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The Best Films of the 1990s
The greatest films of the 1990s, from America’s independent cinema to the rise of the digital age.
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The Fall of Otrar (1991)
Through antiquated sepia tones, visceral tactility, and a vast historical sweep, The Fall of Otrar clings to the the sombre, archaic beauty of the Khwarazmian Empire, even as Ardak Amirkulov’s painstaking reconstruction observes its medieval grandeur fade into distant memory.
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Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)
George Lucas’ myth-making ambitions are undoubtedly bold in The Phantom Menace, serving as a visually and narratively uneven foundation to the darker chapters ahead, yet resolutely daring to ignite the slow-burning fuse of the Star Wars saga’s most tragic, fateful transformation.
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Beau Travail (1999)
Claire Denis crafts a hypnotic meditation on masculinity, repression, and colonial alienation in Beau Travail, tracing one soldier’s obsessive jealousy within the French Foreign Legion, and rendering the human body a vessel of both discipline and desire.
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Barton Fink (1991)
Within the spectacle, symbolism, and absurd formal patterns of Barton Fink, the Coen Brothers expose one aspiring screenwriter’s intellectual hypocrisy, trapping him in a hellishly elusive puzzle box beyond comprehension.
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Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
By plunging one unfaithful husband into the depths of an erotic cult and traversing a hazy underworld of dreams in Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick eerily reveals those depraved, shadowy figures that live inside us all, and the invisible power they hold over our minds, societies, and humanity.
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The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Michael Mann’s grand mythologising of colonial America forecasts a solemn future in The Last of the Mohicans, and yet it is also through the cross-cultural relationships formed between Europeans and Native Americans that seeds of harmony are planted, miraculously blooming in the unfertile soil of war.