The 10 Best Films Of 1991 - Page 2 of 2

The Silence Of The Lambs

5. “The Silence Of The Lambs”
Famously, “The Silence Of The Lambs” was the last film to win the big five Oscars — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best (Adapted) Screenplay. It’s all the more extraordinary because it’s the kind of film that almost never clicks with the Academy — a straight-up genre horror/thriller, with grisly levels of gore, and from a director who’d never really tackled anything like it. But that’s how good Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of “The Silence Of The Lambs” was. Endlessly influential (pick a serial killer movie or show from the past 25 years: it was definitely influence by this), it’s the story of young FBI profiler Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and her attempts to bring in a serial killer known as Buffalo Bill with the help of an incarcerated cannibal killer known as Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). On a genre level, it does everything right, with an ever-increasing sense of fear and a number of unforgettable set pieces. But it’s the texture and humanity that Demme, best known for comedy fare up to this point, adds that makes it a classic — the dry wit and near-campiness of Hopkins’ performance, the vulnerability and steeliness of Foster’s, the literate and surprising script by Ted Tally. As great as the TV incarnation of “Hannibal” was, this remains the definitive take on the character.

thelma-and-louise

4. “Thelma & Louise”
As he reminded us two years ago, at the age of 77, with the delightful, funny, inspiring crowd-pleaser “The Martian,” Ridley Scott is capable of surprising you even — especially — when you least expect it. But no movie on his resumé is more surprising than “Thelma & Louise,” a movie remarkably ahead of its (and probably our) time. Callie Khouri‘s all-timer of an original screenplay sets its two leads, Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon), on a road trip away from Thelma’s controlling husband, a joyous trip until Thelma is raped by a local and Louise kills him. Knowing that they’re unlikely to be believed by the police, they head out on the lam, being robbed by a handsome drifter (Brad Pitt in a breakthrough turn) before driving their ’66 Thunderbird into the Grand Canyon in a blaze of glory. It juggles tones in an unfeasibly dextrous way, subverting and celebrating the lovers-on-the-lam subgenre while remaining a warm and moving film about female friendship, even as it uncovers the evils of both the patriarchy and some of the individual men that are part of it. By the time you reach that iconic ending, you can’t believe that a studio allowed it to happen, that a 54-year-old English man made this movie, that you’re so strangely uplifted by it.

BB18.tif3. “A Brighter Summer Day”
Edward Yang is still probably the best kept secret of 20th-century cinema. His work won acclaim and then some from festival-going critics, but he was never prolific, his movies mostly failed to get U.S. distribution until years later, and he tragically passed away in 2007 aged just 59. But “A Brighter Summer Day,” especially in the full four-hour version that eventually and finally got a U.S. release just last year, 25 years on, helps to demonstrate what a special filmmaker he was. Competing with 2000’s “Yi Yi” for the title of Yang’s masterpiece, it’s a sprawling, truly epic piece of work, based very loosely on a true story, about a young high school student in Taipei (Chang Chen, who’d go on to star in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) who becomes involved in the feud between local teen gangs — split between the children of civil servants and the children of officers, in a fascinatingly specific touch, falls in love and eventually murders his young girlfriend. Curiously, its delinquent teen story is drawing on some of the same influences as the same year’s “Boyz N The Hood,” but the epic length gives Yang the latitude to truly immerse you in its world, to examine his protagonist’s family with the depth and feeling of an Ozu movie, to catch the political situation in the nation. It’s a long watch, sure, but an infinitely rewarding one.

barton-fink2. “Barton Fink”
Premiering barely six months after the release of their previous film, “Miller’s Crossing” (and famously penned in a few weeks while they suffered writer’s block during the process of penning that film), the Palme d’Or-winning “Barton Fink” saw Joel & Ethan Coen go to a truly singular place. Away from the crime-fiction homages of “Blood Simple” and “Miller’s Crossing” and the Preston Sturges/Looney Tunes/“Sugarland Express” mash-up of “Raising Arizona,” it’s an almost impossible movie to pin down. The story of a successful left-wing playwright (John Turturro) brought to Hollywood to work on a wrestling movie, bedding down in a strange hotel and befriending a traveling salesman (John Goodman) who might be the actual devil, it could be described as a Hollywood satire, a psychological horror, a study of madness, a film noir, or a tribute to William Faulkner. It could be seen as indulgent navel-gazing, an inscrutable, baffling piece of work, but the wit and flair with which the Coens execute it, and the deep bench of its cast (John Mahoney, Judy Davis, Michael Lerner, Tony Shalhoub and Jon Polito among those doing impossibly fine work), make it an object of fascination rather than confusion. It’s, and we say this with all due respect to their great earlier work, the moment that they stopped becoming promising filmmakers and became legendary ones.

Double-Life-of-Veronique-1991

1. “The Double Life Of Veronique”
Like Edward Yang, Krzysztof Kieslowski was taken from us much too soon: he was just 54 when he died (that’s Tom Cruise’s age now, ffs) in 1996, just two years after he announced his retirement. In some ways, it hits harder than Yang’s death, because Kieslowski was on such an extraordinary run before he passed: spoilers, this is the first of several films you’ll be seeing in high placement over the next couple of days. The only stand-alone work he made of his extraordinary late-run, sandwiched between the “Dekalog” and the “Three Colors” trilogy, it’s a remarkable film without compare, about a young Polish woman (Irène Jacob) with an ineffable feeling of…something that draws her to a mysterious French doppelgänger (also Jacob). The idea of having a double is one that’s fascinated filmmakers forever (Denis Villeneuve, most recently), but it’s rarely given such strange, hypnotic power, such richness, such…spirituality, for want of a better tone. It’s a film that does what the greatest cinema does: it uses sound and images and the juxtaposition of those to synaesthetic effect, reaching deep into you and unlocking something that was always there, but that you’d never quite come to terms with. It’s, quite simply, a miracle.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet delicatessenAgain, there are enough great movies in a year that we could have gone much longer, but we wanted to try and keep this to a manageable length and don’t want to overload you with honorable mentions. But to name but a few that nearly made the cut, there’s Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s gothic fantasia “Delicatessen,” Eleanor Coppola’s classic “Apocalypse Now” making-of doc “Hearts Of Darkness,” Michael Tolkin’s deeply underrated “The Rapture” (a sort of proto-“The Leftovers” in many ways), Richard Linklater’s groundbreaking indie “Slacker,” and Gus Van Sant’s queer classic “My Own Private Idaho.”my own private idaho gus van sant

We also considered Todd Haynes’ fascinating “Poison;” Leos Carax’s divisive but, in our opinion, magical “The Lovers On The Bridge;” David Mamet’s steel-tough “Homicide;” Spike Lee’s provocative “Jungle Fever;” joyous Bill Murray comedy “What About Bob?” and David Cronenberg’s remarkable, if uneven, “Naked Lunch.” Plus there’s documentary classic “Paris Is Burning,” Chantal Akerman’s “Night And Day,” Albert Brooks’ wonderful afterlife comedy “Defending Your Life,” and wrenching true-crime story “Let Him Have It” starring Christopher Eccleston. Any others we’ve neglected to mention? Let us know your faves in the comments.