90s All Over Me takes inspiration from 80s All Over, the Drew McWeeny/Scott Weinberg podcast that attempted to review every major film release of the 80s one month at a time; that podcast ended circa early 1985 and McWeeny has continued the project on his Substack. The aims of this series are somewhat more modest; rather than covering every month and release in said month, each entry will cover a year of the 1990s, focusing solely on what I’ve seen from that year. The first half of each instalment spotlights what I saw theatrically at the time, contextualising those works in my own moviegoing journey from ages seven to 17 as well as their wider cultural import. The second half covers every other release I’ve seen of that year across physical media, television, and streaming.
Read the previous instalment on 1990 and the 1989 prequel instalment.
- 1990 Total films seen: 101
- Total seen theatrically: 7
- VHS/TV/DVD/Streaming: 94
Theatrical
The Rocketeer
Director: Joe Johnston; Cast: Billy Campbell, Jennifer Connelly, Timothy Dalton, Alan Arkin, Paul Sorvino, Terry O’Quinn; Writers: Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo
Studios weren’t too sure how to cash in on Batman as the new coin of the realm. That frequently unprofitable—but creatively intriguing—struggle pervades the 90s, yielding a handful of wonderful films along the way, among them The Rocketeer. As a 9-year old in the pre-internet era, in a region with one commercial television station, the fact The Rocketeer was a commercial failure was never readily apparent: Matt Le Blanc’s Vinnie Viducci broke the bad news on Married with Children.
Watched purely on its own terms without any surrounding discourse, The Rocketeer—Joe Johnston’s follow-up to Honey I Shrunk the Kids, adapting Dave Stevens’ 1930s-set comic book—is an uncynical, earnest good time, as much Indiana Jones as superhero romp. The Jennifer Connelly crush started here, and Timothy Dalton is tremendous fun as a nefarious Nazi sky masquerading as an Errol Flynn-type matinee idol.
Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead
Director: Stephen Herek; Cast: Christian Applegate, Joanna Cassidy, Keith Coogan, John Getz; Writers: Neil Landau, Tara Ilson
Speaking of Married with Children and crushes, Christina Applegate was the big draw for this family film, which starts like a dark comedy but evolves into a fun, Working Girl-esque girl power flick with a dash of pedestrian romance. From Stephen Herek, director of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, who’d become a Disney live-action journeyman as the 90s unfolded.
Hook
Director: Steven Spielberg; Cast: Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Bob Hoskins; Writers: Jim V. Hart, Malia Scotch Marmo
Spielberg’s star-studded Peter Pan sequel arrived with much fanfare: I remember the uncommon sight of a marquee at the local indoor mall, with a television playing the trailer on loop. Like The Rocketeer, news of its critical and commercial disappointment—and troubled, overblown production—did not reach 9-year-old me.
Whilst its defects have become more glaring with the passage of time, in my 1989 piece I alluded to Spielberg’s preternatural skill for composition, and that’s very much apparent here: even though there are films in this septet of titles that I like much more, none are as well-directed as Hook, and Spielberg’s frequent collaborators—composer John Williams, DP Dean Cundey, editor Michael Kamen—are in similarly good form.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze
Director: Michael Pressman; Cast: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, Paige Turco, David Warner; Writer: Todd W. Langen
The movie is pretty much what is says on the box. It’s notably more sanitised than the original, doesn’t play as rough, and the suits are more plasticine, but it adds monsters and Vanilla Ice, which for 9-year-old me was enough.
Bingo
A family film about a dog who gets adopted, abandoned, pursues his best friend across the country, saves a family held hostage, is framed for a crime and sent to prison, escapes prison, and finds and saves his best friend from criminals blackmailing his football star father into throwing a game. So, only slightly less fantastical than The Secret of the Ooze. Of course I liked it. I’m sure it’s still fine.
Curly Sue
Curly Sue was John Hughes’ final film as director, and its critical and commercial failure supposedly swore him off directing. Again, to a 9-year-old in pre-internet era, those were not facts I was privy to. I liked it then, am sure it’s better than its poor reputation asserts, but as a 42-year-old man it’s not my business to verify.
The Addams Family
There were lots of bygone TV properties adapted to film in the 1990s, some good, plenty bad, including a genuine skunk from director Barry Sonnenfeld himself at decade’s end. With The Addams Family, however, Sonnenfeld—the former Coen Brothers DP—and his game cast truly came to play, producing something thoroughly cinematic and untethered from its television (and New Yorker comic strip) origins.
