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 instalments on 1989, 1990, and 1991.
- 1992 Total films seen: 114
- Total seen theatrically: 7
- VHS/TV/DVD/Streaming: 107
Theatrical
Batman Returns
Director: Tim Burton; Cast: Michael Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny De Vito, Christopher Walken; Writers: Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm.
While Batman had its fair share of narrative beats conforming to studio notes, and Christopher Nolan’s millennial Batman films are notably utilitarian and franchise-minded, Batman Returns operates on fairy-tale logic, conspicuously uninterested in continuity from scene to scene or indeed film to film, with a new paramour, new villains, new sets and surrounds, few returning characters, and only cursory allusion to past events.
Todd Phillips spent much of his Joker press tour boasting about smuggling a gritty 1970s-style art film into the mainstream, but three decades earlier Tim Burton made a $60+ million art film with a freakish villain raised by carnies who bites WASP’s noses, oozes black bile and innuendo, and dispatches an army of rocket-wearing penguins on a suicide mission. Ten-year-old me was not among the children terrified by the film, nor were my parents among those who complained to McDonalds. Danny De Vito, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Christopher Walken are all tremendous.
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
Director: Chris Columbus; Cast: Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, Catherine O’Hara, Tim Curry; Writer: John Hughes.
Pretty much what’s on the packaging: same, slightly different, and more. Very enjoyable if you don’t dwell on the fact that Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern should be charred, smoking corpses with caved-in heads by film’s end. Brief cameo by President Trump.
Aladdin
Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker; Cast: Robin Williams, Scott Weinger, Linda Larkin; Writers: Ron Clements, John Musker, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio et al.
One of the three peaks of the Disney renaissance alongside Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, and on a given day any one of the three could take top spot. Inventive animation, banger tunes, and a rightly beloved Robin Williams vocal performance, though today I’m especially fond of Gilbert Gottfried’s agitated avian villain.
FernGully: The Last Rainforest
Director: Bill Kroyer; Cast: Robin Williams, Tim Curry, Samantha Mathis, Christian Slater; Writers: Jim Cox, Diana Young.
The second Robin Williams vocal performance in an animated movie of 1991. Williams’ goofy bat here is much less beloved than Genie, much to the chagrin of Williams, who perhaps naively wanted Disney to minimise his role in Aladdin’s promotion to avoid overshadowing this sincere environmentally minded work. I don’t really remember it, but enjoyed it at the time.
Strictly Ballroom
To the best of my knowledge, my first theatrical outing to an Australian film. While the scale was smaller, sets and costumes dinkier, and leads less polished than his subsequent output, director Baz Luhrmann’s aesthetic and approach to filmmaking hatched fully formed.
Honey I Blew Up the Kid
Randal Kleiser’s lesser sequel to Joe Johnston’s adventure-orientated original. I remember it better than Fern Gully, but not particularly fondly. Tip for budding filmmakers and effects artisans: tiny people in giant surrounds always look better than giant people in tiny surrounds.
Beethoven
Less of a jerk than Turner & Hooch’s Hooch, but still the slobbering, dirty, chaotic bane of uptight patriarch Charles Grodin’s existence. My abiding memories aren’t really the titular hound but Grodin’s amusing disgruntlement.
The rest: Enter Quentin Tarantino, exit Gerald Thomas
Three of the seven titles above are sequels, a reflection of Hollywood’s priorities both then and now. Other franchises of varying longevity were born this year, with some like The Mighty Ducks and Sister Act currently being mined by Disney+.
New sequel releases included Lethal Weapon 3, very underrated and entertaining, like Home Alone 2 selling exactly what’s on the box but adding some Rene Russo girl power to the formula; The Muppets Christmas Carol, a favourite for both Muppet and Christmas movie fans and, like the Muppets themselves, deeply felt; Once Upon a Time in China II and III, both a notch below their precursor but still quite good; Patriot Games, Phillip Noyce’s straightforward but effective sequel to Hunt for Red October with Harrison Ford stepping in for Alec Baldwin; Dutch comedy sequel Flodders in America, which despite my surname I don’t get or find funny; Hellraiser III, featuring the likeable Terry Farrell and less likeable Pinhead; Army of Darkness, which veers a bridge too far into comedic terrain; Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, an unlikely sequel to the cult original; and Police Story 3, with Michelle Yeoh gamely matching Jackie Chan stunt for stunt. Bruce Robinson thriller Jennifer 8 was not a sequel to seven previous Jennifer films.
