5. “Lone Star”
A pinnacle in independent pioneer John Sayles‘ remarkable directorial career, this elegiac borderland drama about fathers and sons, legacies and lies, bigotry and bloodlines, is most often held up today for its glimpse at a pre-McConnaissance Matthew McConaughey being unexpectedly good in something. But that wildly sells the film short: not only is McConaughey’s flashback role fairly small, it’s surrounded by other great actors all turning in career bests, or thereabouts. Chris Cooper is indelible as the sheriff son of a local legend sheriff father, trying to live up to his dad’s reputation while also suspecting that he might not have been the paragon everyone believes, while Elizabeth Peña, who died at the tragically early age of 54 in 2014, gives perhaps her most beautiful performance as Pilar, the woman Cooper’s sheriff has always loved, and has always been forbidden from. Kris Kristofferson, too, is terrific in support: blue eyes glinting malice as the bad-seed lawman whose corruption still runs though this dusty little Texan border town like a poisoned creek. It’s an incredibly evocative story of the hinterlands between the U.S. and Mexico, between the present and the past, between the person other people want you to be and the person you are.
4. “Trainspotting”
Like many newbie directors, Danny Boyle chased up his tightly focused, licorice-black debut “Shallow Grave” with a more ambitious, broader-canvassed, higher-budgeted sophomore film. Unlike most, however, he turned in an inarguable, era-defining masterpiece — a film that to this day remains the high-water mark of one of the most spectacularly successful filmmaking careers of modern times. Based on Irvine Welsh‘s novel, “Trainspotting” was transformative all around, for Boyle; for Ewan McGregor, who’d broken through in “Shallow Grave” but became a star with “Trainspotting;” for the rest of the cast (Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle, especially); and for a whole generation of moviegoers, particularly in the UK. A blisteringly pacy, funny, tragic, horrifying, surreal, beautiful and heartbreaking tour through the lives of a collection of heroin addicts scrabbling out their ridiculous, transcendent and banal lives in depressed late-’80s Edinburgh, it pulses to one of the greatest film soundtracks of all time, and even the marketing campaign, with its black-and-white-and-orange schema, has become iconic. Whatever you think of the recent sequel (and the project of sequelizing something so indelibly associated with this time and place and age was always going to be a fraught one), the original “Trainspotting” endures along with “Pulp Fiction” as one of a handful of truly pivotal moments in 1990s cinema.
3. “Breaking The Waves”
There are many remarkable factoids about Lars Von Trier‘s “Breaking the Waves”: it was his first English-Language film; it won him the Grand Prix in Cannes; and it kicks off a trilogy of films for which the director would become notorious for taking naive or innocent female lead characters and making them run a gauntlet of punishments tantamount to emotional torture. But perhaps the most outstanding of the film’s many chatter-worthy elements is Emily Watson (Oscar-nominated in her very first performance) making an unforgettable film debut as Bess McNeil, who is physically an adult but childlike in every other way, having been emotionally, mentally, sexually and spiritually sheltered by her close-knit religious community. She marries the worldly outsider Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), but after a brief period of blissful sexual awakening, he is severely injured and bedridden, and their relationship spirals into ever-more-destructive patterns of sadomasochistic perversion. Bess is a practically psychologically impossible character: a self-sacrificingly pious young woman who finds some sort of fulfillment in proving her unwavering faith and devotion to her husband and to God through sexual degradation and humiliation. Yet Watson makes her real, and whatever Von Trier’s motives here (and we can never wholly believe they’re completely benign), he turns in a seminal, visceral, profoundly powerful film.