The rest: Stallone plays Oscar, Silence wins Oscars, and more
I like the structure I’ve established for this series, digging into each year’s theatrical experiences before grappling with the larger sweep of films from that year, encountered in other formats in no particular order over the passage of time, from home video in 1991 through to streaming as recently as last month with New Jack City, Mario Van Peebles’ 80s-set Blaxpoitation actioner. But I also feel the pinch of the format.
Looking back at my 1990 recap, I’m remorseful to have mustered only a couple of adjectives for Hal Harley’s Trust, an exciting discovery from my late twenties that felt so specific and spiky and singular in its voice; I love the performances, especially Martin Donovan, a 90s indie film utility player in whom Hartley found an ideal avatar. I also feel the pinch of memory: having seen so many titles, it’s a Darwinian survival of the fittest—not necessarily the best—in the memory bank. I should have had more to say about Kurosawa’s Dreams or Kitano’s Boiling Point last entry, but memory handicapped me.
Ditto for several titles in 1991, such as Diary of a Hitman, a chamber piece starring several actors I like—Sherilyn Fenn, Forest Whitaker, Sharon Stone—that I know I’ve seen but don’t really remember, and The Linguini Incident, a rom-com with David Bowie and Rosanna Arquette I watched late one night in my early twenties and haven’t thought about since.
To redress somewhat, I’m starting this piece by singling out four films that could otherwise get swept under the radar in discussing the celluloid highlights of this robust year. Entire pieces have been and could be written about bigger titles like Beauty and the Beast, delivering on the promise of The Little Mermaid and confirming Disney’s renaissance; or the popular potboiler Backdraft, consummately made by the steadiest of hands in Ron Howard; or The Fisher King and The Prince of Tides, aristocratically-titled films that have in common raw nerve-tapping central performances by major male stars (Jeff Bridges the former, Nick Nolte the latter), the former one of only three Terry Gilliam films of the decade, the latter one of only two Barbara Streisand productions. Instead I want to spotlight four smaller titles.
As a piece of filmmaking, Heywood Gould’s One Good Cop is pedestrian, and its plot—about the titular good cop adopting his slain partner’s three young daughters—could be the subject matter of a hokey 1930s melodrama. But Michael Keaton’s performances are always fascinating, as is One Good Cop as another of Keaton’s curious choices following Batman, the actor charting a bespoke rather than programmatic career course.
Christopher Eccleston’s another actor I adore, and while his best and most important work has largely been on television, in his film debut Let Him Have It—playing Derek Bentley, the last man in Britain to be hanged—he delivers a striking performance, also announcing his social justice orientation long before it was hip. Director Peter Medak—like many a carpetbagger British filmmaker—has an odd filmography, but one peppered with gems, and Let Him Have It exhibits a keen sense of time, place, and period detail.
While I don’t have the courage or inclination to attempt to wrap my head around Eric Roberts’ 800+ filmography, I enjoy his work, and even as the credits began stacking at the expense of quality in the 90s there were still plenty of sneaky under-the-radar gems in the mix. 1990’s The Ambulance was one; another is By the Sword, where a fencing champion and coach (Roberts) hires an elderly cleaner (F. Murray Abraham) who turns out to share some history and be a formidable maestro in his own right. Roberts and Abraham are unexpectedly compelling sparring (literally) partners, Jeremy Lagan’s direction is economical and stylish, and there’s a Howard Hawksian philosophy of professional respect underpinning proceedings.
Finally, One False Move is a Southern-tinged regional noir about a small town sherif—Bill Paxton, nailing it—recruited into a manhunt for three suspected killers. A small but resourceful thriller with solid, strong direction by Carl Franklin and writing by debuting scribes Tom Epperson and Billy Bob Thornton (also acting). In an alternate Oscar universe, this would have been afforded some of Hell or High Water’s plaudits.
It’s been fascinating to revisit 1989 to 1991 and trace careers rising and falling, revving up and sputtering. As noted above, Curly Sue was a misstep for John Hughes, following the career peak—commercially if not artistically—of scripting Home Alone. Julia Roberts had a great 1990 with Pretty Woman, but less success in 1991 with Sleeping with the Enemy, a serviceable thriller, and Dying Young, an average weepie. Kathleen Turner was a force in the 1980s, but the uninspired V.I. Warshawski signalled a decline in material and opportunities, 1994’s Serial Mom notwithstanding.
