[originally published in Film Comment Volume 34 Number 1, January/February 1998, reprinted by permission]
• The death of Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), L.A. Confidential: The gunshot comes as a cinematically rare and genuine shock, but this is crowned by a supreme actor’s-moment: Jack’s multivalenced chuckle—shoulda known better—as he plants the clue with which his killer will betray himself. “Rollo … Tommasi”…
• A blue, figured rug drifting over a rocky streambed: the beginning of Gabbeh‘s motion picture magic ..
• Kundun: the crane up from the Dalai Lama amidst a virtual sea of slain monks…
• The happy promiscuousness of the camera in Boogie Nights: tracking the trajectory of various characters through the first party scene at Jack Horner’s house, it notices an anonymous girl and follows her … into the pool … and under the water … and surfaces to frame Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly) … and goes under again to meet Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg)….
• The tour-boat scene in My Best Friend’s Wedding, the last time that former lovers Julia Roberts and Dermot Mulroney will ever be alone together: “…If you love someone, you say it out loud, otherwise the moment just—” “—passes you by,” she finishes, as, passing under a bridge, the boat draws out of privileged shadow into the sun….
• Overarching tree limbs—the curve of a mother’s loving embrace—in Mother and Son and Ponette…
• “Never ignore a man’s courtesy”—good advice from Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), Hard Eight…
• In The Apostle, the way Sonny (Robert Duvall) kicks out at the cop who tries to interrupt his seduction of a soul for Jesus … a dying accident victim he touches through the window of his wrecked car…
• “Told ya it was here”—where Louis (Robert De Niro) parked the car, that is. Melanie (Bridget Fonda) is no longer interested. Jackie Brown…
• Stalin (F. Murray Abraham) and Australian fan Joan Fraser (Judy Davis) getting up close and personal on a settee in Children of the Revolution…
• Alien Resurrection: Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) unfolding her long limbs as she emerges from a cocoon of gauze: elegant as a praying mantis…
• Absolute Power: Ed Harris’s cop and Clint Eastwood’s master thief “flirting” over lunch at the museum: two good men, two good actors in perfect rapport…
• Out of the reeds on the other side of a river, Russian soldiers rise—as though from hidden graves—to renew the hostilities Capitaine Conan lives for….
• Wounded men: the compulsive, politicking charisma of D.A. Ron Leibman, and the smiling, embarrassed guiltiness of cop James Gandolfini as honest man Ian Holm’s partner; Night Falls on Manhattan…
• Barely visible in Amistad‘s opening dark, a bloodied black finger scrabbles desperately to tease a nail out of wood….
• A dark, hushed kitchen crowded with ursine menace, rehearsal for the real thing in The Edge…
• Don’t go there: the unclean atmosphere of the house where Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette live in Lost Highway…
• L.A. Confidential: Seconds after two men have been machine-gunned through it, a picture window crashes in sheets ….
• Most startling intertitle of the year: RENO, NEVADA – TWO YEARS LATER, after the mesmerizing first reel of Hard Eight…
• The almost unbearable sweetness of the duet between Catherine Sloper (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Morris Townsend (Ben Chaplin), as close to perfect union as they ever come in Washington Square…
• The hopeless, utterly endearing croaking of the bride-to-be (Cameron Diaz) in the karaoke bar: disaster become triumph in My Best Friend’s Wedding…
• The polite raptness of The Colonel (the late, great Robert Ridgely) checking Eddie’s goods—Boogie Nights…
• The preternatural self-possession and serene preposterousness of Ken Sherry (George Shevtzov), Love Serenade…
• Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) vamping in his opera cape with satanic red lining, Face/Off…
• “I love Chow Yun Fat but I don’t see him as Batman”—overheard at a comic-book con in Chasing Amy…
• The falls—a Herzogian coup in Happy Together…
• Dead faces reflected in a muddy pool of leftover rainwater … epitaph for Deep Crimson‘s grotesque Bonnie and Clyde wannabes…
• Smilla’s Sense of Snow: Below the frozen tundra, a seal rolls over in a grotto of blue ice, lit like a stained-glass window from another dimension…
• A teacher reaches into a landscape to pluck out a bouquet and “blue,” the color of the sky: directorial sorcery in Gabbeh….
