5. “Sátántangó”
It’s over seven hours long, black and white, in Hungarian and comes from the not-exactly cheerful mind of Hungarian nihilist maestro Béla Tarr, so we get it if you don’t feel like running out immediately to pick up a copy of “Sátántangó.” But trust us, you’re missing out — “Sátántangó” is actually a thrill, a bleakly hilarious, apocalyptic tragicomedy in which the long unbroken takes teem with absurd asides and odd moments of surreally real life, even when ostensibly nothing is happening. Divided into chapters, the film is, broadly speaking, a gorgeously-shot allegory in which a small farming community’s social fabric comes apart in the period just preceding the fall of communism, largely due to the presence of a charismatic, charlatan outsider who might stand for God, or the Church, or the authoritarian State, or maybe all three. Rather than feeling gruelling, the extreme length and pacing (there are about as many individual shots as there are in the average 90-minute feature) overpower your resistance, recalibrating your rhythms, until you live in this arcane, peculiar world so vividly that you can practically smell its smells, and so immersively that it might take you a couple of days to readjust to normal life after you emerge.
4. “Hoop Dreams”
Steve James‘ masterpiece documentary predated our current doc Golden Age by some years, but it feels now like one of that phenomenon’s opening salvos. It certainly broke the mold at the box office, raking in nearly $8 million at the box office, which was an almost unprecedented amount for a non-fiction film, and which proved there was a market not just for theatrical documentaries, but for films that dealt specifically with lesser-seen aspects of the black urban experience. It follows two high-school basketball players William Gates and Arthur Agee, from underprivileged Chicagoan backgrounds as they experience financial, social, familial, educational and personal setbacks pursuing their dreams of a pro basketball career. It touches on a heady mixture of issues about racial and economic injustice and the desperate lottery that is the chance of a professional sports career for so many underprivileged kids whose families have no other escape route from their endlessly straitened circumstances. And it’s also peculiarly, soberingly timeless: it may have felt like a lightning bolt of furious compassion back then, but more than two decades later it’s chilling how little has changed, and how topical “Hoop Dreams” still feels.
3. “Pulp Fiction”
It’s difficult to think about Quentin Tarantino‘s era-defining Palme d’Or-winner today without one’s vision becoming clouded with the knowledge of all the diminishing-returns knock-offs it would spawn, and without one’s enthusiasm being a little dimmed by the overfamiliarity of almost every scene from a million dorm room posters and every line of dialogue from a million fratboy recitations. But at the epicenter of all that noise and bluster, there’s still a brilliant film: as expansive and multi-storylined as his debut, “Reservoir Dogs” was lean and economical, “Pulp Fiction” is the purest hit we’d ever get of the newly lavish Tarantino when he still had something to prove, when he still had the voracious, omnivorous appetite of the neophyte, and the energy and invention to match his talents. It’s a ridiculously enjoyable smorgasbord of riches, relaunching careers left and right (John Travolta‘s in particular, but Bruce Willis owes it a debt of gratitude too), and providing other actors, like Samuel L Jackson and Uma Thurman with roles that continue to define their star personas to this day. The images, soundtrack, quippy dialogue and oversaturated, punchy noir aesthetic may all be wildly overfamiliar now, but that’s just another way of saying they’re iconic.
2. “Three Colors: Red”
In the history of apropos final statements from master filmmakers, there are few as singularly sublime as the last installment in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy. After the high watermark of ‘Blue,’ and the more lightweight pleasures of ‘White‘ (also 1994), came the perfectly balanced ‘Red,’ a defiantly humane return to Kieslowski’s career-long preoccupation with the idea of unseen, invisible connections between strangers, who might be miles apart but who, in spirit, exist lockstep alongside each other. Here those strangers are young, part-time model Valentine (a shimmering Irene Jacob) and an embittered retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who are brought together by accident, and who form an oddly out-of-phase bond, despite having little in common in life experience or outlook. Evocative and mysterious and yet somehow, like the color it is named for, bold and vital as blood, ‘Red’ is popularly seen as Kieslowski’s bid for personal redemption and a tentative refutation of the tendency toward cynicism and mournfulness that marked so much of his filmography. But it can also feel like a culmination of the themes he revisited and reworked time and again, perhaps even a key that unlocks other levels of understanding of those prior titles, this time with the focus shifted off their sorrowful context and onto the slender, elusive threads of connection that can be forged despite it all.
1. “Chungking Express”
It’s a mark of both Wong Kar-wai‘s genius (this is his third appearance to date on our ’90s lists) and of the fickleness of the filmmaking Gods, that “Chungking Express” and not his other 1994 title, wuxia epic “Ashes of Time,” swoons its way to the top of today’s rankings. Meant as a quick palate-cleanser and shot during a two-month hiatus in the editing of ‘Ashes,’ ‘Chungking’ feels almost insolently fleet-footed, with its two parallel storylines living deliciously in the moment and in the hyperactively blissed-out camerawork of Christopher Doyle. It also feels entirely of its time: like “Pulp Fiction” — the dominating influence of the 1990s — it melds genre archetypes from the gangster movie, the film noir and the offbeat romance in a postmodern blur of invention and recombination, yet it also remains unmistakably Wong’s. Inasmuch as it tells a story, it follows two lovelorn cops, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung, as they pursue or are pursued by two new women (Brigitte Lin and Faye Wong respectively) in the wake of painful break-ups. The jumble of chronology, voiceover, overlit market stalls and neon-soaked nighttime locales should be cacophonous, but in Wong’s hands it’s simply exciting, a day-glo pop-art masterpiece as bold as its human connections are fragile.
We’re sure there are a bunch of titles you cannot forgive us for excluding, but the ones we’re most beating ourselves up over are: Frank Darabont‘s sleeper crowdpleaser “The Shawshank Redemption“; Atom Egoyan‘s terrific “Exotica” (another noir of sorts); Luc Besson‘s wildly entertaining “Leon“/”The Professional“; Woody Allen‘s delightfully dippy “Bullets Over Broadway“; Ang Lee‘s beautifully low-key “Eat Drink Man Woman“; Danny Boyle‘s blackhearted and propulsive “Shallow Grave.”
We also debated Patrice Cheraeau‘s delirious period bodice-ripper “La Reine Margot“; Jan de Bont‘s action touchstone “Speed“; Shekhar Kapur‘s harrowing, defiant “Bandit Queen“; Robert Redford‘s measured, elegant “Quiz Show“; Richard Curtis‘ Brit smash “Four Weddings and a Funeral“; Kevin Smith‘s no-budget “Clerks“; Darnell Martin‘s lively “I Like It Like That“; the Coens‘ underrated “The Hudsucker Proxy“; and Lee Tamahori’s “Once Were Warriors.”
School us with your own 1994 list, or tell us whether you find our picks phat or whack, in the comments below, and if you’re hankering for more, don’t forget to check out our previous ’90s lists 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993. And for extra credit, you can always visit our 2000s series too: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.