1996 in film.

Top ten box-office films of 1996:

1. Independence Day
2. Twister
3. Mission: Impossible
4. The Rock
5. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
6. 101 Dalmations
7. Ransom
8. The Nutty Professor
9. Jerry Maguire
10. Space Jam

What are your top three films for 1996? We will keep a running tally and eventually have some sort of bracket. For me it would be:

1. Secrets and Lies
2. Fargo
3. Bottle Rocket

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

 

Secrets and Lies is one of Mike Leigh's best. I hope he has one more great film in him. It has been an emptier place in his absence.

I have a soft spot for That Thing You Do!, though. It is one of my most-watched films.

 

1. Scream
2. Happy Gilmore
3. From Dusk Til Dawn

 

1. Fargo
2. Bottle Rocket
3. Secrets and Lies

I was hoping to get to vote for Happy Gilmore but it’s a tough top 3 to crack into.

 

1. Fargo
2. Bottle Rocket
3. Scream

pretty surprised scream didn’t crack the box office top 10 of the year. i guess because it was released in december?

 

Films released in December have their totals counted for their entire run, even when it extends into the next year.

The mostly likely reason is the R rating. You lose a significant chunk of audience that way.

 

I actually rewatched Fargo just about two weeks ago. The Coens get called nihilists a lot, but the heart of the film is a fundamentally good and honest women with her unassuming husband and incoming baby. It is a very moralistic film; although there are innocent victims, the perpetrators are ultimately brought to justice.

 

1. Fargo
2. Pusher
3. The Rock

The Rock is #good, actually

 

1. Trainspotting
2. Secrets & Lies
3. Comrades: Almost a Love Story

4. From Dusk Till Dawn
5. Szamanka
6. Fudoh: The New Generation
7. La Promesse
8. Fargo
9. Scream
10. The Cable Guy

Another great year!

 

1. Fargo
2. That Thing You Do!
3. Happy Gilmore

Honorable mentions:

Scream
Bottle Rocket
The Cable Guy
Waiting for Guffman
The Rock
Trainspotting
Independence Day
Mission: Impossible

 

1. Trainspotting
2. Secrets & Lies
3. Comrades: Almost a Love Story

Trainspotting is an iconic film - one of my all time absolute favourites and one of the most important British films ever made. It's a real "point in time" film, a perfect depiction of mid-90s UK, just before New Labour and midway through Britpop. It's full of energy, music and brilliant writing - taking downcast Kitchen Sink British social realist films, keeping some of the squalor, but making it feel so full of life.

Secrets & Lies is a great Mike Leigh film, and as always for Leigh he coaxes some remarkable performances from his ensemble cast. Despite the revelations, it never descends into soap opera, which in less talented hands it could easily become.

Comrades: Almost a Love Story is a beautiful film about a man from mainland China falling in love with a woman from Hong Kong, but not quite grasping it. It's also about love in a relentlessly capitalistic city and culture(s), and the difficulty reconciling the two. Maggie Cheung is remarkable, as she always is.

A lot of great honourable mentions this year.

Fargo is very unlucky to miss out on the top three - one of the Coen's best, a perfect example of their black comic crime farce.

Another excellent Maggie Cheung film this year is Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas wonderful, bizarre hybrid film about Cheung going to Paris to film a remake of Les Vampires. It's hard to describe really, but it's ultimately an exploration of French cinema and outsiders, plus a whole lot more.

From Dusk Till Dawn is one of my favourite films to watch with someone for the first time, just telling them it's a gangster / bank-robbing thriller. It's messy and silly, but that mid-point is just such a brilliant moment.

The Watermelon Woman is the first feature film directed by a gay black woman, Cheryl Dunye. It's a sort of fiction about the tracking down of a (fictional) "Watermelon Woman" from early silent cinema. It's incredibly rough around the edges, but there's lots to like and find fascinating here.

For a couple of HK oddities, we have Ebola Syndrome, which is a Herman Yau & Anthony Wong film about a man who gets infected with Ebola and starts a deliberate outbreak in Hong Kong. Incredibly crass and tasteless, but I watched this at the start of the whole pandemic and it was the perfect absurd antidote to the seriousness of the real-world situation.

There's also Horrible High Heels, which is probably one of the strangest films I've seen. Starts off fairly "normal" about a serial killer skinning people and using them to make shoes, but at some point it just stops making any sense, and culminates in a massive fight in a field somewhere. It's completely incoherent, but for some reason got a blu-ray release, so all it's flaws can be seen in crisp HD.

 

Snap on the top three! Great stuff.

 

It's a really great top three, haha.

 

Fargo
Scream
Bound

Shoutout to Happy Gilmore, Hard Eight, and Mother

 

1. Fargo
2. Trainspotting
3. Independence Day

I will never tire of the sheer absurdity of Independence Day

 

1. Scream
2. Romeo + Juliet
3. The Craft

shoutout to Crash and Bound too

 

1. Trainspotting
2. Daytrippers
3. Bound

 

1. Primal Fear
2. Bottle Rocket
3. Fargo

primal fear probably shouldn’t be this high but I’ve always just loved it, the way it seats up Gere’s character to have this redemption and then well I guess I’ll avoid spoilers. It made me want to be a lawyer though for all the wrong misleading movie reasons. Scream was close, there was a recent trend of films winking at the audience like 21 jump street that Scream perfected. From Dusk Till Dawn is really great, it’s two short and decently entertaining films with an awesome transition.

 

Fargo on top

 

hard eight!

 

I completely forgot about Hard Eight. Wouldn't crack my top 3 anyway, but a great debut from PTA.

 

Just one brief scene and PSH has the most memorable performance of the movie. So many bizarre little lines but it strangely makes the character feel very real

 

This is a rather weak year for me but there is still enough to make a top three and they are -

1. The Birdcage
2. Trainspotting
3. Fargo

Not many others I could have picked for my top three with the rest not in bold being at least likeable; Matilda, Star Trek: First Contact, Twister, Scream, The Rock, James and the Giant Peach, Mission: Impossible, The Cable Guy, Bound, Sleepers, A Time to Kill, The Frighteners, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Big Night, Ransom, Gamera 2: Attack of the Legion, Independence Day, From Dusk Till Dawn, DragonHeart, The Arrival, Broken Arrow and Maximum Risk.

 

1. Trainspotting
2. Fargo
3. The Birdcage

Honorable mentions:

The Cable Guy
From Dusk Til Dawn
Happy Gilmore
Matilda
The Rock
Romeo + Juliet
That Thing You Do!

 

1. Comrades: Almost a Love Story (Chan)
2. Secrets and Lies (Leigh)
3. Drifting Clouds (Kaurismaki)
-
4. The Funeral (Ferrara)
5. Breaking the Waves (von Trier)
6. Kids Return (Kitano)
7. A Couch in New York (Akerman)
8. The Last Angel of History (Akomfrah)
9. Perfect Love (Breillat)
10. La promesse (Dardenne & Dardenne)

Rohmer's A Summer's Tale and Assayas' Irma Vep just narrowly missed out. The Watermelon Woman, A Moment of Innocence, and Goodbye South, Goodbye are all very good as well. Long overdue to revisit Cronenberg's Crash once again.