-
The Best Films of the 1990s Decade
The greatest films of the 1990s, from America’s independent cinema to the start of the digital age.
-
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
Salvation is but a distant dream for doomed prom queen Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, even as its shallow façade casts a sleepy spell over her blissfully deluded town, letting this all-American sweetheart spiral into a tragic self-destruction brought on by unresolved traumas drawn out through David Lynch’s surreal, psychological horror.
-
Pi (1998)
True order is found not by trying to penetrate a complex universe in Pi, but rather by accepting its dazzling, wondrous incomprehensibility, as Darren Aronofsky conducts a character study of psychedelic focus that submits us to one mathematical genius’ delusional obsessions.
-
Naked (1993)
Like a man ready to tear the world down with him on his way to hell, there is no real direction to Johnny’s intellectual bullying through London’s nocturnal streets in Naked, yet around him Mike Leigh constructs a character study of such immense nihilism that even he can’t escape the miserable darkness he emits.
-
Flowers of Shanghai (1998)
Nineteenth century China has never felt so tangibly cinematic as it does in Flowers of Shanghai, examining the blurred boundaries that lie between sex and business in its most frequented pleasure houses, and positioning us through Hou Hsiao-hsien’s floating camera and elliptical structure as silent observers of its sharply gendered politics.
-
La Promesse (1996)
The Dardenne Brothers prove their dedication to social realism in La Promesse, tying their narrative up into knotty moral predicaments around one teenager’s vow to a dying, undocumented immigrant, and through its tiny symbolic developments it progresses with archetypal formality, pushing him to be better than the unjust world he grew up in.
-
The English Patient (1996)
Wistful memories and melancholy regrets swirl all through The English Patient’s vast, time-leaping narrative, developing its gentle ruminations over national identity into a historical epic of extraordinary beauty, as Anthony Minghella uses the sprawling emptiness of the desert to underscore the majesty and romance of the larger-than-life characters traversing it.