared to be flummoxed. An unpredictable fusion of Alfred Hitchcock and Costa-Gavras, The Crying Game found the politics in sexuality and the lusts in politics. Better yet, writer-director Jordan devised ingenious and delicate ways to share his insights with a wide audience. The breakout box office of The Crying Game was, for me, one of the happiest flukes in a decade that consigned too many movies to the fate of their opening-weekend receipts.
   
   
10. The Thin Red Line (1998) Dir. Terrence Malick. In my enthusiasm for The Thin Red Line, I mean to take nothing away from the shattering you-are-there technical triumphs of Saving Private Ryan, the film to which Malick's war epic was most often unfavorably compared. Spielberg, though, marched into battle with more creature comforts than was generally acknowledged: for example, two of America's best-loved actors, a tidy three-act structure, flags, flags everywhere, and all the brass-band grandiosity that John Williams could muster. If you can make it through Private Ryan's battle scenes, the rest of the going is easy. By contrast, The Thin Red Line doesn't stint on character or horror, but if war is really about giving up everything that makes us feel secure—love, family, independence, physical safety, and a sense of what is happening to us—then Malick's film has the additional virtue of paying tribute to those irrecuperable losses by depriving the audience of what makes us feel good. Yes, the film can be bewildering, the morals and meanings elusive, the cast of characters forever cycling in and out. It's war, folks—what did you expect?
    

The Runners-Up:

• Safe (1995) Dir. Todd Haynes. Originally #9 on my list of the best films of 1995, Safe seems even more brilliant with each watching, both because and in spite of the fact that its mysteries grow only more maddening. Julianne Moore, one of the decade's four or five preeminent actors, gives an amazing performance as a woman who barely exists, on whom strange, depleting forces seem to be at work. With far less condescension than has been alleged, writer-director Haynes delivers a satire with more shrieks than laughs, a witty but very dark vision of modern America in which to feel anything is to believe yourself ill.
  
  
• Heavenly Creatures (1994) Dir. Peter Jackson. Kate Winslet became a star in Titanic but registered even more strongly in a smaller, stranger film that takes just as many risks and nails them all. Winslet and Melanie Lynskey portray early-adolescent girls in 1950s New Zealand whose friendship becomes a literally world-altering passion, though not in any traditional sense of the word. In real life, as in the end of this film, these seemingly pre-sexual soulmates bludgeoned one of their mothers to death with a brick wrapped in a stocking. The film plunges fearlessly into the girls' feverish daydreams and ecstatic communications and discovers that they themselves might not have known how they suddenly became murderers. Or they might have known exactly.
  
  
• JFK (1991) & Nixon (1995) Dir. Oliver Stone. Two films by the same director whose technological wizardry and thematic content are so interrelated it would be senseless to choose between them. Ultimately, JFK and Nixon suffer as both cogent history or coherent narrative because of Stone's virulent paranoia—and yet, the secret to both films is that the paranoia is also what makes them work, what elevates them to a thrilling middle zone of art between history and fiction. Both stories show how home videos, bugged conversations, tampered-with tapes, and other media devices became central artifacts in the controversies surrounding the very different but equally ghostly presidents at their centers. Stone's hyperreal filmmaking, with its stunning collage of archival footage, dramatic reenactment, film-to-video shifts, and mulitple viewpoints, cuts right to the heart of that same issue: the status of the truth, for better or worse, belongs in our post-digital era to the powerful people who control technology and the cunning with which they use it.