The great Ed O’Neil headlined the amiable Hughes-scripted Dutch—released as Driving Me Crazy in Australia—but suffered the indignity of being replaced by Fred Dalton Thompson in John Milius’s Flight of the Intruder after tests audiences laughed and started shouting “Bundy!” during his scenes.
I’m a documented apologist for Sylvester Stallone and director John Landis, and I love their collaboration on Oscar, an old-school farcical comedy about a day in the life of a mobster trying to go straight. Landis’s impeccable comic timing, the witty script, the gifted cast—including Peter Reigart, Marisa Tomei, Tim Curry, and Chazz Palminteri—and Stallone’s earnest stab at the material make Oscar a personal favourite. But the knives were out for Stallone and Landis, and its critical and commercial failure fanned a wobbly 90s for both creatives.
I’m also an apologist for Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd, and while both stars made their share of bad films in the 1980s, Nothing but Trouble—a black comedy in which city slickers roll into a nightmarish small town presided over by a grotesque tyrant—has an especially noxious reputation. It was especially disastrous for Aykroyd, who bet the farm as writer, director, and star.
I don’t share the general low opinion of the film, finding a lot of creativity to enjoy and a certain car-crash fascination on a scene-to-scene basis, but I do think a director with a better handle on tonal modulation than Aykroyd—a previous collaborator like Landis or Ivan Reitman, or a Joe Dante or Robert Zemeckis—might have massaged some of the Aykroydian excess for audiences. I also feel bad for Demi Moore, like Julia Roberts following a mammoth 1990 hit—Ghost—with two left-handed choices in this and the mediocre magical realist rom-com The Butcher’s Wife.
Kevin Costner’s reckoning was on the horizon (not that Horizon), but he had a spectacular 1991 between Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and JFK. The bloom was off the rose a bit following Dances with Wolves’ perceived overexposure and behind-the-scenes hijinks on Robin Hood. He’s also up against a platoon of colourful over-actors across both productions—among them Alan Rickman on Robin Hood and Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Oldman on JFK—and there’s a case to be made that he’s bad in the former film. But I’d argue he’s perfect casting for Kevin Reynolds’ silly but very, very watchable medieval romp, helping the well-worn material play for modern audiences. It goes without saying, but the film surpasses the unmemorable competing production Robin Hood, directed by John Irvin and starring Patrick Bergen.
Similarly, Costner provides a sturdy anchor amidst the information and sensory overload of JFK and nails the lengthy final courtroom monologue. Shout-out to the late, great Donald Sutherland for making a meal of the film’s other famous extended monologue. The film remains, I’d argue, Oliver Stone’s finest work and a tremendous feat of casting, screenwriting, cinematography, and editing. Rabid fans of Oppenheimer who haven’t seen JFK would do themselves a solid to watch it, given Nolan’s structural and stylistic indebtedness to Stone’s film.
Stone’s The Doors was also released in 1991. Much as 2023’s Barbie was billed as a film for both people who love Barbie and people who hate Barbie, those who find Jim Morrison intoxicating and those who find him insufferable will have their competing hypotheses amply supported in The Doors (the same could be said for Francis Coppola, subject of the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness chronicling the making of Apocalypse Now). Nonetheless, The Doors is an excellent film executed with Stone’s signature conviction, and the scale and staging of its concert scenes is impressive. Another unsubtle director to release a musical picture in 1991 was Alan Parker with the entertaining and salty The Commitments, his fourth musical and first (of two) of the 1990s.
Kilmer, surprisingly, was not Oscar-nominated for The Doors. Following Jeremy Irons’ Best Actor win the previous year for playing accused murderer Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, three more actors competed for Best Actor for murderous roles in 1991. I failed to touch on Robert De Niro in my discussion of Awakenings and Goodfellas when covering 1990. He’s terrific in both, but can sometimes be boring—as he is in Guilty by Suspicion, Irwin Winkler’s stab at a Stanley Kramer-esque film about Hollywood and McCarthyism—or simply serviceable, as he is in Backdraft. But he’s far from boring in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear, delivering a tour de force performance and bringing menace, humour, and creepy charisma to the film’s loud and loud-shirted reinvention of Robert Mitchum’s villainous Max Cady. Cape Fear’s never boring either, and while he’s made objectively better and more edifying films, this remains one of my favourite Scorsese films.
