“La Belle Noiseuse” (Jacques Rivette, 1991) Jacques Rivette’s four-hour masterpiece about the act of artistic creation turns the male gaze back on itself. True, it’s hard to think of an actress who’s had to be naked onscreen for just a longer period of time in one movie than Emmanuelle Beart is in this a single.
“Eyes Wide Shut” might not seem to be as epochal or predictive as some on the other films on this list, but no other ’90s movie — not “Safe,” “The Truman Show,” or even “The Matrix” — left us with a more precise sense of what it would feel like to live in the twenty first century. In a very word: “Fuck.” —DE
“Jackie Brown” may very well be considerably less bloody and slightly less quotable than Tarantino’s other nineteen nineties output, but it really makes up for that by nailing all of the little things that he does so well. The clever casting, flawless soundtrack, and wall-to-wall intertextuality showed that the same male who delivered “Reservoir Pet dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” was still lurking behind the camera.
Prepared with an intoxicating candor for sorrow and humor, from the moment it begins to its heart-rending resolution, “All About My Mother” will be the movie that cemented its director as an international power, and it remains one of many most affecting things he’s ever made. —CA
The patron saint of Finnish filmmaking, Aki Kaurismäki more or less defined the country’s cinematic output during the 80s and 90s, releasing a gradual stream of darkly comedic films about down-and-out characters enduring the absurdities of everyday life.
A married guy falling in love with another man was considered scandalous and potentially career-decimating movie fare in the early ’80s. This unconventional (at the time) love triangle featuring Charlie’s Angels
In the films of David Fincher, everybody needs a foil. His movies normally boil down for the elastic push-and-pull between diametrically opposed phonerotica characters who reveal themselves through the tension of whatever ties them together.
Sure, there’s a world of darkness waiting for them when they get there, but that’s just how it goes. There are shadows in life
No supernatural being or predator enters a single frame of this spank bang visually economical affair, nevertheless the committed turns of its stars as they descend into insanity, along with the piercing sounds of horrific events that we’re compelled to assume in lieu of seeing them for ourselves, are still more than enough to instill a visceral anxiety.
None of this would have been possible Otherwise for Jim Carrey’s career-defining performance. No other actor could have captured the blend of Pleasure and darkness that made Truman Burbank so captivating to both the fictional viewers watching his show as well as the moviegoers in 1998.
This critically beloved drama was groundbreaking not only for its depiction of gay Black love but for presenting complex, layered Black characters whose struggles don’t revolve around White people and racism. Against all conceivable odds, it triumphed over the conventional Hollywood romance La La Land
In “Strange Days,” the love-Unwell grifter Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), who sells people’s memories for bio-VR escapism within the blackmarket, becomes embroiled in porn gub a vast conspiracy when considered one of his clients captures footage of the heinous crime – the murder of a Black political hip hop artist.
And still, on meeting a stubborn young boy whose mother has just died, our heroine can’t help but soften up and offer pornhits poor Josué (Vinícius de Oliveira) some help. The kid is quick to offer his personal judgments in return, as his gendered assumptions feed into the combative dynamic that flares up between these two strangers as they travel across Brazil in search of the boy’s father.
When Satoshi Kon died from pancreatic cancer in 2010 at the tragically premature age of forty six, not only did the film world shed certainly one of its greatest storytellers, mistress t it also lost certainly one of its most gifted seers. No person had a more correct grasp on how the digital age would see fiction and reality bleed into each other around the most private levels of human perception, and all four of the wildly different features that he made in his temporary career (along with his masterful Television show, “Paranoia Agent”) are bound together by a shared preoccupation with the fragility on the self from the shadow of mass media.