Films of the 1990s

Today I stumbled upon Film Comment's feature on the best films/directors of the 1990s from the end of that decade. It's a PDF in ProQuest, so no links are available. Here are a few lists, though.

David Bordwell

Person of the Decade can only be Abbas Kiarostami, who seems along with his Iranian colleagues and the best Asian directors to be reinventing the history of the cinema, from early film tableaus through neorealism to reflexivity, without any postmodernist bad faith - instead, a spontaneous sense of human integrity.

Ten Best Nineties films I know (in no ranked order)

• Through the Olve Trees (Kiarostami)
• A Brighter Summer Day (Yang)
• Chungking Express (Wong)
• The Blade (Tsui Hark)
• The Thin Red Line (Malick)
• Heat (Mann)
• Simple Men (Hartley)
• An Angel at My Table (Campion)
• A Scene at the Sea (Kitano)
• The Suspended Step of the Stork (Angelopoulos)

Manohla Dargis

After Godard, this is what movies could be, should be, and finally are. Wong Kar-wai is one of the few filmmakers alive who makes films, not just words into pictures.

Ten Neglected Feature Films of the Nineties

• Babe (Miller)
• Flowers of Shanghai (Hou)
• The Portrait of a Lady (Campion)
• Happy Together (Wong)
• Mars Attacks! (Burton)
• My Sex Life (Desplechin)
• Perfect Love (Breillat)
• Vive L'Amour (Tsai Ming-liang)
• Dead Man (Jarmusch)
• No Fear, No Die (Denis)

Roger Ebert

The decade ended as it began, with the United States the only major filmgoing nation with no workable adult rating.

J. Hoberman

Film(s) of the Decade: Jean-Luc Godard's ongoing Histoire(s) du Cinema and its Hollywood evil twin Forrest Gump: the history of movies merges with the movie of history.

Person of the decade: Hou Hsiao-hsien. Having only gotten better and made three masterpieces this decade - The Puppetmaster, Goodbye South, Goodbye, and Flowers of Shanghai - he seems not to have gotten the message that the golden age is over.

Alexander Horwath

Flowers of Shanghai - A somewhat symbolic choice: for me, the 1990s were defined by Western film culture's new attention toward the astounding Asian cinemas. The Nineties oeuvres of (for instance) Darezhan Omirbaev, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami, Wong Kar-wai, Takeshi Kitano, Tsai Ming-liang, and Hou Hsiao-hsien belong to the great achievements of all cinema - and Hou's Flowers is the opium den where they should all mee. (Come to think of it, the little hill with a tree and a hole and a mobile phone in Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us would also make for a perfect spot.)

Quentin Tarantino - For better and worse. A strong debut; followed by a decade-defining "important" and actually very good film that soon became "weaker" in many people's minds because of its immense and mostly disastrous effects on the whole of film culture; and, finally, a true masterpiece that most humanely and intelligently talked about American life in the late 20th century - by talking about les flaneurs du mal(l).

Kent Jones

Most Underrated

• Les Voleurs (Téchiné)
• Nil By Mouth (Oldman)
• Dazed and Confused (Linklater)
• Dr. Akagi (Shohei Imamura)
• Georgia (Grosbard)
• Starship Troopers (Verhoeven)
• Kundun (Scorsese)
• Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou)
• Bottle Rocket (Anderson)
• Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick)

Dave Kehr

Ten Most Underrated (chronological)

• To Sleep with Anger (Burnett)
• Where the Heart Is (Boorman)
• Men Don't Leave (Briekman)
• Point Break (Bigelow)
• Naked Lunch (Cronenberg)
• Matinee (Dante)
• Wild Bill (Hill)
• Bottle Rocket (Anderson)
• Ulee's Gold (Nunez)
• Capitaine Conan (Tavernier)

Todd McCarthy

Ten Best

• Unforgiven (Eastwood)
• Pulp Fiction (Tarantino)
• Fargo (Coen)
• Schindler's List (Spielberg)
• Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (Dragojevic)
• Boogie Nights (Anderson)
• L.A. Confidential (Hanson)
• All About My Mother (Almodovar)
• A Little Princess (Cuarón)
• Lessons in Darkness (Herzog)

Tony Rayns

Ten Best & Most Underrated

• Days of Being Wild (Wong)
• The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (Hong Sang-soo)
• Gedo/The Outer Way (Mochizuki)
• A Brighter Summer Day (Yang)
• London (Keiller)
• Poison (Haynes)
• Rebels of the Neon God (Tsai)
• Actress (Yost)
• After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda)
• Xiao Wu (Jia)

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Ten Best/Most Underrated (alphabetical)

• Actress (Yost)
• A Brighter Summer Day (Yang)
• Dead Man (Jarmusch)
• From the East (Akerman)
• Histoire(s) du Cinema (Godard)
• Inquietude (Oliveira)
• The Puppetmaster (Hou)
• Satantango (Tarr)
• When It Rains (Burnett)
• The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami)

Amy Taubin

Ten Underrated

• The Portrait of a Lady (Campion)
• The Age of Innocence (Scorsese)
• Safe (Haynes)
• Coming to Terms with Death (Ferran)
• I Can't Sleep (Denis)
• Outer and Inner Space (Warhol)
• White Dog (Fuller)
• Dead Man (Jarmusch)
• To Sleep With Anger (Burnett)
• Crash (Cronenberg)