I also love Warren Beatty’s work in Bugsy, ostensibly playing the titular mobster who helped wrangle Las Vegas into existence, but essentially playing Warren Beatty in his patented mannered style, intertextually drawing upon his own reputation as ladies man and perfectionist control freak. Barry Levinson is credited director and does polished work, but Beatty’s authorial fingerprints are all over the film.
The third of this trio and the winning performance is Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, a celebrated performance—carved out in substantially less screen time—in Jonathan Demme’s celebrated film, only the third to sweep Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay Oscars after It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. For this writer, Jodie Foster’s is the more revelatory performance, alternately steely and vulnerable, and set the actress’s career path for the rest of the decade and beyond.
Foster also doubled as director on the drama Little Man Tate, about a gifted child torn between his mother and a psychologist who sees his potential and wants to nurture it. The film was scripted by the now highly regarded Scott Frank, debuting in 1991 with that and Dead Again, a likeably goofy thriller that served as Kenneth Branagh’s follow-up to Henry V. Another screenwriter who’d go onto bigger projects, J.J. Abrams, made his debut with Regarding Henry, an underrated Mike Nichols drama featuring Harrison Ford against type as a careerist lawyer who reconnects with his family following a mental impairment.
Three great action titles came out in 1991, the first two fairly unimpeachable, the third less assured in its reputation, but I’ll fight for it tooth and nail. Terminator 2: Judgment Day is peak blockbuster and a pinnacle of action film artistry. I love how it riffs on its predecessor, echoing key beats, escalating set pieces, but also twisting ingredients, most notably recasting Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor as a badass and making the slim, neutral-looking, police uniform-wearing Robert Patrick the lethal antagonist. I assume director James Cameron knew fellow tech wizard and sci-fi nerd Robert Zemeckis, and wonder if he was influenced by Back to the Future 2 and how that film riffs on and escalates from its predecessor.
Cameron also produced the second great action title of 1991, then-partner Kathryn Bigelow’s extreme-ly entertaining Point Break, a blast of a film that was Keanu Reeves’ first flirtation with the action genre. Finally, The Last Boy Scout, a buddy action movie pairing Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans, supposedly had a troubled production but was salvaged in post-production by Stuart Baird, a veteran editor and Warner Bros fixer who nurtured other troubled productions to release in the 90s (and became a fairly average director later in the decade). Watching The Last Boy Scout, I’m oblivious to its rocky inception: it’s helmed by Tony Scott in his signature style, with sparse but effective action scenes and witty, finely-tuned sarcastic banter from Shane Black.
The Last Boy Scout is one of three Joel Silver productions released in 1991, alongside Ricochet and Hudson Hawk. Both The Last Boy Scout and Ricochet nicely encapsulate the quippy amorality of Silver’s brand of action movie imagineering. Hudson Hawk, meanwhile, is its own infamous beast. I noted career missteps—perceived and real—earlier in this piece; following Bruce Willis’s misguided casting (as well as Tom Hanks’s) in 1990’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, the failure of pet project Hudson Hawk perpetuated a downward career slump. So too, to a lesser extent, did The Last Boy Scout and Billy Bathgate, though Willis is one of the redeeming features in that disappointing Robert Benton/Dustin Hoffman collaboration.
My own memory of Hudson Hawk is fuzzy but fond, and in an era largely bereft of stars I’d rather have more stars making eccentric personal passion projects—a canon inclusive of Dances with Wolves, Bugsy, Nothing but Trouble, and Hudson Hawk, and many more titles as the 90s unfolds—than less of them. Willis more than bounced back, but the film was a certifiable pin in director Michael Lehman’s career following a promising start with Heathers. Less scathed were writers Steven E. De Souza—a regular Silver scribe—and Daniel Waters, Lehman’s collaborator on Heathers, who made bank in the early 90s with memorable snarky work on The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and, subsequently, Batman Returns and Demolition Man.
Boyz ‘n the Hood and Thelma & Louise, both terrific acting and directorial showcases, were huge cultural conversation pieces of 1991. Female friendship, the core of Thelma & Louise, was similarly prominent in Fried Green Tomatoes and low-key charmer Enchanted April, while mother-daughter relationships—blood or situational—were at the centre of Not Without My Daughter—watched on a TV wheeled into my classroom at either primary or high school for vaguely educational filler—and Rambling Rose, pairing real-life mother-daughter Diane Ladd and Laura Dern for the second time following Wild at Heart.