2. “Crash”
With all due respect to Ben Wheatley, whose “High-Rise” was a film many of us around here liked a great deal more than the baseline, the writing of J.G. Ballard had already met perhaps its most perfect match in the cerebral body-horror/sci-fi stylings of Canadian genius David Cronenberg. Tackling Ballard’s demented 1973 story of car-crash fetishism and celebrity worship, with his trademark icy intelligence, Cronenberg actually goes further than the book, turning the narrative into a chilling cautionary tale about premillenial angst and eroticized technophilia. Reviled, derided and banned in some territories on release — unsurprising, given that there’s a scene in which James Spader explicitly fucks Rosanna Arquette‘s leg wound — “Crash” has largely been reinterpreted since and is gradually establishing itself in the pantheon as the vital, riveting, towering movie it is. Spader, Arquette and Deborah Kara Unger are all great, but it’s perhaps Holly Hunter and Elias Koteas who are the standouts here, embodying so much of the film’s seductive perversion and so many of its ugly, profound, disquieting ideas in every look they give, every line they speak. It’s rare that watching a movie can feel like such a transgressive and dangerous act, but with “Crash,” it still does — though perhaps the greatest danger of all is that you get it mixed up with Paul Haggis‘ Best Picture winner and wind up subjecting yourself to that instead.
1. “Fargo”
Two decades, a whole host of Coen Brothers movies, and two seasons of a terrifically inventive hit TV show later, “Fargo” still stands apart as its wholly own thing, and in filmmaking terms a near-unicorn: a movie in which there is not one single slack scene. Like only a handful of films before or after, “Fargo” is one of those shimmering touchpoints that, no matter at what point you happen across it, channel surfing on TV, you find yourself staying for the next bit, and the next, and the one after that. It’s all down to that uniquely Coens-ian sensibility with humor as arid as the Minnesotan landscapes are snowy, and an approach so disingenuously playful that it’s never clear if we’re in on the gag or if we are the gag. But as a uniquely seriocomic crime thriller, what really sets “Fargo” apart is its characterizations, with each of the performances perfectly attuned to the story’s loopy, grisly weirdness, from the flat vowels and inappropriately chirpy intonation of those Minnesotan accents, to the sublimely deadpan physical comedy as the mismatched hitmen (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) go crazy down there at the lake, the would-be kidnapper husband (William H. Macy) becomes increasingly sweaty and desperate, and the pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) tuts and tsks her brilliant way to the solution of the crime, becoming, along the way, possibly — probably — fuck it, definitely — the single greatest movie character of the 1990s.
If 1996 was not the most contentious year in our year-by-year ’90s rundown, it was probably top 3, and the divisiveness here was spread over a far wider than usual number of titles, meaning this list has gone through a couple of almost total re-evaluations (apart from “Fargo,” which was never going to be very far from the top). So even our honorable mention section is contentious this time, and there are probably at least as many films again that one or other of us feels strongly should have made the cut. But we’re being strict with ourselves and limiting our mentions section to a maximum of 15, and today the darts landed on: Nicolas Winding Refn‘s (and Mads Mikkelsen‘s) breakout “Pusher“; David O. Russell’s “Flirting With Disaster“; Wes Craven‘s genre-redefining “Scream“; Cameron Crowe‘s eminently quotable “Jerry Maguire“; and Wes Anderson‘s launchpad “Bottle Rocket.”
And let’s not forget Stanley Tucci & Campbell Scott‘s terrific Sundance breakout “Big Night“; Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s riveting, semi-autobiographical “A Moment Of Innocence“; Anthony Minghella‘s indulgent but sumptuous “The English Patient“; Alexander Payne‘s abortion satire “Citizen Ruth“; Nicole Holofcener‘s chatty and charming “Walking And Talking“; Eric Rohmer‘s gentle “A Summer’s Tale“; Leon Gast‘s Oscar-winning doc about the Rumble in the Jungle “When We Were Kings“; Claire Denis‘ lyrically gritty “Nenette et Boni“; Billy Bob Thornton’s directorial debut “Sling Blade”; Gilles Mimouni‘s enjoyably Hitchcockian “L’Appartement“; and Doug Liman‘s meme-spawning, moment-defining, multiple-career-launching lo-fi comedy “Swingers.”
Care to checkmate us with your own list in much the same way that Deep Blue did with chess Grand Master Garry Kasparov in February 1996? That’s what the comments are for. And in the meantime, if you fancy, here are the rest of the ’90s lists, (1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1995) and, what the hell, our 2000s series too: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. And tune back in tomorrow, when we’ll be diving into 1997.