Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1000 Essential Films: 1990s

Originally published in Essential Cinema, copyright 2004 Jonathan Rosenbaum

Below are Rosenbaum's 117 favorite films from the 1990s:

1990 
Archangel (Guy Maddin) 
Close-up (Kiarostami) 
The Confession (fragment, Paradjanov) 
Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar Wai) 
Homework (Kiarostami) 
How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany (Farocki) 
The Machine that Killed Bad People (Steve Fagin) 
Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (James Ivory) 
No, or the Vainglory of the Command (de Oliveira) 
Nouvelle vague (Godard) 
One Hour (Frank) 
Texasville (Bogdanovich) 
To Sleep with Anger (Burnett) 
White Hunter, Black Heart (Eastwood)

1991 
Actress (Stanley Kwan) 
Les amants du Pont Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge) (Leos Carax) 
La belle noiseuse (Rivette) 
A Brighter Summer Day (230-minute version) (Edward Yang) 
la cabale des oursins (Moullet) 
Defending Your Life (Albert Brooks) 
Hangin' with the Homeboys (Joseph B. Vasquez) 
My Own Private Idaho (van Sant) 
Night and Day (Akerman) 
Rhapsody in August (Kurosawa)

1992 
Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven) 
Bram Stoker's Dracula (Coppola) 
Careful (Maddin) 
Close My Eyes (Stephen Poliakoff) 
Deep Cover (Bill Duke) 
The Famine Within (Katherine Gilday) 
Guelwaar (Sembene) 
The Hours and Times (Christopher Munch)
Life and Nothing More... (Kiarostami) 
The Long Day Closes (Davies) 
Naked Lunch (Cronenberg)

1993 
Bitter Moon (Polanski) 
The Blue Kite (Tian) 
Calendar (Egoyan) 
D'est (Akerman) 
Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis) 
Highway Patrolman (Cox) 
Hyenas (Diop Mambety) 
I'll Do Anything (unreleased musical version, James L. Brooks) 
Latcho drom (Tony Gatlif) 
Matinee (Dante) 
My Favorite Season (Andre Techine) 
La naissance de l'amour (Philippe Garrel) 
The Puppet Master (Hou) 
Ruby in Paradise (Victor Nunez) 
The Scent of Green Papaya (Tran Anh Hung)

1994 
Ashes of Time (Wong) 
Chartres Series (Brakhage) 
Crumb (Terry Zwigoff) 
Dieu sait quoi (Pollet) 
Exotica (Egoyan) 
Exterior Night (Rappaport) 
The Last Bolshevik (Marker) 
Red (Kieslowski) 
Satantango (Tarr) 
The Second Heimat (Edgar Reitz) 
That's Entertainment! III (Bud Friedgen / Michael J. Sheridan)

1995 
Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater) 
Blush (Li Shaohong) 
Dead Man (Jarmusch) 
From the Journals of Jean Seberg (Rappaport) 
Good Men, Good Women (Hou) 
A Great Day in Harlem (Jean Bach) 
Haut bas fragile (Rivette) 
Safe (Todd Haynes) 
Salaam Cinema (Mohsen Makhmalbaf) 
The Son of Gascogne (Pascal Auber) 
Underground (Emir Kusturica) 
When It Rains (Burnett)

1996 
The Ceremony (Chabrol) 
Goodbye, South, Goodbye (Hou) 
Improvisation (Mili) (filmed in 1950 with Charlie Parker; released on video in Japan in 1996) 
Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas) 
Mahjong (Yang) 
Oriental Elegy (Alexander Sokurov) 
Suicide (Gregg Bordowitz) 
Thieves (Techine) 
Whispering Pages (Sokurov)

1997 
The Apostle (Robert Duvall) 
Blue Moon (Ko-I Cheng) 
Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Peter Chan) 
Destiny (Youssef Chahine) 
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (Errol Morris) 
Happy Together (Wong) 
Jazz '34: Remembrances of Kansas City Swing (Altman) 
Love and Death on Long Island (Kwietniowski) 
The River (Tsai Ming-liang) 
The Second Civil War (Dante) 
Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami) 
Yours (Jeff Scher)

1998 
Alone. Love Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold) 
Bulworth (Warren Beatty) 
Circle's Short Circuit (Caspar Stracke) 
Divorce Iranian Style (Kim Longinotto / Ziba Mir-Hosseini) 
Histoire(s) du cinema (Godard) 
Inquietude (de Oliveira) 
Khroustaliov, My Car! (Alexei Guerman) 
New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara) 
The Newton Boys (Linklater) 
The Thin Red Line (Malick) 
West Beirut (Ziad Doueiri)

1999 
The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf) 
Beau travail (Claire Denis) 
Beseiged (Bertolucci) 
Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick) 
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jarmusch) 
I Stand Alone (Gaspar Noe) 
Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano) 
Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Julio Medem) 
Mr. Zhao (Lu Yue) 
Public Housing (Wiseman) 
Rosetta (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne) 
Rushmore (Wes Anderson) 
6ixtynin9 (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang) 
The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami)

So Who Ruled the 1990s? Rosenbaum's auteur scorecard:

Kiarostami - 4 Hou - 3 Wong - 3 Akerman - 2 Burnett - 2 Dante - 2 de Oliveira - 2 Egoyan - 2 Godard - 2 Jarmusch - 2 Linklater - 2 Maddin - 2 Rivette - 2 Sokurov - 2 Techine - 2 Yang - 2