my favorite movies of 1992:
(1) The Player
(2) Howards End
favorite of 1992:
(Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Cynthia Stevenson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Lyle Lovett, Dean Stockwell, Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis. Directed by Robert Altman.)
Altman’s neo-noir satire of the movie industry. I recommend watching this after Bicycle Thieves (one of my favorites of 1948). The Player’s movie-within-a-movie also seems to be a twist on I Want to Live! (1958), a film noir based on a true story of a woman on death row.
A Variety critic describes watching The Player in 2020 for the first time since it came out:
I was shocked to see what a thriller it is. As in: edge-of-your-seat, suck-in-your-breath, OMG-did-that-just-happen? suspenseful. (There’s a faxed message that will make your heart stop.) I’d remembered it as a delectable, switchblade-witted vision of Hollywood — a funny, flowing Altmanesque juggling act — and I was curious to see how its portrait of the motion-picture industry had aged. (Answer: It’s aged a lot … and not at all.) … I had remembered “The Player” as a sublime comedy. And it is. Yet for all its drop-dead tweaks of Hollywood in the blockbuster age, it’s also a movie that sucks you in like a dramatic whirlpool. It’s about a production executive, Griffin Mill (played in a devious, layered performance by Tim Robbins), who’s a ruthless backstabber and proud packager of commercial but vacant movie ideas — the kind of scoundrel who would usually be the villain in a drama of corporate malfeasance. Griffin keeps getting threats in the form of postcards from a writer he’d had a meeting with but left hanging. … [T]he subtle beauty of Robbins’ performance is that he gets us on his side by showing us that Griffin, cold and unctuous as he is, is clawing his way through a jungle he never made. He’s a cog — a smooth utensil in a double-breasted suit. … He’s the point man in the larger war “The Player” keeps winking at: the one between reality and illusion. …
Stream The Player on the Criterion Channel (with extras including commentary by Altman and others) or Max. If you don’t subscribe to the Criterion Channel, try a free trial.
2nd favorite of 1992:
(Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham Carter, Vanessa Redgrave. Directed by James Ivory.)
Ebert observed that this movie, based on the 1910 novel by E.M. Forster, is “seething with anger, passion, greed and emotional violence. That the characters are generally well-behaved says less about their manners than their inhibitions.” The movie’s “buried subject,” Ebert said, “is the impossibility of two people with fundamentally different values ever being able to really communicate.”
When I first saw Howards End, I was unsure what to make of it — but rewatching it transformed this movie into a richly layered world. An IMDb reviewer who had a similar experience says:
This is a story (like most of E.M. Forster’s) about the injustices of class distinctions. However, with a subtlety that I missed on my first viewing, this film is also … a story of social progress. This film is set in a time when society is coming out of the Victorian age and into the Edwardian. You see contrasts of the past thinking with the progressive thinking all through the movie. A visual metaphor is repeated over and over: the turning of cranks, whether it be on a Morse code machine, a vintage car, or the wheels of a locomotive. I believe this represents both karma and progress. …
In the New York Times video below (which somewhat spoils how things end for one character), critic A.O. Scott says: “It’s because the movie is so completely about them that it succeeds in being about something much larger. … It’s a costume drama and a biting social critique — a stick of dynamite wrapped in lace.”
Stream Howards End on Tubi (free with ads) or Kanopy.
3rd favorite of 1992:
(Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Judy Davis, Sydney Pollack, Juliette Lewis, Liam Neeson. Directed by Allen.)
Stream Husbands and Wives on these sites.
4th favorite of 1992:
(Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stephen Tobolowsky. Directed by Barbet Schroeder.)
Critics were sharply divided on this movie, but they agreed about its strengths and weaknesses: everyone said it’s a schlocky, formulaic thriller but the performances by Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh are outstanding. I wonder if the reviews would’ve been more positive if Single White Female had come out today, with its female-centered focus on two young women whose relationship as roommates starts out being played as a love story before one of them turns into the roommate from hell. There’s also a MeToo subplot about sexual harassment in the workplace.
This movie fits into the “erotic thriller” genre that peaked in the ’80s and ’90s, but the eroticism is never gratuitous; it always furthers the plot or adds to our understanding of the characters. While the movie’s climax does have some contrived moments, Single White Female has more psychological depth than you’d expect based on the reviews that dismissed it as a trashy slasher flick. Rewatching it brings out well-chosen details in the roommates’ relationship, like the way one of them catches the other going into her bedroom and trying her perfume without asking; this small crossing of boundaries seems to invite a dangerous obsession.
Single White Female repeatedly pays homage to classic Hollywood movies, with scenes inspired by Hitchcock’s Rear Window (my favorite movie of 1954) and Vertigo (my favorite of 1958). The roommates watch meaningful lines being spoken by Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak (reunited shortly after Vertigo) in Bell, Book and Candle (1958), and by Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (one of my favorite movies of 1950).
Bottom line: Single White Female isn’t perfect (even the title isn’t perfect!) but it’s worthy of reconsideration.
Stream Single White Female on these sites.
Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.
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