When “Schindler’s List” was released in December 1993, triggering a discourse Among the many Jewish intelligentsia so heated and high-stakes that it makes any of today’s Twitter discourse feel spandex-thin by comparison, Village Voice critic J. Hoberman questioned the prevalent knowledge that Spielberg’s masterpiece would forever change how people think with the Holocaust.
Underneath the cultural kitsch of everything — the screaming teenage fans, the “king from the world” egomania, the instantly common language of “I want you to draw me like one among your French girls” — “Titanic” is as personal and cohesive as any film a fraction of its size. That intimacy starts with Cameron’s own obsession with the Ship of Dreams (which he naturally cast to play itself inside of a movie that ebbs between fiction and reality with the same bittersweet confidence that it flows between earlier and present), and continues with every facet of the script that revitalizes its essential story of star-crossed lovers into something legendary.
“Jackie Brown” may very well be considerably less bloody and slightly less quotable than Tarantino’s other 1990s output, but it makes up for that by nailing most of the little things that he does so well. The clever casting, flawless soundtrack, and wall-to-wall intertextuality showed that the same man who delivered “Reservoir Pet dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” was still lurking behind the camera.
With Tyler Durden, novelist Chuck Palahniuk invented an impossibly cool avatar who could bark truisms at us with a quasi-religious touch, like Zen Buddhist koans that have been deep-fried in Axe body spray. With Brad Pitt, David Fincher found the perfect specimen to make that person as real to audiences as He's for the story’s narrator — a superstar who could seduce us and make us resent him for it with the same time. Inside a masterfully directed movie that served to be a reckoning with the 20th Century as we readied ourselves to the twenty first (and ended with a man reconciling his aged demons just in time for some towers to implode under the weight of his new ones), Tyler became the physical embodiment of buyer masculinity: Aspirational, impossible, insufferable.
It’s now The style for straight actors to “go gay” onscreen, but rarely are they as naked (figuratively and otherwise) than Phoenix and Reeves were here. —RL
Montenegro became the first — and still only — Brazilian actor to become nominated for an Academy Award, and Salles’ two-hander reaches the sublime because de Oliveira, at his young age, summoned a powerful concoction of mixed emotions. Profoundly touching nonetheless never saccharine, Salles’ breakthrough ends with a fitting testament to the idea that some memories never fade, even as our indifferent world continues to spin forward. —CA
It’s no incident that “Porco Rosso” is set at the peak of your interwar time period, the film’s hyper-fluid animation and general air of frivolity shadowed by the looming specter of fkbae fascism along with a deep sense of future nostalgia for all that would be forfeited to it. But there’s also such a rich vein of fun to it — this can be a movie that feels as breezy and ecstatic as flying a Ghibli plane through a clear summer afternoon (or at least as ecstatic as it makes that seem to be).
The relentless nihilism of Mike Leigh’s “Naked” can be a hard tablet to swallow. Well, less a tablet than a glass of acid with rusty blades for ice cubes. David Thewlis, within a breakthrough performance, is over a dark night in the soul en path to the top from the world, proselytizing darkness to any poor soul who will listen. But Leigh makes the journey to hell thrilling enough for us to glimpse heaven on how there, his cattle prod of a film opening with a sharp shock as Johnny (Thewlis) is pictured raping a woman inside of a dank Manchester alley before he’s chased off by her family and flees to your crummy corner of east London.
A non-linear vision of 1950s Liverpool that going balls deep in her beautiful milf ass unfolds with the slippery warmth of a Technicolor deathdream, “The Long Day Closes” finds the director sifting through his childhood memories and recreating the happy formative years after his father’s death in order to sanctify the love that’s been waiting there for him all along, just behind the layer of glass that has always kept Davies sweet russian minerva gets access to a slim jim (and his less explicitly autobiographical characters) from being in the position to reach out and touch it.
Most American audiences experienced never seen anything quite like the Wachowski siblings’ signature cinematic experience when “The Matrix” arrived in theaters from the spring of 1999. A glamour brunette maiden trinity st clair adores being nailed glorious mash-up with the pair’s long-time obsessions — everything from cyberpunk parables to kung fu action, brain-bending philosophy into the instantly inconic influence known as “bullet time” — number of aueturs have ever delivered such a vivid eyesight (times two!
“Public Housing” presents a tough balancing act for just a filmmaker who’s drawn to poverty but also useless-set against the manipulative sentimentality of aestheticizing it, and still Wiseman is uniquely well-well prepared with the challenge. His camera only lets the residents be, and they reveal themselves to it in response. We meet an elderly woman, living on her personal, who cleans a huge lettuce leaf with Jeanne Dielman-like care and then celebrates by calling a loved a person to talk about how she’s not “doing so sizzling.
The artist Bernard Dufour stepped in for long close-ups of his hand (to generally be Frenhofer’s) as he sketches and paints Marianne for unbroken minutes in a time. During those moments, the plot, the actual push and pull between artist and model, is placed on pause as you see a work take shape in real time.
The Palme d’Or winner has become such an recognized classic, such a part in the canon that we forget how radical it had been in 1994: a work of such style and slickness it won over even the Academy, earning seven Oscar nominations… for the movie featuring loving monologues about fast food, “Kung Fu,” and Christopher Walken keeping a beloved heirloom watch up his ass.
is a blockbuster, an original outing that also lovingly gathers together all sorts of string and still feels wholly itself forhertube at the top. In some ways, what that Wachowskis first made (and then attempted to make again in three subsequent sequels, including a modern reimagining that only Lana participated in making) at the end the ten years was a last gasp on the kind of righteous creative imagination that had made the ’90s so special.