1995 in film.

Top ten box-office films of 1995:

1. Die Hard With a Vengeance
2. Toy Story
3. Apollo 13
4. Goldeneye
5. Pocahantas
6. Batman Forever
7. Seven
8. Casper
9. Waterworld
10. Jumanji

What are your top three films for 1995? We will keep a running tally and eventually have some sort of bracket. For me it would be:

1. Before Sunrise
2. Safe
3. Showgirls

What are some of the forgotten gems from the year? What is overrated? What did you discover at a young age and what did you discover later?

YEARS IN FILM • forum.chorus.fm

 

I would have turned 7 in 1995, so this is really starting to hit that spot of nostalgia. I have seen 8 out of the ten highest grossing movies (I thought Waterworld was a flop?)

 

1. Before Sunrise
2. City of Lost Children
3. Toy Story

 

1. Heat
2. Casino
3. Seven

Honorable mentions Toy Story, 12 Monkeys. Really need to get around to Before Sunrise

 

1. Before Sunrise
2. Safe
3. Showgirls

Debated between Heat and Showgirls, I do fucking love Heat, but Showgirls is such a bold and complex film. It's genuinely dark in ways that a lot of films described that way pale in comparison to. Obviously Heat is an all-timer, but this was a really good year because you can't beat Before Sunrise or Safe either. I've posted about Welcome II the Terrordome before, a politically radical Afrofuturist sci-fi film, the first theatrically distributed British feature by a black woman, and the kind of movie that doesn't really get to exist anymore in the dominance of Disney in most genre films now. Billy Madison and Crimson Tide are Hollywood studio films that hit every note pretty well. I'm a Higher Learning fan, John Singleton is always worth watching as the ideas in his films are often prescient (the scene where Ice Cube asks Omar Epps how he'll feel and what he'll do as a black man when, at his first game, they play the National Anthem). Scorsese's Casino is really, really strong, just a testament to how good he is that I don't consider it among his best. Kids was a big moment for my friend group when we rented it and watched it at a sleepover one night when we were 15 or 16. And Kicking and Screaming was the first Baumbach I think I ever saw. What a great year.

 

Another really fantastic year. The 90's are crushing it.

1. Before Sunrise
2. Toy Story
3. Heat

Honorable mentions:

Seven
Showgirls
Dead Man
Babe
Clueless
Casino
The Usual Suspects
Ghost in the Shell
Leaving Las Vegas
Tommy Boy

 

1. Toy Story
2. Clueless
3. Crimson Tide

Also love Heat, Kids, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Se7en, and Before Sunrise. Haven't seen Casino yet, but looking forward to it.

 

1. Braveheart
2. Before Sunrise
3. Seven

4. Leaving Las Vegas
5. Twelve Monkeys
6. Fallen Angels
7. Ace Ventura When Nature Calls
8. The City of Lost Children
9. Showgirls
10. Toy Story

This is a fantastic year. Also love, Heat, Desperado, Strange Days, Casino, A Little Princess, Jumanji, Ghost in the Shell, Tokyo Fist, Kids, so much great stuff. Braveheart was my favourite film for so long I still have so much attachment to it.

 

1. Heat
2. Before Sunrise
3. Seven

 

Wow great year

 

1. Tokyo Fist (Tsukamoto)
2. The Convent (Oliveira)
3. Safe (Haynes)
-
4. One Hundred and One Nights (Varda)
5. God’s Comedy (Monteiro)
6. La Cérémonie (Chabrol)
7. Ulysses Gaze (Angelopoulos)
8. Heat (Mann)
9. The Bridges of Madison County (Eastwood)
10. Love Letter (Iwai)

A monster of a year. We also have great debut features from Jafar Panahi in The White Balloon and from Hirokazu Kore-eda in Mabarosi. Plus Ferrara’s The Addiction, Zhang’s Shanghai Triad, Hou’s Good Men, Good Women, Schanelec’s My Sister’s Good Fortune, Wong’s Fallen Angels, and (obviously) Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Phew.