Unlike Lethal Weapon 3 and Home Alone 2, David Fincher’s Alien 3 and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me defiantly did not deliver their promised bill of goods. A sequel and prequel respectively, the former killed off beloved characters immediately and put shaven-headed heroine Ripley in a prison without guns surrounded by rapey convicts, while the latter took its methodical time killing off Laura Palmer, similarly surrounded by rapey types, over an agonising final week. Suffice to say, neither was what their fanbases wanted, but both are fascinating and striking, and the former—despite its unhappy production—launched a signature director of the decade in Fincher.
One more sequel, Carry on Columbus, marked the 30th entry in its series and a return to screens for the long-running British comedy franchise following a 14-year year hiatus. Previous Carry On films had cashed in with timely parodies of Cleopatra, Hammer horror, spy films, and Emmanuelle, and this entry was conceived to cash in on the dualling Columbus films of 1992: 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. It’s a lot more entertaining than either of those, with returning director Gerald Thomas fulfilling his modus operandi of making a typical Carry On film, replete with several familiar faces in Jim Dale, Bernard Cribbens, June Whitfield, and Jack Douglas. But it can’t help but feel a little creaky, with some comedic Young Turks of the moment—Julian Clary, Rik Mayall—showing up to kiss the ring but also reinforcing that the series’ moment had passed.
As for the other Columbus movies, 1492, befitting a Ridley Scott historical epic, is gorgeous but bloated, while John Glenn, underrated for his five James Bond films of the 1980s, delivers a serviceable film but show little flair for the historical epic. Marlon Brando reunites with his Superman producers the Salkinds to cash another nice fat cheque. Alongside Columbus, another Spanish hero of yore, albeit fictional, appeared in Don Quixote, Jess Franco’s edit and release of Orson Welles’ unfinished work, contested by some Welles scholars.
Whilst sequels abounded, Home Alone, Pretty Woman, and Ghost two years earlier all demonstrated that smartly-marketed mainstream originals could enjoy massive success. The Bodyguard—the last fairly unconditional Kevin Costner success—was a juggernaut in 1992. Directed by Mick Jackson from a script by Lawrence Kasdan, The Bodyguard is slick and the right dosage of sappy, and while the chemistry between Costner and Whitney Houston doesn’t particularly crackle, the iconic moments of the film do a lot of the romantic heavy lifting. Bradley Cooper has taken more than a few pages from Costner’s playbook in charting his course as actor and sometimes actor-director, from headlining a TV adaptation (The A-Team) to working with Clint Eastwood (American Sniper, The Mule) to teaming with a superstar songstress ala The Bodyguard (A Star is Born).
Costner’s leading man equals and rivals in 1992 included Mel Gibson, headlining the abovementioned Lethal Weapon 3 and the all-sap, little-slick Forever Young; Tom Hanks doing penance for The Bonfire of the Vanities with A League of Their Own, though the film is Geena Davis’s showcase; and Tom Cruise as a hotshot lawyer in A Few Good Men and a slipshod Irishman alongside wife Nicole Kidman in Ron Howard’s all-sap, glowingly photographed period romance Far and Away. The former film—Aaron Sorkin’s screenwriting debut—continued Rob Reiner’s hot streak from This is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and Misery, provided a bounce back for Demi Moore after a rough 1991, and afforded Jack Nicholson a chance to chew copious tasty courtroom scenery. The film is better than Nicholson’s other 1992 credits, both collaborations with longtime friends—Danny De Vito’s Hoffa and Bob Rafelson’s Man Trouble—though scenery is also consumed in both.
Speaking of eating scenery, Al Pacino devours living rooms, dining rooms, hotel rooms and ballrooms, restaurants, dance-floors, and school assembly halls in Scent of a Woman. Martin Brest’s drama, as luxurious in length and indulgent as it is, does exert a certain hold on viewers, though I suspect if it wasn’t Pacino’s Oscar-winning role it would be a footnote in his filmography (and possibly is regardless).
