Then there was the amazing Manoel de Oliveira, the last active survivor of the silent era, who nonetheless made more good films than just about anyone else in the Nineties. So I’ll rely on memory to select not one film or one person, but those who kept it “cherce” during a decade when many too many people made many too many films: Victor Erice, Alexei Guerman, and Terence Malick made one jewel apiece, while Alain Cavalier, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Otar Iosseliani, Ken Jacobs, Abbas Kiarostami, Chris Marker, Nanni Moretti, and Straub-Huillet were slightly more prolific but just as good. Sorry to be such a late entry, but I’m in Turin and my reference materials here are nonexistent. PETER SCARLET San Francisco Film Festival

Hayao Miyazake-a leading Japanese animation filmmaker.įilms (chronological): The Dispossessed (Aravindan, India), Kae Byok (Im Kwon-Taek, Korea), Nostalgia for the Countryland (Nhat Minh Dang, Vietnam), Dukhai (Bangladesh), The Sleeping Man (Kohei Oguri, Japan), Red Persimmon (Wang Tung, Taiwan), Ferocious Saint Lord of Gobi (Mongolia), The Teacher of Cyrill Alphabet (Mongolia), The Wind Will Carry Us (Iran), Fatherless (Yoshihisa Shigeno, Japan) ANDREW SARRIS film critic, New York Observerīill Murray transcended his Saturday Night Live beginnings by rejuvenating American screen comedy with many wry, but never sick or mean-spirited, twists, most notably in the American comedy of the decade, Groundhog Day.Ĭolor of Paradise (1999, Iran)-This is one of the noblest films ever made. That part was optional, but as it turned out, most respondents gave it a whirl, and very provocatively, too. And we’d appreciate a brief statement why.” Additionally, we suggested that they send their lists of the Ten Best films of the decade, or the Ten Most Underrated. Same with the individual who, for better or worse, most decisively defines film in the Nineties.

We weren’t necessarily after the “greatest” film, “most creative director,” or “brightest star.” Rather, we asked, “Zero in on the film of the Nineties, from any nation, that casts the longest shadow for you, whether in terms of excellence, power, visionary quality, symbolic importance, influence, or epically destructive badness-this is entirely your call. This past fall, the editors, staff, and some friends of this magazine sent out letters to a blue-ribbon panel of critics, filmmakers, authors archivists-people with a serious personal and professional investment in film -inviting their selections of the film of the decade and the film person of the decade.

Armond White's review of Wild at Heart