 

1. Billy Madison
2. Tommy Boy
3. KIDS

Friggin:
Before Sunrise
A Goofy Movie
Clueless
Heat
Showgirls
Toy Story
Sudden Death
The Big Green
Bushwacked
Heavyweights
Casino
Rumble in the Bronx
Tales from the Hood

 

so many bangers in this year

 

1. Before Sunrise
2. Casino
3. Die Hard with a Vengeance*

*It is nearly on par with the original and I am tired of pretending it isn't

 

Honestly surprised at how many votes Before Sunrise is getting

 

This is easily one of the best years so far this decade as there are 15 films vying for a place in my top three. Nonetheless, they are -

1. Casino
2. Devil in a Blue Dress
3. Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

The other eleven contenders are in bold with the subsequent films being others that I like; Se7en, The Usual Suspects, La Haine, Heat, Twelve Monkeys, Desperado, The Quick and the Dead, Crimson Tide, A Close Shave, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, Dolores Claiborne, Dead Presidents, Apollo 13, GoldenEye, Strange Days, Waterworld, Copycat, Sudden Death, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, Toy Story, Dead Man Walking, and Outbreak.

 

why

 

Was expecting a lot more Heat love in here tbh. A monumental filmmaking achievement. DeNiro, Pacino and Mann all colliding at the height of their powers

 

top 5 movie ever for me

 

Heat rules, I'm assuming I'll love it on my next watch.

 

It’s on 4 lists and 7 people have at least mentioned it. It’s a good showing in a strong year.

 

I think the last time I tried to put together my list a few months ago it was #7. Close enough

 

1. Before Sunrise
2. Ghost in the Shell
3. A Close Shave

Before Sunrise is just beautiful storytelling, done with wonderful simplicity, that looks easy, but considering the number of bad Before Sunrise knock-offs, it really isn't. By the looks of it, it's going to win this year at a canter.

Ghost in the Shell is a visually stunning, puzzling animation, that packs a huge amount of conceptual stuff in 80 minutes, but still finds time for robot crabs with machine guns. It's fascinating as the middle point between it's influences (Akira, Tetsuo, Blade Runner etc) and what it influenced (The Matrix most obviously, but most other sci-fi that came after). My controversial (maybe?) opinion is that I think that the live action reboot with Scarlett Johansson was actually fairly decent.

A Close Shave is the third Wallace and Gromit short, this one a very silly pastiche of bits of British Hammer Horror stuff, meeting The Terminator. I remember being genuinely quite scared of Preston, the robot dog, and the climax is still pretty terrifying. Beautiful stuff.

Honourable mentions include another batch of very formative and important films to me when I started watching films more seriously; La Haine, Casino, Se7en, The Usual Suspects, Heat & Twelve Monkeys.

We have Wong Kar Wai's Fallen Angels, which was originally intended as the third story in Chungking Express, and has that hazy melancholic air to it that nobody does better than him, albeit with much more violence.

I really like Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, a curious film about William Blake traversing through the Wild West and at some point (but it's not clear exactly when...) dying, in what feels like a state between life and death, the dream world and the waking one.

A couple of good ones from India, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, which is a massive smash hit blockbuster romance starring Shah Rukh Khan. My knowledge of Bollywood cinema is very minimal, but I enjoyed this. It's also been playing in a theatre in Mumbai ever since it's been released. For something different from India, I like Naseem, a socially realist slice of life, set during times of upheaval in Mumbai about schoolgirl Naseem and her family.

Ken Loach's Land and Freedom is another good one from this year, about the civil war in Spain, about about failed and splintered revolutionaries. Reminded me a lot of Loach's masterpiece The Wind That Shakes the Barley, with Loach's depiction of the moral complexity and ambiguity of a revolution.

We have the first entry in Takashi Miike's yakuza Black Society Trilogy this year, Shinjuku Triad Society, which is good.

Toy Story is great too, of course.

 

Same for me.