Pacino also appears in Glengarry Glenn Ross, the adaptation of David Mamet’s sweary Pulitzer Prize-winning play, part of a top-notch ensemble including Jack Lemmon, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey (controversy noted), and Alec Baldwin in a role especially created for the screen. Baldwin also co-stars alongside Meg Ryan in the adaptation of a Tony and Pulitzer-nominated play, Prelude to a Kiss. While potentially a very fine play, this was another instance where the oddball product does not match the package being sold.
In my 1990 piece I mentioned Bruce Willis wanting to play Die Hard 2 completely straight but being coerced into comedic takes by director Renny Harlin, who salvaged every shred of levity for the screen. Similar self-sabotaging impulses were expressed by Bill Murray on 1993’s Groundhog Day—salvaged by Harold Ramis, albeit at the cost of their friendship and future collaborations—and by Eddie Murphy on 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop 3, not salvaged by John Landis. Chevy Chase’s impulse for seriousness inflicted a fairly fatal blow to Memoirs of an Invisible Man.
Originally envisaged as an Ivan Reitman effects comedy in the vein of Ghostbusters, screenwriter William Goldman recounts, in his second book on screenwriting, how Chase yearned to make a film about the “loneliness of invisibility”. Reitman walked after creative disputes, John Carpenter came aboard, and the end product has decent effects, some novel invisibility gags, but a flat Chase performance, denting Chase’s profile and ending Carpenter’s remarkable—though not always profitable—decade run from 1978’s Halloween through 1988’s They Live.
In earlier pieces I touched on some major films from African-American stars and/or directors like Do the Right Thing, Boyz ‘n the Hood, and New Jack City. 1992 yielded further notable showcases for African-American talent, including Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, epic in both ideas and scale; Bill Duke’s stylish thriller Deep Cover; Kevin Hooks’ propulsive but slight Wesley Snipes vehicle Passenger 57; and Boomerang, directed by Reginald Hudlin and based on a concept by star Eddie Murphy. There were also black star vehicles from white filmmakers, such as Sister Act and White Men Can’t Jump, an engaging buddy comedy from sports movie poet laureate Ron Shelton.
It feels like a number of seeds were planted since 1990, talent-wise, for Quentin Tarantino’s arrival—Harvey Keitel’s Oscar nomination for Bugsy, Keitel and Michael Madsen’ roles in Thelma & Louise, Tim Roth’s profile rising in Vincent & Theo and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead—and the pieces coalesce under Tarantino’s direction in Reservoir Dogs. Today the film cannot help but feel a product of its moment, of a piece with all the imitators that came flooding in, and as a director—of both actors and overall craft—Tarantino has grown in leaps and bounds, as well as resources, in the subsequent three decades. However, his gifts as a wordsmith—which he’s leaned into off screen in recent years with novelisations and criticism—feel fully formed in Reservoir Dogs, elevating both the film above its imitators and Tarantino himself above all the burgeoning writers-directors lost in the Hollywood weeds.
Harvey Keitel felt omnipresent in the 1990s, enjoying a lengthy post-70s second wind, and though I never considered him a favourite, I saw most of his 90s films during my teenage years, taking his presence as a seal of intrigue if not always quality. While Keitel’s default speed is gruff and he has fewer tricks in his toolbox than contemporaries like De Niro, he also made bolder choices in material during this era, as evidenced by Bad Lieutenant. I’ve only seen the film once, so my memory of its overall shape is fuzzy, but Abel Ferrara conjures some indelible moments and images and Keitel exposes himself (literally) and then some.
Though very different in subject matter and aesthetic than Tarantino, Hal Hartley helped pave the way for Tarantino and later independent filmmakers like Kevin Smith, who’s expressly acknowledged Hartley’s influence. In 1991, Hartley had two releases in Simple Men and Surviving Desire: I don’t remember either at all, but I’m sure characters in beige attire interacted in prickly monotone. Tsui Hark also overworked, delivering Once Upon a Time in China II and III and producing New Dragon Gate Inn—China II and New Dragon Gate Inn helping cement Donnie Yen as a star—while Robert Redford helmed the pretty A River Runs Through It and headlined the stacked ensemble of Phil Alden Robinson’s smart, witty Sneakers.
