The 10 Best Films Of 1997 - Page 2 of 2

jackie-brown5. “Jackie Brown”
Your favorite Quentin Tarantino movie probably says something about you as a person. The there-from-the-beginning purist loves “Reservoir Dogs,” the majority love “Pulp Fiction,” the mainstream action fan loves “Kill Bill,” your sister loves “Death Proof,” your dad loves “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained,” your cousin who has entirely terrible opinions loves “The Hateful Eight.” But the real sophisticate loves “Jackie Brown,” Tarantino’s most mature and, we’d argue, richest film, one that suggested a direction for the writer/director’s career that we somewhat regret he didn’t go down. An adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel “Rum Punch,” it sees Blaxploitation star Pam Grier give the performance of a lifetime as the title character, a stewardess pulled in by authorities looking to bring down gun-runner Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson), making her a target of her former employee, while being drawn to her bail-bondsman (Robert Forster). It’s undeniably indulgent, but somehow more focused than the movies that would come after thanks to Leonard’s plotting tying it all together; and the exquisite performances from Grier, Forster and Robert De Niro (maybe his last truly great one?) in particular give the movie a middle-aged melancholy that makes it the director’s most resonant, substantial and even moving picture.

taste-of-cherry4. “A Taste Of Cherry”
If there had been any doubt up to this point, Abbas Kiarostami cemented his reputation as one of the world’s greatest filmmakers when “A Taste Of Cherry” picked up the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997 (albeit split with Shohei Imamura’s “The Eel”). The film follows Badii (a superb Homayoun Ershadi, who in reality is an architect), a middle-aged man searching the countryside outside Tehran for someone to throw earth in his grave after he commits suicide, and it’s patient and languid almost to a fault. Your mileage might vary as to whether it’s the director’s best. Roger Ebert was among those calling it “a lifeless drone,” but we’d respectfully disagree: it’s a film that puts Kiarostami’s humanism front-and-center, and the film’s more oblique qualities actually give it a more wide-reaching profundity, perfectly matched by the director’s beautifully plain shooting style. The film’s coda, which cuts suddenly to behind-the-scenes footage of Kiarostami and his crew making the film, accompanied by Louis Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary,” is equal parts baffling and brilliant. Few directors have tackled the simple banalities of death and its relationship with life with such skill, and we appreciate that all the more since his passing last year.

Princess Mononoke3. “Princess Mononoke”
The move towards the relative mainstream for Hayao Miyazaki came four years later with “Spirited Away” (winner of the first Animated Feature Oscar), but the first real exposure that U.S. audiences got to the Japanese animation master, outside of the true otaku, came with “Princess Mononoke,” a film that we’d argue is actually the director’s finest hour. An original fable set in medieval Japan, it sees young hero prince Ashitaka (Yoji Matsuda) cursed in a battle with a demon, and setting out to the west to find a cure, encountering San (Yuriko Ishida), a young woman raised by wolves, embroiled in a battle between forest gods and the world of man. It’s a rousing, thrilling adventure tale, with a dizzying level of imagination and creativity to the various creatures and sequences its showcases, like a sort of pastoral “Star Wars.” But it’s also probably the most adult thing that Miyazaki ever made (more so even than “The Wind Rises”), harsh and uncompromising and tackling big themes, like all the best fables. “Spirited Away” was stranger, “Ponyo” sweeter, “My Neighbor Totoro” more heartstring-twanging, but this is the one, of all Miyazaki’s films, that pulls it all together.

boogie-nights2. “Boogie Nights”
Few filmmakers arrive fully formed, and such was the case with Paul Thomas Anderson: his first film “Hard Eight is one of immense promise, but one with plenty of flaws too. But that’s fine, because only the following year, he delivered “Boogie Nights.” With an ambition that laughed in the face of his relative young age (he was just 27 when the film opened), the film follows nearly a decade in the life of Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg), soon to be known as Dirk Diggler, as he becomes involved in the San Fernando Valley porn scene, becomes a star and, as the 1980s arrive, sees his friends and himself slump into darker, more dangerous times. Anderson, perhaps understandably, is still wearing his influences on his sleeve: a little Altman, a lot of Scorsese. But those influences recombine into a voice all of his own: novelistic, funny, compassionate, probing, provocative and with an undercurrent of simmering violence that would run throughout his work. “I’m a star. I”m a star, I’m a star, I’m a star. I am a big, bright, shining star,” Diggler says at the films’ end, and Anderson was clearly, and rightly, talking about himself, too.

la-confidential1. “L.A. Confidential”
We went back and forth a lot on which of the top two would take the number one slot this year, and in the end, the thing that swung it was stumbling across Curtis Hanson’s crime classic just starting on TV, intending once again to just watch five minutes of it before bed, and still being there two-and-a-bit hours later. It’s just simply endlessly watchable, a gorgeous-looking, phenomenally acted noir tale that can achieve more in its relatively brief running time than most of your peak-TV faves do in 10 hours. Miraculously condensing James Ellroy’s sprawling, unsparing, multi-stranded mystery into a gripping thriller without dumbing it down, it sees a trio of post-war cops (Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe & Kevin Spacey) embroiled in a series of investigations after a drunken Christmas disgrace in the department and a diner massacre that claimed one of their own. Hanson, an oft-underrated filmmaker who had his finest hour here, rebuilds 1950s L.A. with glorious detail and a movie lover’s giddiness at the train set he’s playing in, while evoking the best of the crime genre, to the point that he builds a film that can happily sit beside “The Big Sleep,” “Chinatown,” et al. Nothing in this space has come close in the two decades since.

To dash through our usual suspects of runners-ups, we were particularly upset that our 10-film format didn’t have room for Atom Egoyan’s powerful “The Sweet Hereafter,” Ang Lee’s ’70s-set literary adaptation “The Ice Storm,” Paul Verhoeven’s subversive sci-fi actioner “Starship Troopers” and Michael Haneke’s brutal breakthrough “Funny Games.”

Then there was also David Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” Tsai Ming-liang’s “The River,” Mike Newell’s Mafia tale “Donnie Brasco,” John Cusack’s finest hour in “Grosse Pointe Blank,” Takeshi Kitano’s “Hana-bi,” Martin Scorsese’s atypical, still hard-to-find “Kundun,” Almodóvar’s jet-black “Live Flesh,” Andrew Niccol’s sensitive sci-fi “Gattaca,” Harmony Korine’s indie firecracker “Gummo,” Palme d’Or winner “The Eel,” John Woo’s inordinately enjoyable “Face/Off,” David Mamet’s puzzle-box “The Spanish Prisoner,” Neil LaBute’s provocative “In The Company Of Men,” Spike Lee’s wrenching documentary “4 Little Girls,” Christopher Guest’s hilarious “Waiting For Guffman,” and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s breakthrough with “Good Will Hunting.” Man, what a good year.

Any others you think should have made the cut? Let us know in the comments.