Critic’s choice: Roger Ebert’s 10 favourite movies of the 1990s
The power of the movies is often talked about with the sincere reverence it deserves. Films have the chance to not only change the way society talks, dresses or behaves but to make a seismic impact on the way it is governed and how the inhabitants within it treat one another. With this in mind, there is far less concern over film critics’ power. With one stroke of a pen, a good critic can endorse a movie and make it a hit overnight; that was certainly the power Roger Ebert had at his disposal.
Starting his impressive career in 1967, when he was given a chance to write critical reviews of movie releases for the Chicago Sun-Times, Ebert would become perhaps the most celebrated critic of his generation. He just happened to ascend to the position during one of America’s most pivotal cinematic cultural changes. During the 1970s, the merging of independent, intellectualised movies and mainstream cinema began in full force. As cinema changed, so did its criticism, and the words of a skilled technician like Ebert were now more valued than ever.
His career gathered pace throughout the following decades, and by the time the new wave of Hollywood began to peak once more in the 1990s, as auteurs like Quentin Tarantino began to find their feet, Ebert was rightly heralded as a titanic tastemaker. It means his version of the decade’s best movies is well worth adding to your watchlist. When sat across from one director for whom he held special affection, Martin Scorsese, the critic selected his favoured films from the 1990s, and it makes for an interesting set of titles.
Starting off with number ten is the 1991 Oliver Stone movie JFK, which grabbed eight Academy Award nominations and a lot of fierce criticism at the time for Ebert. However, it was a “dazzling stylistic recreation of the paranoia, suspicion and mystery that still surrounds the Kennedy assassination“. Another pivotal political figure was given time on the big screen the following year with Spike Lee’s 1992 movie Malcolm X, which Ebert found particularly brilliant because of “Denzel Washington’s great performance as the charismatic black leader that provided an angrier, more radical alternative to the voice of Martin Luther King”.
Nic Cage’s performance in Leaving Las Vegas earns both Ebert’s respect and a spot on his favourite movie list, while Lars Von Trier’s 1996 picture Breaking the Waves also gains a spot. Naturally, one of the grandest, most poignant movies of the decade, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is given a correct spot, with Ebert once again singling out the performance of a leading man: “Liam Neeson as a daring and good-hearted man who saves the lives of eleven-hundred Jews by conning the Nazis with their own cruel rules.”
Ebert bends the rules somewhat by selecting a trilogy, as he collects Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red, White and Blue into one series. Noting them for how “They look at the way our lives are lived at the mercy of fate, coincidence and blind chance”.
Following this somewhat different choice, Ebert then selects three movies that could be inserted into most people’s favourite movies of the 1990s list. Coen brothers’ 1996 picture Fargo, which he called a “genuinely exciting and ingenious crime plot”, the Martin Scorsese movie Goodfellas, about which Ebert effuses Scorsese’ deftly directed masterpiece, and Taranitno’s Pulp Fiction. “It’s a complete original,” explains Ebert, though that comes with a downside: “Which unfortunately inspired way too many other young filmmakers to write way too much Tarantinian dialogue. They knew the words, but not the music.”
Perhaps the most surprising pick is slot number one, which Ebert hands over gleefully to Steve James and his 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams. Originally meant to be a simple 30-minute documentary about inner-city kids who have a chance of becoming serious ball players, the project evolved into 250 hours of footage.
For Ebert, it defines the importance of film: “The film just kept on growing as it followed their lives covering almost five years –as they’re both recruited by a suburban high school basketball powerhouse, and fate makes a twist in their destinies. To me, the greatest value of film is that it helps us break out of our boxes of time and space and empathize with other people – it lets us walk in someone else’s shoes.”
Roger Ebert’s 10 favourite movies of the 1990s:
- Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994)
- Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino,1994)
- Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
- Fargo (Coen brothers, 1996)
- Three Colours: Red, White and Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1994)
- Schindler’s List (Stephen Spielberg, 1993)
- Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier, 1996)
- Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995)
- Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992)
- JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991)