• The hard, fast exchange of blows in a duel of will and wit between damaged boy and shrink (Matt Damon and Robin Williams) in Good Will Hunting…
• Kurt (Ricky Jay) engaging Little Bill (William H. Macy) in a discussion of “minimal” while, just beyond, a rapt audience watches Little Bill’s wife getting dicked on the driveway—Boogie Nights…
• Just before the end of Donnie Brasco, Lefty (AI Pacino) leaving open a drawer containing his jewelry and cash so that his wife will find them…
• Washington Square’s Aunt Lavinia (Maggie Smith) spews overripe platitudes about love as she flirts with her niece’s fortune-hunting fiancé (Ben Chaplin). Behind her, glimpsed through a scrim, a whore’s legs pump up and down….
• A father’s lullaby, the grave face of a sick child, and a small knife: The Sweet Hereafter…
• In the middle of a stormy night, a tiny black foal nests in the snow outside a grandmother’s yurt … a magical gift in A Mongolian Tale….
• The muffled thump of great combs trimming and shaping heavy hanks of wool: the beating heart of Gabbeh…
• The first appearance of Sam Neill’s many-times-turned spy in Children of the Revolution: in ironically menacing silhouette, with a smoking cigarette cocked in his leather-gloved hand…
• Philip Baker Hall in excelsis: in Hard Eight, the matter-of-fact awe of just tracking around the casino in Sydney’s wake; and in Boogie Nights, the entrance of Floyd Gondolli…
• The brute, sudden horror of death in the dark: Harold Perrineau Jr.’s savaging by the bear in The Edge…
• Behind the Victory Motel, headlights in the trees: classic air of menace at the climax of L.A. Confidential…
• A father’s hand, raised from the steering wheel to wave at his kids, suddenly spasms impotently … signaling the loss of all bearings in The Sweet Hereafter….
• The way Billy Bob Thornton’s kneeling sinner turns his face away during his conversion at the tender hands of The Apostle…
• L.A. Confidential: Jack Vincennes’s glance at the one-way mirror in the chief’s office—behind which Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) stands—after he has copped to the grand jury…
• “This isn’t E.M. Forster!” … Upper-class British novelist Giles DeAth (John Hurt) realizing he’s in the wrong movie auditorium in Love and Death on Long Island…
• Sensual short-circuiting in Female Perversions: utterly self-absorbed Eve (Tilda Swinton) making out in a hammock with her latest, lovely conquest (Karen Sillas)…
• The Ice Storm: Seconds after a passionless quickie in his car’s front seat, a suburban spouse (Jamey Sheridan) draws back in horror—”Awful … that was awful”—from his neighbor’s wife (Joan Allen)….
• A Thousand Acres: A woman scorned (Jessica Lange) disappears—as though she never existed—into a field of corn….
• The story about the girl that got away as told by Silent Bob, aka writer-director Kevin Smith, in Chasing Amy…
• Hotshot lawyer Jon Voight, momentarily tripped up by tyro attorney Matt Damon in The Rainmaker: “You little pissant!”…
• “Jan-et!”—Judy Davis’s outraged shriek when Woody Allen accidentally calls her Jane, after her thinly disguised character in his latest novel; misogynistic metacinema in Deconstructing Harry…
• A reforming junkie (Malcolm McDowell) injects his hand-puppet self with an overdose of the old “rang dang do,” in Hugo Pool…
• “Earl Grey rules!”—Sudden Manhattan…
• In Anastasia, ghosts from a lost age of Romanov splendor drift down from floor-to-ceiling portraits in a great, decaying ballroom….
• An image cinema waited a hundred years to frame: in Amistad, a low-angle shot up past the helm of the ship as a strong man looks skyward and steers by the stars…
• In Chasing Amy, Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams)’s sweet, wise “sermon” about all the ways her lover’s proposed three-way could go wrong…
• The Apostle: The joy and regret that illuminates an old minister’s (John Beasley) face as he explains why a weak heart keeps him from preaching: “When I get up to the pulpit and the spirit moves me … I can’t hold back.”…
• Early in The Devil’s Advocate, the virtually nuclear toilet-flush sound effect as lawyer Keanu Reeves scrubs his hands in the courthouse restroom…
• In Boogie Nights, the cap-gun verisimilitude of Brock Landers and Chest Rockwell’s shooting…
• Gary Oldman as Zorg, The Fifth Element‘s best special effect: a weirdly skewed stick-figure who seems to have been dismantled and reassembled on several occasions by repair teams with radically conflicting theories of prosthetics…
• “What the fuck happened to you, man? Your ass used to be beautiful.” Ordell (Samuel 1. Jackson) to Louis, no longer listening. Jackie Brown…
• Boogie Nights: During the unaccustomed near-silence while his musical tapes change over, Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina) suddenly feels impelled to account for the thirty-seventh firecracker since the sequence began: “Cosmo … he’s Chinese”….