Communal weepies, a now-extinct movie trend, were common and profitable in this era: 1989 had Steel Magnolias, 1990 had Ghost, and 1991 had Fried Green Tomatoes along with My Girl, another movie wheeled into the classroom (possibly multiple times) and a lovely film with thoughtful performances from Anna Chlumsky, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Dan Aykroyd doing penance for Nothing but Trouble.
Features from Australian directors abroad included Simon Wincer’s Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, neither as bad as its reputation nor a hidden gem warranting rediscovery; Richard Franklin slumming on sequel F/X2; Russell Mulcahy delivering both the compromised, hard-to-watch Highlander 2: The Quickening and very watchable – if overwrought and madly desperate to entertain – Ricochet, and Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe, an excellent and handsomely-mounted work that completes a masterful but under-sung one-two-three punch for the director, following Driving Miss Daisy and Mister Johnson.
Black Robe—about a Jesuit priest’s thwarted attempts to spread the Gospel in the inhospitable landscape, both natural and spiritual, of 1600s Canada—is a worthwhile companion piece to films like Roland Joffe’s The Mission and Scorsese’s Silence, presenting a violent clash of cultures and beliefs—and by implication an unseen spiritual warfare—in Beresford’s characteristically straightforward, unaffected style. My appreciation of it is well-documented.
In a reversal on the usual trend of Australian directors working internationally, German Wim Wenders joined Michael Powell, Nicolas Roeg, Ted Kotcheff, and Werner Herzog in the ranks of foreign directors to helm Australian productions with the ambitious but dry Until the End of the World. The film, headlined by William Hurt, is a Wenders greatest hits package: a road movie like Paris, Texas and earlier German works, albeit on a global scale spanning four continents, with noir elements like Hammett and a cast of misfits ala The Million Dollar Hotel.
Other notable local productions included Proof, a Jocelyn Moorhouse drama with thoughtful lead turns from Russell Crowe and Hugo Weaving; Mark Joffe’s eccentric sophomore comedy Spotswood, starring Anthony Hopkins and mixing dry and goofy humour while dramatizing the tension between corporate imperatives and small business ethos; Dingo from the inventive Rolf de Heer, an empathetic and magic realist work about a jazz enthusiast (Colin Friels) who journeys to Paris to meet his idol (Miles Davis); and Flirting, John Duigan’s soulful, perceptive sequel to The Year My Voice Broke, depicting a romance between returning hero Danny (Noah Taylor) and Ugandan student Thandiwe (Thandie Newton in her debut role).
In addition to those sequels discussed above, other sequels of 1991 included the schlocky Class of Nuke Em High 2 and Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare; the ropey Mannequin on the Move and telemovie I Still Dream of Jeannie; the likeable Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey; the very fun Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a pointed Cold War allegory casting Klingons as Russians and a return to form following The Final Frontier and fitting send-off for the OG crew; and The Naked Gun 2 1/2, not quite as inspired or polished as its predecessor but with genuinely hilarious sight gags, lines, and slapstick set pieces, like the two below.
Of the Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker comedy team, Jerry Zucker went respectable-ish with 1990’s Ghost, while David Zucker kept it funny with the Naked Gun sequel—memorably parodying his brother’s film, as seen in the teaser above—as did Jim Abrahams with the very funny Hot Shots!
Other comedies of 1991 included the final—and least—Wilder and Pryor team-up, Another You; Steve Martin headlining LA Story and Father of the Bride and adding some dry levity to Lawrence Kasdan’s earnest Grand Canyon; Woody Allen sporting a ponytail and making a rare appearance in another director’s work in Paul Mazursky’s Scenes from a Mall, opposite Bette Midler, while issuing his own annual release with the underrated, atmospheric Shadows and Fog; the delightful Kevin Kline and a game ensemble—including Sally Field, a world away from Not Without my Daughter—lathering on the laughs in Soap Dish; Rick Mayall and Phoebe Cates in a nostalgic favourite of many that I have little affection for, Drop Dead Fred; the very likeable contemporary Western comedy City Slickers, showcasing some better-than-the-norm-for-a-studio-comedy cinematography by recent Oscar winner Dean Semler; a serviceable late Mel Brooks vehicle, Life Stinks; and an innocuous Michael J. Fox vehicle, Doc Hollywood. Perusing these titles is a reminder that a number of unlikely stars were afforded seemingly annual star vehicles during this era: not only Michael J. Fox and Bette Midler, but also Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Pesci, and Danny De Vito, among others.
