An evolving list of ★★★★ / ★★★★★ films released during the 1990’s. The following are my awards (as they currently stand):

Hutch d’Or (Best Film):
Beau Travail (Director: Claire Denis)

Best Director:
Krzysztof Kieslowski for The Double Life of Veronique and the Three Colours Trilogy

Best Actor (tied):
Daniel Day Lewis for The Age of Innocence, and
David Thewlis for Naked 

Best Actress (tied):
Irene Jacob for The Double Life of Veronique and Three Colours Red
Emily Watson for Breaking the Waves, and
Juliette Binoche for Three Colours Blue

Best Supporting Actor:
Joe Pesci for Goodfellas

Best Supporting Actress:
Anna Paquin for The Piano

Best Screenplay:
Quentin Tarantino for Reservoir Dogs

Best Cinematography:
Slawomir Idziak for The Double Life of Veronique and Three Colours Blue

Best Original Score:
Zbigniew Preisner for The Double Life of Veronique and The Three Colours Trilogy

Best Soundtrack (tied):
Beau Travail, and
Goodfellas

Best Documentary:
Close-Up (Director: Abbas Kiarostami)

Best Animation and Best Short:
The Wrong Trousers (Director: Nick Park)

Best Debut:
Reservoir Dogs (Director: Quentin Tarantino)

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A Brief Review of the Decade:

Sixteen ★★★★★ films. I’ve also seen more films from these ten years than in any other decade. 

The 1990’s was when I became a cinephile. It was an intense introduction and I made it my business to see nearly everything I could. I was perhaps not as discerning as I am now, but then I was more open to possibility, and loved nothing more than unearthing a great film from the enormous pile of also rans. Of course my viewing was not restricted to contemporary films, and I was eager to explore as much as I could of prior decades. But as this was in the age of VHS, and the home viewing experience was pretty terrible, most of my viewing took place in the cinema and focused on new releases. Fortunately it was a strong decade and this ensured my early enthusiasm received plenty of reward and helped establish a solid basis for my enduring love of film.

In hindsight I see the 1990’s as a crossroads decade. It saw a decline in the classic art house tradition, but in its place was born a new wave of directors who seemed to straddle the divides of art and popular cinema. American cinema was being reborn, with an exciting group of emerging young directors, many of whom lead the way to this day now. These new US directors and their international equivalents were well educated in cinema history, but they had something interesting and entertaining to say and new ways to say it. Art cinema didn’t need to be so highbrow anymore. Looking back I reflect on this decade as a bittersweet changing of the guard. I miss the serious dedication to the poetic art of classic cinema that relatively few directors  have made it their business to maintain, but I am grateful instead for the craft and invention of our modern directors. 

But while the 1990’s were still in flight there was no sense of this baton change. Everything was in flux and everything was still possible. Krzysztof Kieslowski directed a string of masterpieces with The Double Life of Veronique and his Three Colours trilogy. These films were intelligent, imaginative and deeply poetic, philosophical meditations. As well as being brilliantly written and directed, they were tops for their cinematography, particularly Slawomir Idziak’s work on Veronique and Blue. Equally impressive was the music by Kieslowski’s regular composer Zbigniew Preisner. Given the quality of these films I sometimes wonder how influential his legacy might have grown to be if his life had not been cut short after completing the trilogy.

Claire Denis is one director who cut her teeth on art cinema assisting Wenders during the 1980’s on his classic Wings of Desire and Paris Texas. She’s had a career of interesting and challenging films, but nothing else to match her extraordinary Beau Travail, a unique and brilliant example of poetic cinema. Other quality art cinema was released throughout the decade by the old timers like Theo Angelopoulos (Eternity and a Day), Jacques Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse), Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt by the Sun and Urga), and a still spritely Agnes Varda (Jacquot de Nantes). And a new generation of more austere auteurs bared their souls and their teeth with the likes of Tsai Ming-liang (Vive L’Amour), Gaspar Noe (I Stand Alone), Bruno Dumont (The Life of Jesus) and perhaps best of all, Michael Haneke (Funny Games). 

Terrence Malick had disappeared again after Badlands and Days of Heaven, but then he eventually reappeared with one of cinema’s great humanist paeans in The Thin Red Line. It suffered commercially against Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, but I think it has endured as the greater film, beautiful, moving and boasting wonderful cinematography and music. Spielberg did however contribute a genuine masterpiece with Schindler’s List. 

Before he was a bad boy provocateur, Lars von Trier was an exciting innovator. In the 1990’s he directed a run of fascinating, and in the case of Breaking the Waves, lacerating films, which marked him out as one of the most exciting new voices. In this category he was equally matched by Wong Kar-Wai who brought a lighter touch, and a visual style that was exhilarating and romantic in a modern guise. After the moody Days of Being Wild, he dropped his wonderful diptych of Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. Other directors who successfully trod the line between art and entertainment included Leos Carax (Les Amants du Pont Neuf) and Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man).

Over in America, Scorsese continued to excel, with two of his greatest yet most contrasting films in Goodfellas and The Age of Innocence. But he was joined by a new breed of hotshot directors, who’d been schooled on his films of the 1970’s and 1980’s, and were now ready to stand beside him. Tarantino was perhaps the most exciting discovery. I was thrilled by his low budget Reservoir Dogs, which arrived with a howl as one the greatest ever debuts and with a crackerjack screenplay. The excitement carried through into his follow up, Pulp Fiction, but it is a wee bit disappointing to look back and think that he never managed to quite live up to this early promise. Contrast that though with Joel and Ethan Coen who have built a prolific and consistently high quality body of work, which includes the early landmarks of Fargo, Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing. And also Paul Thomas Anderson who has gone on to be top of my Director’s League with a range of masterpieces that got underway in the 1990’s with Boogie Nights and then Magnolia.

The energy of this American new wave wasn’t restricted to just a few filmmakers. The mood was infectious and spread to other directors in the USA and across the world. These included Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Wes Anderson (Rushmore), Matthieu Kassovitz (La Haine) and Takeshi Kitano (Boiling Point). More traditional, though high quality genre filmmaking was also in good supply from the likes of Jane Campion (The Piano), David Fincher (Se7en) and Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential). 

With my immersion in narrative feature films I probably overlooked many documentary and short film releases, however, some brilliant films still stand out. Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness was an extraordinary swoop across the devastation of the Kuwaiti oil fields after the first Gulf War. And Abbas Kiarostami’s almost unclassifiable Close-Up is a documentary that expands into fiction and meta-fiction to return with profound truths about the nature of storytelling and humanity. And then at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, the wonderful Aardman Animations team produced claymation perfection with The Wrong Trousers.

There were many great acting performances throughout the decade. Daniel Day Lewis brought repressed, elegant physicality, as only he can, to The Age of Innocence, and David Thewlis was astonishing and disturbing in Mike Leigh’s bleak Naked. Irene Jacob and Juliette Binoche delivered highly sensitive, nuanced performances in Kieslowski’s swan-songs, but perhaps the most intense performance of anyone came from Emily Watson in Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. Supporting roles by Anna Paquin in The Piano and Joe Pesci in Goodfellas also stand out, showing form that would be revisited twenty years later in Scorsese’s The Irishman. And I can’t fail to mention the wonderful supporting turn by wonder dog Gromit in The Wrong Trousers.

So the end of the 20th Century seemed like the beginning of a new era in film. The old masters were mostly going or gone, and there was a new cinematic style taking shape. Onwards, then, to the new millennium...

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