• The Saint (Val Kilmer), having immersed himself in a near-frozen Moscow river, watches up through the water as an enemy stands above looking for him…
• After the woman he’s hot for tells him “next time,” The Apostle spins around on her front steps to aim a stiff finger at her door, shooting off steam and punching out a promise of future good times….
• In Deep Crimson, a reluctantly murderous “mother” prepares a little girl for her bath—both knowing it will be her last….
• The miraculous presence that appears behind Ponette as she grieves by her mother’s grave…
• Mother and Son amid white birches on a hill that tilts inexorably down-frame…
• Alien Resurrection: The horrific yet ennobled visage of Ellen Ripley’s unholy child at the moment it registers its Virgin Mother’s betrayal…
• Mother and child reunion: Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) tenderly bringing Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) home in his first big sex scene in Boogie Nights…
• .Slowly closing in on the target of choice—a lost son—at the beginning of Hard Eight…
• Julie Christie all aglow in anticipation of love in Afterglow…
• The hair-raising shooosh of a boy’s suddenly dead body sliding along a frozen road … The Ice Storm…
• A romantic melody on the radio, a slow dance on a nighttime pier … the sweet, doomed passion of an IRA soldier (Brad Pitt) and his girl (Natascha McElhone) in The Devil’s Own…
• Jackie Brown: Max Cherry (Robert Forster) listening to the Delfonics on his car tapedeck, and just not quite singing along…
• A sweetly demented “stalker” (Mel Gibson) sits in his car gazing up at the apartment window of the woman he loves (Julia Roberts), Conspiracy Theory. After a moment, he begins to hum, “scoring” her workout on the treadmill….
• Unable to maintain proper manly restraint under the influence of “I Will Survive,” Kevin Kline breaks out in exuberant dance—In & Out….
• An unexpected, deadpan rendition of “Wichita Lineman” by a middle-aged Asian restaurateur in Australia’s Love Serenade…
• My Best Friend’s Wedding: George (Rupert Everett), “radiant with charisma,” let loose on the wedding-rehearsal luncheon and drawing the entire assembly into an ecstatic rendition of “Say a Little Prayer for Me”…
• Love and Death on Long Island: the delicate obtrusiveness of the proprietor of Chez d’Irv (Maury Chaykin), especially when he asks Giles DeAth whether he’s ever bumped into a guy named Stan Brickhouse—”an attractive man … average-size hands, breasts like a woman”…
• Observed from a god’s-eye view in Smilla’s Sense of Snow: a man and his dog team trying to outrace a frame-filling, moving wall of snow…
• A red car drives down a turnpike curving gently through misty green countryside: Good Will Hunting heading for his own private Idaho….
• Any of Judy Davis’s orgasmic rants in Children of the Revolution, but especially the one that ends by radically changing tune, as she sighs a mild “Ta, love” to the patient husband (Geoffrey Rush) who hands her a cuppa…
• In & Out: Seen from overhead, the incidental passage of a car, driver unknown and irrelevant, that somehow validates, even blesses, the tender reunion of former student (Matt Dillon) and very rattled teacher (Joan Cusack) in the Midwest evening…
• Boogie Nights: a New Year’s Eve flashbulb goes off in Little Bill’s face as he heads outside to his car to get his gun….
• Apotheosis in Gattaca: onetime übermensch Jerome (Jude Law) immolating himself in a purification chamber while “blood brother” Vincent (Ethan Hawke) rockets to heaven…
• The face of a man buried alive at the end of Taste of Cherry…
• Max Cherry watching Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) depart, then turning to walk out of the focus she gave his life…
• In Washington Square, an orange parasol makes a sunflower of Catherine as she warms to her handsome suitor…
• My Best Friend’s Wedding: George, improvising, making a well-meaning grab for his “fiancée’s” breast in the taxicab…
• The argument we never learn about at a neighboring table while Sydney buys Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) a late-night cup of coffee—Hard Eight…
• “I’ll never let go,” Rose (Kate Winslet) promises Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Titanic, and proves it … by letting go….
• The Sweet Hereafter: the camera seeming to crane up around the very curve of the earth as it finds and follows Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood)’s truck following the school us…
• At the climax of L.A. Confidential, a flotilla of cherry-topped cop cars cresting the hill and approaching past the pumping oil well, as a man walks toward them with hands raised …
• Long way down, Boogie Nights, in the midst of the Quentin-Tarantino-eat-your-heart-out set-piece of the year, Eddie Adams/Dirk Diggler seems to know that he’s going to die right here, right now, inevitably and with abject pointlessness. But only “Marky Mark” dies; Mark Wahlberg gets out of there a winner….
RTJ / KAM