When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1994, it gave its Best Picture award to Forrest Gump, a movie with a simple message: It's better to be retarded than a hippie. It didn't make it onto my list:
1. Pulp Fiction
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Written by Tarantino and Roger Avery
Tarantino is one of those artists, like Hunter Thompson or Marcel Duchamp, who it's better to admire than to imitate. But you can't blame him for that.
2. Crumb
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
This has a sequence where a comic book slowly devolves into something else, the illustrations swept aside by page upon page of tiny, illegible words. I don't think I've ever seen a movie portray a man's descent into madness so effectively.
3. Hoop Dreams
Directed by Steve James
Better than any scripted basketball movie.
4. Before the Rain
Written and directed by Milcho Manchevski
A Balkan time-loop.
5. The Secret of Roan Inish
Directed by John Sayles
Written by Sayles, from a novel by Rosalie K. Fry
Aside from Limbo, which doesn't entirely fit the mold anyway, I'm not a fan of Sayles' big-canvas pictures—those labored films where he tries to create a politically engaged portrait of an entire community but ends up producing a clockwork-powered speechmaking machine instead. But his small movies, like this eerie and endearing fantasy, can be wonderful.
6. Red
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
Written by Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Surveillance, love, and coincidence.
7. Chungking Express
Written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai
More surveillance, more love, more coincidence. There's a plotline in this movie about a woman who keeps sneaking into a man's apartment and rearranging his things. I'm a sucker for stories like that.
8. Ed Wood
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski
Alexander and Karaszewski's next two movies about misfits, The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon, were directed by Milos Forman, who turned them into somewhat sanctimonious biopics. Burton did much better, because he had the inspired idea to treat Wood's life as a fairy tale.
9. Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter
Directed by Deborah Hoffman
It's a touching documentary about Alzheimer’s...and it's funny. No, really.
10. Pipsqueak Pfollies
Written and directed by Danny Plotnick
In the words of the filmmaker, this "painstakingly details all the crap little kids can get away with."
Honorable mentions:
11. Burnt by the Sun (Nikita Mikhalkov)
12. The Last Seduction (John Dahl)
13. The Kingdom (Lars von Trier)
14. Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson)
15. The Madness of George III (Nicholas Hytner)
16. White (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
17. Faust (Jan Svankmajer)
18. Barcelona (Whit Stillman)
19. Fresh (Boaz Yakin)
20. True Lies (James Cameron)
Of the films of 1994 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in That's Entertainment! III. (And I still haven't sat through Satantango yet. One day, one day…)