40. Na srebrnym globie / On the Silver Globe
On the Silver Globe is the kind of film that leaves a stain as well as making a mark – and rightfully so. After all, it is only two thirds there. Literally. Check out the production history for more on that. What remains terrorises, memorises, perplexes, as well as stopping your subconscious and your actual conscious in its tracks. It is not the sort of film that will be your friend for life. But if you chose to take up arms against it then that’s on you.
It peels back the veneers of respectability and even civilisation, ultimately as the director said it was the saddest story he knew. The lack of a complete set of film elements lead the filmmaker to insert a series of contemporary Poland. Giving On the Silver Globe an out of time and a never really there quality. And please understand not at the same time that, these two things are slightly out of phase with each other. Almost like laser beams in a vacuum. The ending breaks the heart, but also elevates the human mind – you wonder how an individual could accomplish so much. – – – Stephen Shakesby
39. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, directed by Frank Oz, remains one of the decade’s finest comic motion pictures. Of course, glasses raised and clinked to the undeniable chemistry between the film’s hustling leads, Steve Martin and Michael Caine. That’s not all, though. The breakthrough turn from actress Glenne Headly was integral to the frolics on the French Riviera. The trio provide one cunning set-piece after the next, so that even the more predictable moments work well enough in that knowing what’s around the corner only makes the characters’ reaction to these madcap antics even funnier.
And in its throwaway twists and turbulent turns, the film doesn’t con its audience as a reminder of the comic intellect they enjoyed decades earlier. Even as a remake of the 1964 film Bedtime Story, with David Niven, Marlon Brando and Shirley Jones, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels stood on its own feet – back in the late 1980s, when perhaps audiences were wilting from the influx of desperate comedies. And the less said about 2019’s The Hustle with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson the better. – – – Robin Write
38. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Terry Gilliam’s 1988 film is infamous for its’ disastrous production, release, and reception. It established Gilliam’s reputation as a gonzo genius perpetually tilting at windmills. The irony is that the film is one of Gilliam’s best.
Munchausen is set on a Wednesday during the Age of Reason in a town besieged by the Ottoman Empire. Sally Salt (Sarah Polley) is there with her father’s theatre troupe who are performing a play about the famous Baron Munchausen. The real Baron (John Neville) arrives and regales the townsfolk with his tall tales before setting off in search of old allies to help him lift the siege. Fact and fiction blur as the audience is never quite certain if we’re still in one of the Baron’s stories.
This is the third in what Gilliam calls his “Trilogy of Imagination”. The first two entries, Time Bandits and Brazil are rightfully hailed as classics. However, Munchausen is Gilliam at his fantastical best. The film is filled with beautiful sets designed by Dante Ferretti and gorgeously shot by Giuseppe Rotunno. Michael Kamen’s score is a delightful combination of melancholy and magic.
Each character is memorable but the relationship between Sally and the Baron is the true heart of the tale. She wants to believe in the vanished world the Baron represents. And the Baron desperately wants to feel that this world mattered. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a paean to the power of storytelling. Especially when the story being told is ridiculous and absurd. – – – Daniel Marchant
37. Camille Claudel
This lavishly mounted biopic served as a showcase for the talents of French diva Isabelle Adjani. She had been typecast as a wild-eyed, strong willed eccentric for many years, and Camille Claudel allowed her to display her range. She does portray a mad tortured genius but she also gets the opportunity to explore the artistic process of a sculptor. As the title would suggest, she plays the infamous French sculptor Camille Claudel.
The film traces Claudel’s rise from relative obscurity to nationwide fame as a bright young talent. Her tumultuous relationship with Auguste Rodin, played by Gérard Depardieu, complicates matters and she begins to resent the fact that his fame and influence eclipses her own. She begins to question whether she is truly talented and this makes it more difficult for her to hold onto her sanity.
It initially suggests that it will be unconventional and challenging, even though the film slips a little into clichéd territory. Some will be reminded of the awards bait that Meryl Streep tends to appear in and, unsurprisingly, Adjani did earn an Academy Award nomination for her efforts. Her performance almost overshadows everything that surrounds her. This might have functioned better as a one woman show on Broadway, than it does as a feature film. – – – Zita Short
36. Distant Voices, Still Lives
Few films capture the distinct feel of thumbing through an old family photo album, but Terence Davies’ masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives brings the past to aching life. Coated in a beautiful sepia-like filter, Davies’ film walks through the lives of a working-class family in 1940s and ‘50s Liverpool, exploring shared experiences of domestic trauma through the hazy gauze of memory. Carefully employing period-specific popular music, Davies’ weaves sound and image into a tableaux of nostalgia, simultaneously reveling in the pleasures of the past while exploring the cruelty of days gone by.
A film that defies narrative convention with incredible ease, Distant Voices, Still Lives splits its narrative into two parts filmed separately, further heightening the disconnect between the past and the present. Davies’ film is simultaneously specific to its creator while also remaining painfully universal, an impressionistic portrait of a family struggling to live with an uncomfortable past. – – – Cameron Wolff
35. Une Affaire de Femmes / Story of Women
Story of Women is a 1988 French language drama film by director Claude Chabrol, starring Isabelle Huppert and François Cluzet. It is based on the real life of Marie-Louise Giraud who was guillotined in July of 1943 for having performed 27 abortions in occupied France during World War II. Isabelle Huppert gives an astounding performance with her portrayal of Marie-Louise throughout the film, which has surprisingly feminist undertones for its time. It tackles topics of women’s rights, the effects of war and social class; these topics, of which, are confronted with thought and care.
