What sensible, fair-minded person would look you straight in the face and insist that Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut is the best film of the ’90s? Think about that.
EWS is many things — curious, dreamlike, flat, anti-realistic, visually commanding, mesmerizing in its own weird way. But a film this clenched and constipated and covered in starch cannot sit at the top of anyone’s best of the ’90s list…no! Only a critic who believes in fuck-you eccentricity for its own side would stand by Kubrick’s final film.
And yet this, I regret to report, is what IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich has done.
The EWS celebration is part of “The 100 Best Movies of the ’90s” (8.15), an exhaustive rundown by Ehrlich, Eric Kohn and Kate Erbland — three-fourths of Indiewire‘s virtue-signalling quartet (Anne Thompson being the final member). Their top ten, and in this order: Eyes Wide Shut, Close-Up, Schindler’s List, Beau Travail, Hoop Dreams, Goodfellas, After Life, Titanic, The Long Day Closes and Safe.
But Ehrlich is to be saluted for including Titanic among the top ten. James Cameron‘s epic has been a very unfashionable film to celebrate over last couple of decades. I only put it at #30 on my list, and qualified things by stating that I was primarily enthusiastic about the final hour and especially the last ten minutes. Ehrlich doesn’t pussyfoot around — he praises the whole thing…intimacy, lead performances, extras, VFX and all.
In IndieWire‘s view Pulp Fiction ranks 14th, Malcolm X is 16th, Clueless is 20th, Unforgiven ranks 26th and Fargo (HE’s pick for the decade’s best) is 31st.