The Best 10 Movies of 1995

Ebert's Best Film Lists1967 - present

Two of the best performances of the year were in the best film of the year, a heartbreaking, tragic love story set against the seamy backdrop of Las Vegas. Nicholas Cage played an alcoholic Hollywood executive who loses his family, his job and his self-respect, and comes to Vegas determined to drink himself to death. Elisabeth Shue is the hooker who meets him on the Strip, and finds that her heart is touched by his helplessness. "You can never, ever ask me to stop drinking," he warns her, and she agrees. And for a brief time they are able to hollow out a little happiness in their cave of despair. The movie is operatic in its emotions; the characters may seem like small, unremarkable people, but the film finds heroism and grace in their decisions, and the closing scenes are not only heartbreaking but somehow transcendent. Mike Figgis, whose credits include "Stormy Monday" and "Internal Affairs," directed; he used a 16mm camera to move freely through Las Vegas, without the delays and formality that come along with a big crew. The result is an unforced authenticity; Cage and Shue really seem present in the streets and casinos, living their lives in a city whose indifference is one of its charms. When I've recommended this film, people have sometimes told me they heard it was "depressing." My answer: No great film is depressing. All bad films are.

Like many great documentaries, this one defies description. It is easy enough to tell you what it is "about," but almost impossible to capture its mixture of oddness, madness, eccentricity, mental anguish, and defiant triumph. The movie tells the story of R. (for Robert) Crumb, a scatological comic artist who emerged from the San Francisco underground of the 1960s, and continues to flourish today. Many of Crumb's images, like the "Keep On Truckin'" drawing, have become famous. Not so well known is his appalling private life. He came from a profoundly dysfunctional family, and during the movie we meet his mother and two brothers, all articulate, gifted, fascinating, and disturbed. He says that only his art kept him sane and functioning, and by the end of the movie we agree. And we will not soon forget meeting a brother who still lived in the room he had as a child, and feared to leave the house. Crumb's art is often deliberately offensive. As he pages through his high school yearbook, naming his old enemies, we realize it is also highly autobiographical. He might never have revealed this side of himself had it not been for the persistence of the filmmaker, Terry Zwigoff, a longtime friend. The result is a film that is literally about the saving power of art.

This remarkable film was screened in December for Academy consideration, and will open around the country in the weeks to come. It is the kind of movie that ennobles filmmaking, by taking an inflammatory subject and considering it fairly and unblinkingly. The movie stars Susan Sarandon as a nun who receives a letter from a condemned man on Death Row, asking for a visit. So, she visits him. The man, played by Sean Penn, is a murderer and a rapist. Ancient Hollywood formulas would lead us to expect that Penn will be revealed as innocent, that Sarandon will save him, that they will fall in love, that she will help him escape, or the plot will lead to other such formulas. This is not that kind of movie. It is intensely focused on who these people really are, and the world they really live in. For the nun, that means getting to know the parents of Penn's victims--bitter people who do not understand why she visits the killer of their children. Sarandon herself is often appalled by the convict, but she through to the soul beneath. The movie is profoundly Christian in the way it separates the sinner from the sin, suggests we must love our enemies, and allows us to empathize with (but not forgive) the killer. Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn give performances of astonishing power.

Oliver Stone's biography shows Richard M. Nixon as a brooding, suspicious man whose political brilliance was matched with a knack for self-destruction. The film begins with Nixon fumbling with a recorder while listening to the infamous White House tapes, and then it flashes back to consider his lifelong pattern of following a victory with a defeat. When he finally reached the highest office, no one could defeat him but himself--and he pulled that off. Anthony Hopkins wisely avoids a Nixon impersonation and instead goes for the essence of the man, who remains awkward and evasive even in private moments, and yet is able to score historic milestones, such as the opening with China, and nuclear treaty with Russia, and the winding-down of the Vietnam war. Stone surrounds him with great supporting performances, including Joan Allen as a strong-willed Pat Nixon and Paul Sorvino as the brilliant and sometimes incredulous Henry Kissinger. There is controversy over the accuracy of Stone's version of "Nixon," as there was (to a much greater degree) over his "JFK." The important thing to remember is that this is (ital) Stone's (unital) version--not objective historical truth, but an artistic interpretation. Like Shakespeare's Richard III, Robert Graves' Claudius and Gore Vidal's Lincoln, this is a portrait that uses the materials of life but does not pretend to be a factual record.

