- The Sweet Hereafter
- Boogie Nights
- Happy Together
- Jackie Brown
- Grosse Pointe Blank
- Taste of Cherry
- L.A. Confidential
- Fireworks
- Henry Fool
- The River
Honorable Mentions: The Hanging Garden, The Ice Storm, Nowhere, Princess Mononoke, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion
For My Watchlist: The Butcher Boy, Gattaca, The Life of Jesus, Public Housing, Xiao Wu
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During this great transitional year (got my BA from Marquette, moved across the country to attend grad school at Boston University), The Sweet Hereafter was a revelation. Already drawn in by all of its glowing reviews, I saw at the Oriental Theatre in Milwaukee when home for Christmas break with a friend whose motivation to watch it with me was solely due to its enigmatic poster. As eye-opening as anything I’d seen in my first semester of studying film, I watched all of Atom Egoyan’s previous six features within the next six months. Briefly a candidate for 24 Frames (I ended up writing a little about it in my essay on star Sarah Polley’s own film Stories We Tell), it still stands (along with 1994’s Exotica) as Egoyan’s peak, the place where all of his obsessions coalesced into one of the best book-to-film adaptations of all time.
Paul Thomas Anderson went on to direct at least five features I’d rank above his second one, Boogie Nights, but what a breakthrough, the real fulfillment of auteur-driven studio pictures that Pulp Fiction promised a few years earlier. To express the visceral charge of being in love with cinema and also being able to back that up with the level of your craft is still a rare accomplishment; perhaps due to its length, I don’t revisit it as often as I should (speaking of Tarantino, Jackie Brown, in my mind his last great film until Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, also applies here.)
While making my way through the Wong Kar-wai box set a few years ago, Happy Together, which I hadn’t seen since its original release was the nicest surprise, intriguingly looking forward to his masterpiece In The Mood For Love; Henry Fool, rewatched in late 2023 when nearly all of Hal Hartley’s work was streaming on the Criterion Channel is by far the best of that trilogy (and maybe his last great work?) Grosse Pointe Blank and Romy and Michele remain solid comfort-food watches (I suspect L.A. Confidential would as well); I should also revisit Taste of Cherry since I now understand its cryptic ending (on first watch, my reaction was, “Wait, what did I miss? It just… ends, like that?”) As for Tsai Ming-liang’s long-unavailable The River, at this writing it’s streaming (with commercials!) on something called Plex which may be my best option to see it again (not holding out for hope for a public screening on 35mm anytime soon.)
Somehow, I never got around to The Butcher Boy or Public Housing despite having numerous opportunities to do so (I might’ve taped the latter, one of Frederick Wiseman’s marathon-length documentaries off of PBS at one point.) Hoping to see Xiao Wu soon in kicking off a chronological watch of Jia Zhangke’s back catalog inspired by his latest, Caught By The Tides.
Haunted Jukebox 