Looking back over the first three pieces in this series, I’m very aware of the dominance of English-language movies and American films. Our movie diets are often products of our upbringing, and growing up in regional Victoria in the 1990s, those are what I saw, what was available, and became the baseline for much of what I sought subsequently. While I’ve deliberately sought opportunities to see and fill gaps in world cinema, it’s a perennial game of catch-up. Nonetheless, from 1991 I can list the French titles Delicatessen, the sly and stylised black comedy from Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Mark Caro, and Claude Chabrol’s period adaptation Madam Bovary starring the remarkable Isabelle Huppert.
Two other adaptations or classic works hailed from England that year: Derek Jarman’s take on Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, and Peter Greenaway’s take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero’s Books. The latter is an impressive technical work and feat of production design that obscures its Shakespearean source, and all things considered I’d rather have a more traditional John Gielgud performance of the role captured for posterity.
The anthology Night on Earth was Jim Jarmusch’s first global production; where previous films Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train all featured foreigners on American soil, Night on Earth depicts five taxi trips around the globe in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. It’s characteristically witty, literate, and laconic.
Akira Kurosawa’s penultimate work Rhapsody in August, a gentle but haunted meditation on Hiroshima’s legacy within a Japanese family, also straddles cultures by featuring Richard Gere in a small role as a remorseful soldier. From China, meanwhile, hailed the entertaining Jackie Chan film Armour of God II: Operation Condor and Tsui Hark’s epic Once Upon a Time in China, featuring Jet Li in his adult breakout role as Wong Fei-Hung, a Robin Hood-style folk hero immortalised in other Chinese features before and since (including Chan’s Drunken Master). The film opens with a banger theme song over a martial arts riff on Chariots of Fire.
Chan and Li would roll into the American film industry later in the decade, in far lesser films; for now, US martial arts movie duties were being handled by familiar faces, all still on game: Jean-Claude Van Damme in Double Impact, Steven Seagal in the sweaty and effective Out for Justice, and Dolph Lundgren in the lean, tight as a bow Showdown in Little Tokyo.
Showdown in Little Tokyo is the first Brandon Lee film touched on in this series, and his tragic and untimely passing will hang over 1994. Similarly, I haven’t really touched on the late, great River Phoenix—who would overdose in 1993—though he’s appeared in films covered, in what feel like deliberately small, strategic roles, as young Indiana Jones in the flashback opening to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (spookily channelling his Mosquito Coast co-star Harrison Ford) and as a waiter besotted with Tracy Ullman in I Love You to Death. Phoenix takes centre stage in 1991’s My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant’s very loose riff on Shakespeare’s Henry IV with hustlers.
I’m curious where Phoenix’s career would have gone as the 1990s and beyond unfolded; as it stands, he was building a very different filmography to Idaho co-star Reeves—flexing action, comedy, and drama muscles in 1991 across Point Break, the Bill & Ted sequel and Idaho—and very different to the young cast of Mobsters, a Young Guns with gangsters where the cast felt like adolescents playing dress-up as adults.
Horror-wise, 1991 yielded Mindwarp, The Resurrected, Stuart Gordon’s Spanish Inquisition-set The Pit and the Pendulum, Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs, and Nicolas Roeg-Theresa Russell collaboration Cold Heaven. Tommy Lee Wallace followed It with courtroom miniseries And the Sea Will Tell, while two impressive works from the Coen Brothers and David Cronenberg, Barton Fink and Naked Lunch, dabbled in what could be called black comedy art horror about writers and writing.
For the record, some notable films of 1991 that I have not included because I haven’t seen them: The Sheltering Sky, The Double Life of Veronique, Dogfight, Homicide, Toy Soldiers, What About Bob, Frankie & Johnny, Jungle Fever, Madonna: Truth or Dare, Kafka, Europa Europa, Mississippi Masala, King Ralph, Shakes the Clown, The Hard Way, Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken, Switch, Career Opportunities, Defending Your Life, Cool as Ice, Rover Dangerfield, and For the Boys.
If you’re still here, thanks for enduring. See you back here for 1992 for sequels to Batman and Home Alone, two beloved Robin Williams voice performances, three not-especially-beloved Christopher Columbus movies (the explorer, not the Home Alone director), challenging franchise entries from Davids Lynch and Fincher, the debut of one Quentin Tarantino, and Chevy Chase hobbling John Carpenter’s career. To be continued …