Posted in: lists

Moments out of Time 1991

[Originally published in Film Comment Volume 28 Number 1, January/February 1992, reprinted by permission]

• Best shot of the year: A motorcycle tops a rise on a lonely road in sagebrush country, followed (though not, strictly, pursued) a beat later by a police car. The timing of the vehicles’ apparition; the casual left-to-right pan that observes them till the cyclist realizes he should pull over; the way the shot-movement incidentally sums up the roll of the land, its distances and layers and colors … My Own Private Idaho

"La belle noiseuse"
‘La belle noiseuse’

• Most triumphant moment: in the doctor’s office in Rambling Rose, Daddy (Robert Duvall) admitting “I was wrong”; his tears of love and fervent pride for the wife (Diane Ladd) who has set him right…

• World and time shrink down to the limits of a sketch pad, while an artist’s hand consumes sheet after sheet with inked images of an unseen nude; the relentless scratch of his pen like death’s feather on the nerve—La Belle Noiseuse

• Véronique (Irène Jacob), lying on her back on a bed in a hotel room she has just rented impetuously, watches an offscreen something sail down past the window, its shadow brushing her face—The Double Life of Véronique….

Barton Fink: The bellhop—CHET! (Steve Buscemi)—rising through a trap-door behind the Hotel Earle reception desk to ask Fink (John Turturro) whether he’s to be “trans or res”…

• That last, endless shot of The Silence of the Lambs: an emptying street, dimming at the onset of evening, down which Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) has long since disappeared on the scent of “an old friend”…

Read More “Moments out of Time 1991”