This film, which was ahead of its time, is phenomenally directed, written and acted, and serves as an important character study in the history of war as well as women’s history and rights. Story of Women tells an otherwise untold tale of war, and shines a light on the struggles of those who suffered often silently during a dark period in history, lest they be forgotten. – – – Anna Miller
34. Coming to America
In a decade packed to the gills with classic comedies that are still being praised today, Coming to America stands above the vast majority of them. A hair more sophisticated than the raunchy offerings of the 80s, Coming to America offers one of the best looks at a younger generation coming into their own and challenging the mindset of the older, more established generation.
Eddie Murphy, playing to his strengths as a comedian, offers up one of the best performances of his career as Akeem, playing equal parts royal, exuberant, bashful, and clueless. Arsenio Hall as faithful sidekick Semmi gets less to work with, but still turns in gold as the pair delight in playing multiple roles throughout the film. The story of Prince Akeem, future ruler of fictional country Zamunda, and his faithful companion Semmi’s journey to America to find a bride is a simple, straightforward plot designed to give Murphy and Hall a chance to flex their chops. Not wanting to be beholden to tradition, Akeem’s desire to marry for love instead of tradition are the heart of the matter, with screenwriters David Sheffield and Barry Blaustein managing to find genuine moments of tenderness amid the zany adventures of the fish-out-of-water African pair.
A strong main cast aided by equally strong supporting characters makes for some of the most memorable comedic performances to grace the screen. Murphy’s innocent earnestness, a hilarious screenplay, and director John Landis’ masterful use of timing combine to make Coming to America a timeless gem that serves as both a great coming-of-age story and a love letter to one of the best cities in the world. – – – Darryl Mansel
33. Working Girl
Working Girl takes on the template of a classic Cinderella story, as working-class Tess McGill tries to make it in the big city as an administrative assistant. She is angered when her employer steals one of her ideas and chooses to adopt her employer’s identity in order to carry out a business deal on her own. In the process, she seduces Jack Trainer, who happened to be dating her employer, and achieves success in a male-oriented field. It’s nothing new and its efforts to comment on sexism within the workplace come across as ham-fisted.
It is irritatingly innocuous and unwilling to interrogate the motivations of its protagonist. McGill never comes across as the plucky, hardworking heroine that she is supposed to be. For this story to properly function, she would have needed to possess more of an edge. Melanie Griffith seems tranquillised for long passages of the film and never makes much of an impression in a role that was clearly intended to make her a star. With such a blank slate at the centre of a movie, it makes it difficult to invest in McGill’s journey.
This lauded romantic comedy achieved the rare distinction of receiving a Best Picture Oscar nomination. In an era in which the genre was in dire straits, this must have seemed like hot stuff. Mike Nichols’s direction is typically polished and efficient and the script is able to suggest that the film is about something more than an ambitious blonde moving up the social ladder. – – – Zita Short
32. Drowning by Numbers
1988’s Drowning By Numbers is the perfect distillation of everything Peter Greenaway, with gorgeous music, swathes of intricate tableaus, and a web of complex observations on passion, gender, and oppression. Taking place in a microcosm for our society governed by masculine power structures, it tells the story of three women all named Cissie Colpitts who take their fate into their own hands, and decide to drown their husbands.
Continuing the auteur’s obsession with water (evidenced in films such as The Sea In Their Blood and Death in the Seine amongst others) as power, control, and a manifestation of desire, the Cissies regain independence from the gluttony, demands, and adulterous behaviour that restrains and disregards them. Finding a newfound freedom in lukewarm baths and tumultuous waves – in the murders committed there is a restoration of power to the weak, a regaining of what was taken. The youngest Cissie for example, a swimmer, struggles with the expectation that she will sacrifice her body (and olympic success) to bear her husband’s child, and so it is in her domain, the practice pool, where she forces her husband to symbolically submit. Each woman manipulates the water to express her frustration with a world that forces them into place, and it acts both as cleansing and a warning. – – – Nathan H
31. Salaam Bombay!
Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair is primarily known for her culture-centered, matured rom-coms, so her acclaimed drama on the lives of street children in Bombay would typically be an outlier. However, rather than sinking into an exploitation of poverty within class divide, there’s something more lively found, particularly in the life of a boy named Krishna. Narrative darkness is contrasted with the piercing sunlight that lights the streets, pleasures of childhood then twisted into an exploration of the labors of youth within a corrupted system. Krishna begins left behind by the circus his mother has sent him to work for, and like a later parade, we see what is celebration for others used to disrupt the lives of these street children behind them.
Salaam Bombay! a tough, yet rich film, and it’s the humanity of these children (Shafiq Syed as Krishna, and Chinda Sharma as Sola Saal, a young girl whose been sold into a brothel) and their raw performances that sell it. International Academy Award contenders outside the Western World tend to be chosen by a Hollywood audience of wannabe do-gooders, who fixate upon these films that show the intensity of systematic suffering, and perhaps Nair’s film is a prime example. But for all its painful stories of children caught in prostitution, poverty, and the drug trade far too young, she is able to create something more human than pity. – – – Sarah Williams
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