5. “Unforgiven”
Still to date the crowning achievement of Clint Eastwood‘s directorial career, the script for his Best-Picture-winning revisionist Western had been floating around for years, with the director eventually buying up the rights, and then biding his time with it until he was old enough to pull off the lead role. With any other actor, that might seem like ego, but, John Wayne being long gone, there was simply no one else, as director or star, who could have brought the same level of regretful, tragic backstory to this astonishingly textured and intelligent film. Every previous Man With No Name role, every gunfight and quick draw Eastwood engaged in during his long career playing cowboys literal and metaphorical, is brought to bear in his portrayal of Bill Munny, matched beat for beat by a killer supporting cast including Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris and especially the invaluable Gene Hackman. The themes are mighty and ancient — revenge, betrayal, injustice — but the scope of David Webb Peoples‘ (“Blade Runner“) script remains intimate, and Eastwood is effortlessly fluid and expressive behind the camera, too, in one fell swoop revitalizing a genre that had been in danger of disappearing from our screens.
4. “Hard Boiled”
Hong Kong action maestro John Woo may have set the template for “Asian genre director who comes to Hollywood,” but his inarguable masterpiece was made just before he departed his homeland for the bright lights and big budgets of the U.S. “Hard Boiled” was something of an expiation for “sins” past as well: this time, he refocuses his glamorizing camera on the cops who had often played bumbling second fiddle to the cool gangster archetypes that populated his previous hits. Here the buddy dynamic is between an undercover officer, played by Tony Leung, and a police inspector, played by Chow Yun-Fat, as they join forces to bring down a triad led by Anthony Wong‘s mob boss. But plot is scarcely the point: “Hard Boiled” reaches such a pinnacle of pyrotechnic spectacle, particularly in the hospital shoot-out, that it becomes almost a Platonic abstraction of the action movie. With choreography so precise and fluidly shot it looks like ballet, and of course the iconic moment in which Chow Yun-Fat charges down a corridor with a baby in one hand and shotgun in the other, it’s a high-water mark not just in Asian action cinema, but in blockbuster filmmaking in general. To watch it is to almost forgive Woo for “Mission: Impossible II.” Almost.
3. “The Last Of The Mohicans”
In some ways, you can look at Michael Mann‘s adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper‘s novel (which is, by comparison, dull as dishwater) as analogous to Stanley Kubrick‘s “Spartacus“: it feels like the least authorial title in his filmography and yet, even in an outlier genre, and suffering from studio interference, it’s still totally brilliant. In fact, Mann’s motivation was unusually personal: his earliest cinematic memory was of George B. Seitz‘s 1936 version. But his meticulous directing style brought conflict with Fox, who forced him to trim it right down — tantalizingly, there is apparently somewhere out there Mann’s original three-hour cut, which, hello, yes please. But even truncated, the film feels grandly epic: from its pulse-pounding foot chases, to its evocative rendering of the French and Indian War, to the swoony central romance, it fits in the mode of classic historical epic that became modish in the ’90s, but is arguably the most stirring of them all. Featuring a terrifically physical performance from a hunky Daniel Day-Lewis as well as a gorgeous, tremulous-yet-steely turn from Madeleine Stowe, the film is also deeply moving in its depiction of the dwindling native tribes, and in villain Magua (Wes Studi) has one of the all-time great adversaries.
2. “Malcolm X”
Back in 1992, the simple fact that there existed such a thing as a “Malcolm X” movie, even if it did take director Spike Lee himself along with half of black Hollywood helping with the financing, was such an noteworthy achievement that few really engaged with the type of film it is. In the years since, though, “Malcolm X” has grown in stature, not just as a perennially relevant document of the struggle for black civil rights, but as a remarkably idiosyncratic, inventive and entertaining take on the often staid biopic. Denzel Washington, in a performance that practically leaks charisma, is the anchor for a fascinating, rambunctious film that changes in register from quasi-musical opening, to adventurous origin story, to political drama, to something close to a paranoia thriller, albeit one in which the paranoia turns out to be tragically justified. It’s an audacious, mercurial portrait of an incendiary life, and of course its controversial subject provides the perfect material. But the vitality of Lee’s filmmaking also suggests that anyone’s story, examined closely enough by respectful but not overly reverent eyes, might properly encompass a whole host of genres, colors, and moods — “Malcolm X” is the rare biopic that is full of life.
1. “Reservoir Dogs”
Perhaps the main reason that Quentin Tarantino‘s late-career bloat is so disappointing is that not only do we know he’s been capable of self-discipline in the past, we have, in his debut feature, a perfect example of less being more. “Reservoir Dogs” may have an ensemble cast (Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, Edward Bunker, Chris Penn, Lawrence Tierney and Tarantino himself, as if you didn’t already know) and it may boast scenes as loquacious as any in modern cinema, as the collected hoodlums trade overlapping profanity-laden anecdotes. But as a film, ‘Dogs’ is mercilessly sculpted: without a shred of excess, it unfolds with mounting dynamism, which is quite the trick considering how it leaps around in time frame. Peppered with eternally quotable moments and iconic soundtrack cuts, it’s a masterclass in building momentum, a lean, lithe blackhearted whipcrack of a heist movie, and an instant pantheon great in the genre. All these years later, you can still palpably sense the ravenous appetite that the then-neophyte director had for all things cinematic: the story is referential to the point of rip-off, to be sure, but the execution is snappishly brilliant, obsessively honed and entirely original.
There is at least one set of toys outside the pram at the fact that we couldn’t find space for the James Foley‘s classic David Mamet-scripted “Glengarry Glen Ross” on the main list, but it’ll have to be content to nestle at a putative number 11. And numbers 12-25, if we extended the list that far, would probably run something like: Gillian Armstrong‘s terrifically subtle and moving “The Last Days Of Chez Nous“; David Lynch’s recently reclaimed “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me“; Keith Gordon‘s unfairly forgotten “A Midnight Clear“; Neil Jordan‘s it’s-more-than-just-a-twist-dammit “The Crying Game“; Abel Ferrara‘s uncompromisingly venal “Bad Lieutenant“; Abbas Kiarostami‘s “Life, And Nothing More…“; Baz Luhrmann‘s delightful “Strictly Ballroom“; Merchant/Ivory classic “Howards End“; Stanley Kwan‘s “Center Stage“; Tim Burton‘s “Batman Returns“; Allison Anders‘ “Gas Food Lodging“; Gregg Araki‘s “The Living End“; Claude Sautet‘s luminous “Un Coeur En Hiver“; and, bringing up the rear in a way that no doubt its protagonists would appreciate, Penelope Spheeris‘ magnificently stupid “Wayne’s World.”
And with that we come, to quote the Boyz II Men single that spent 13 weeks at number one in 1992, to the end of the road — for today, anyway. Tune back in tomorrow to catch our 1993 Top 10, and in the meantime, feel free to give us all the Booyah!-s or Bogus!-es you please about todays picks, in the comments below, or to check out our 2000s series here: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.
