"There must be a separate God for movies"

The best films of the '90s illuminated the world -- and cinema itself.

By Charles Taylor

Jan. 4, 2000 | While the contents of the list that follows are not arbitrary, the number is. The best of a decade, a year, a millennium cannot be rounded off to a random number. So while I've chosen 10 films that represent the best the movies offered in the '90s, there are others that deserve mention, including two it broke my heart to leave off. John Boorman's "Where the Heart Is," a highlight of a decade of superb work from the director, was perhaps the decade's most mindlessly dismissed film. This magical family comedy played like "King Lear" done in the mood of "Twelfth Night" under a spell of enchantment out of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Like Boorman, Jacques Rivette is one of the giants of movies, and his sort-of musical "Haut/bas/fragile," which follows three young women over the course of a Parisian summer, bringing each to a moment of decision in their lives, was perhaps the most beguiling of his poeticization of everyday life.

My ideal list of the decade's best films would make room for them, and for Robert Altman's "Vincent and Theo," Bernardo Bertolucci's "Besieged," Chris Marker's "The Last Bolshevik," Philip Kaufman's "Henry and June," Steven Soderbergh's "Out of Sight," "Fred Schepisi's "The Russia House," Terry Gilliam's "The Fisher King," Danny Boyle's "Trainspotting," Alfonso Cuaron's "Great Expectations," Erick Zonca's "The Dreamlife of Angels," Agnes Varda's "Jacquot" and Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."

There is much to say about the obstacles that movies have faced in this decade and continue to face -- the way the dominance of special effects has reduced movies to spectacle that banishes characterization and psychology; the way the studios' publicity machines have attempted to co-opt and do away with criticism by shifting attention to entertainment reporting; the paltry distribution of foreign films in the States -- but I've chosen not to dwell on it. That the movies on this list are as strong as they are in such times is proof enough of Pauline Kael's line, "There must be a separate God for movies." Each, in its way, illustrates Truffaut's ideal, expressing both an idea of the world and an idea of the cinema.

1. "Vanya on 42nd Street" (United States, Louis Malle and Andre Gregory)
For his final -- and greatest -- picture, Louis Malle filmed the version of "Uncle Vanya" that Andre Gregory and his actors rehearsed for three years in New York's crumbling New Amsterdam theater and then performed for small, invited audiences. A direct descendant of the legendary naturalistic Chekov productions staged by Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theater, this "Vanya" obliterates the distinctions between the artifice of theater and life -- the actors perform in their street clothes, with the audience a few feet from them in the dilapidated theater -- in a way that seems the realization of the playwright's dreams. Malle, Gregory and their actors break down the barriers that keep us from getting to the inner life of the play.

The film also features perhaps the greatest ensemble acting ever captured on film with a cast that includes Julianne Moore, Brooke Smith (whose concluding monologue is transcendent), Larry Pine, Phoebe Brand, George Gaynes and, as Vanya, Wallace Shawn, seething with anger and self-disgust but coming too close to our own thwarted ambitions for us to shut him out.

2. "Irma Vep" (France, Olivier Assayas)
Olivier Assayas has been at the forefront of the directors who have revitalized French cinema this decade. But it's the spirit of the French New Wave that hovers over this comedy about the making (and unmaking) of a movie. At the center is the nouvelle vogue's great icon, Jean-Pierre Leaud in an endearingly eccentric performance as a shambling wreck of a director taking on the impossible task of remaking Louis Feuillade's 1915 serial "Les Vampires." To star as the cat-suited jewel thief Irma Vep, he casts Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung (playing herself). Parodying the foolhardy insularity of both art movies and the mainstream, Assayas' film is a comic elegy for the New Wave that brims over with precisely the freedom and lyricism that defined those films of the late '50s and early '60s. It is also a demonstration of how, for a filmmaker, a movie can be contained in one face. Scampering over the roofs of Paris in scratched-up black-and-white, Maggie Cheung could stand for the glories the movies have given us and the glories they've yet to yield up.

3. "Before Sunrise" (United States, Richard Linklater)
An American boy meets a French girl on a train in Europe. Disembarking in Vienna, they spend the night walking around the city and talking, finally making love hours before each is scheduled to depart for home. Within that simple framework Richard Linklater, working from the note-perfect script he wrote with Kim Krizan, made the most exquisitely poetic romantic film since "Sunrise," "L'Atalante" and "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg." Ethan Hawke, charming as a slacker version of the earnest young American abroad, and Julie Delpy, looking as if she'd just stepped out of a Botticelli, perform the script as if it were a pair of intertwining arias. This is a movie about language as self-portraiture, foreplay, seduction and, finally, as a means of remembrance. Hawke and Delpy are in such full flower here that it hurts a little to watch them. The evanescence of a great romance that lasts one night becomes a parallel to the evanescence of watching a movie. The lovers slip through our grasp as quickly as they slip through each other's.

4. "Babe: Pig in the City" (Australia, George Miller)
One of the cinema's genuine masterpieces of fantasy filmmaking, but with the emotional purity of De Sica. George Miller replaced the pastoral idyll of the original "Babe" with a bughouse inventiveness whose whirligig pace matches the city in which Babe, marooned by circumstance, finds himself a guest in a hotel for animals. Like the skyline the brave little pig sees when he looks from his window, a view that mashes together landmarks as far and wide as the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty and the Sydney Opera House, the movie is a pipe-dream vision of the city as part bustling metropolis, part Oz. At the end of the crowded Yellow Brick Road that Babe travels is a calming, well-deep humanism. Miller brings each of his animal characters to an emotional precipice where they stand completely revealed and because of that -- and this is the grace of the film -- they're able to realize what links them to their fellow creatures. Thank the pig.

5. "Three Kings" (United States, David O. Russell)
At once a blood-soaked political vaudeville and a classic adventure story that allows for the possibility of heroism. Reacting against the comfortable video game distance from which Americans watched the Gulf War, David O. Russell brings us the reality of the operation in relentless close-up. A cynical film about the limits of cynicism, the movie takes a wised-up attitude to the moral hypocrisy of the U.S. position -- encouraging Iraqis to overthrow a weakened Saddam but offering them no assistance -- but refuses to be cynical about the impulse of its heroes to defy that hypocrisy and act like decent human beings. The emotional tone switches constantly, which threw some viewers.

Like the work of many young directors, "Three Kings" is an adrenaline-soaked amalgam of action, rock-video technique and pop culture reference (this is a movie where Iraqi rebels wear hooded robes and gas masks that make them look like the Jawas from "Star Wars.") But alone among those films, "Three Kings" never sacrifices its moral compass for the sake of sensation.

Next page: "Hamlet," "Cobb," "Backbeat"