Martin Scorsese's film about the mob in Vegas in the 1970s is a virtuoso combination of drama, comedy and documentary; much of its first hour is voice-over narration, explaining how gangsters took over Vegas casinos, shipped stolen profits back east, and then began to sew the seeds of their own destruction. (It is easy to imagine that the mob could steal from slot machines--but this movie explains how they dealt with those tons of quarters.) The movie stars Scorsese pals Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci as a casino boss and a street thief who knew each other as children in Chicago, and whose destinies overlap in Vegas. While De Niro tries to keep the lid on the maximize mob profits, the Pesci character establishes himself as "the mob's Vegas enforcer" (not true) and manages to bring down the whole house of cards. Some critics complained that the movie was just a retread of De Niro and Pesci in Scorsese's "GoodFellas," but that's not fair; using the same actors, Scorsese finds a different style, milieu and purpose, and his movie is interesting both for its characters and its wealth of information.

Ron Howard's film was about one of the epic voyages of our century, and its nearly tragic end. The Apollo 13 mission to the moon was interrupted by an exploding oxygen tank and a chain of onboard problems that almost marooned the astronauts in space. The film follows, almost second by second, as a strategy is devised to use the resources in the space capsule for a hazardous return to earth. Howard is good at ensemble films (he made "Backdraft," "Parenthood," "Cocoon" and "The Paper"), and here he assembles three astronauts (played by Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon) and a ground team including a bumped astronaut (Gary Sinese) and a determined controller (Ed Harris) in a quick-cutting story of improvisation under fire. The movie's special effects are particularly impressive; the blast off, outer space and re-entry footage look so real, indeed, that Howard made it a point to announce that every shot was made from scratch. The result is an inspiring reminder that the spirit of exploration that got us to the moon has lagged lately.

In a year when "Showgirls" brought the shadow-world of "gentleman's clubs" into the glare of publicity, here was an intriguing, complex and surprisingly moving film set in the same milieu. Atom Egoyan's story is a labyrinth, winding seductively into the darkest secrets of a group of people who should have no connection with one another, but do. At the beginning, the film seems to be about randomly selected strangers. By the end, it is revealed that these people are so tightly wound up together that if you took one away, their world would collapse. Mia Kirshner stars, as Christina, a table dancer in a club with strict rules: The customers may not touch the dancers. One day one customer does, and is banished, setting in motion a series of revelations. One of her regular customers, played by Bruce Greenwood, spends hours with her--but his need doesn't seem to be sex. What is their real relationship? In the way he unfolds his story, Egoyan shows the same disorienting mastery of time that audiences enjoyed so much in Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." But in the way he develops the characters, he shows a mastery, too, of human nature.

Gregory Nava's "My Family" is like a family dinner with everybody crowded around the table, remembering good times and bad, honoring those who went before, worrying about those still to come. It is an epic told through the eyes of one family, the Sanchez family, whose father walked north to Los Angeles from Mexico in the 1920s, and whose children include a writer, a nun, an ex-convict, a lawyer, a restaurant owner, and a boy shot dead in his prime. The movie is beautifully photographed, and lovingly recreates the period details, as a humble house in the shadow of a Los Angeles bridge grows to encompass one generation after another. There are warm, resonant performances by the cast, which reads like a roll-call of important Latino stars. And the screenplay, by Nava and his wife Anna Thomas (who also wrote the Oscar-nominated "El Norte") opens its arms wide and embraces all the facets of this family: Legend, religion, music, pride and shame, triumph and loss.

The year's unlikeliest love story involved the British writer Lytton Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington, who fell in love as soon as they met and lived together for years, although he was homosexual and they both had a series of other lovers. It was a meeting of the minds, and Jonathan Pryce and Emma Thompson display those minds admirably in barbed wit and ironic understatement. The writer and director, Christopher Hampton, places them in of the Bloomsbury group, that eccentric collection of British artists and intellectuals, but shows how they defined their own lives in a personal space no one else really violated, and few understood.

From Alfonso Arau, the director of "Like Water for Chocolate," this is a romantic fantasy, aflame with passion and bittersweet longing. One needs perhaps to have a little of these qualities in one's soul to respond fully to the film, which to many critics looked like overworked melodrama, but to me sang with innocence and trust. Keanu Reeves and Aitana Sanchez-Gijon co-starred, as a homeless soldier just home from World War II, and a single young woman returning, pregnant, to her family's California vineyard. To save her shame, he agrees to pose as her husband, and then to their amazement they really do fall in love. The family is beautifully cast, especially Giancarlo Giannini as an outraged father and Anthony Quinn as a wise grandfather. The cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki is ethereal, as in magical scenes like the one where the family uses big butterfly wings to protect the crop against frost. Unashamedly, gloriously romantic.