Sexy thrillers, while still out there, no longer exist at the same production scale or high profile as they did in the 90s, a result of both increasing conservatism and, on the flip slide, the ready accessibility of online pornography meaning people don’t have to see or rent movies for discrete kicks. While Fifty Shades of Grey was a phenomenon, it plays like a consumerist romance fantasy and has more in common with Crazy Rich Asians than 1992 releases like Paul Verhoeven’s glossy cause célèbre Basic Instinct, which afforded Sharon Stone—quite outstanding in the film—a deserved but double-edged breakthrough role.
Other films of Basic Instinct’s ilk, but less notorious, included Alan Pakula’s sturdy Consenting Adults, the trashy Poison Ivy, and the stylish Final Analysis. Adjacent films circling the turf included the resourceful Jean-Jacques Annaud’s prestige-baiting Emmanuelle throwback The Lover; Ralph Bakshi’s sweaty live-action/animation hybrid Cool World, which amazingly didn’t arrest Brad Pitt’s career; domestic disturbance thrillers like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and Single White Female, both entertaining and showcasing strong female leads in Annabella Sciorra & Rebecca De Mornay and Bridget Fonda & Jennifer Jason-Leigh respectively; and auteur fare like Raising Cain and Bitter Moon.
Raising Cain sees Brian De Palma reverting to safer genre waters after the failure of The Bonfire of the Vanities and having fun riffing on Psycho, while anyone looking for kicks in Bitter Moon, Roman Polanski’s pitch-black comedy about dysfunctional relationships fatally curdling, would be sorely disappointed. Neil Jordan’s excellent The Crying Game was sold in part on its mysterious sexy poster—raven-haired Miranda Richardson brandishing a gun—and the promise of a twist, but is really a political thriller and relationship drama, one that succeeded because and in spite of confounding its audience’s expectations.
The considerable shadow of Saturday Night Live hung over American film comedy of the 80s and 90s, and it’s not surprising that Wayne’s World was one of the most successful films of the year. The SNL offshoot, featuring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as music groupies Wayne and Garth, makes some inspired casting choices—Tia Carrera, Rob Lowe, Ed O’ Neill, Alice Cooper as himself—and an inspired choice of director in The Decline of Western Civilisation documentarian Penelope Spheeris. Like The Naked Gun 2 last month, this is a not infrequent YouTube go-to for moments like these:
Also successful was the abovementioned Boomerang, a pleasant surprise given Murphy’s star was beginning to (temporarily) dim and the film’s evidently introspective, autobiographical touches; less successful was The Distinguished Gentleman. Not an SNL cast remember but a feted host, Steve Martin co-starred with Goldie Hawn in Housesitter, intermittently amusing but elevated by its leads. Nicolas Cage began his flirtation with mainstream comedy in Honeymoon in Vegas, the premise foreshadowing the following year’s Indecent Proposal. Joe Pesci scored a lead and Marisa Tomei an Oscar for the amiable My Cousin Vinnie; also amiable was Encino Man, launching Pauly Shore and Brendan Fraser; the latter also headlined an impressively cast little gem in the school-set race drama School Ties.
Personal like Boomerang but much less successful, Barry Levinson’s Robin Williams-starring Toys was an expensive misfire: neither fish nor fowl, Levinson’s film fails as both Dr Strangelove-esque satire of the military-industrial-complex and daffy Robin Williams family film. Also poorly received was Sylvester Stallone’s second stab at comedy with Stop or My Mom Will Shoot: while I adore Oscar, even as a Stallone apologist I struggle with this one.
While Stallone dabbled in comedy, three action stars on a lower tier levelled up with Universal Soldier and Under Siege. The fun American debut of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, who would become purveyors of large-scale sci-fi mayhem as the decade unfolded, the biggest effects in Universal Soldier are ultimately its dualling Euro action leads, albeit as reanimated American soldiers. While Van Damme arguably got the bigger career bump in the heroic role, Dolph Lundgren is the MVP, showcasing a less serious side to himself which he’s leaned into increasingly with time, most memorably here. Meanwhile, Under Siege—very we-directed by Andrew Davis—levelled up Seagal and, alongside Passenger 57, helped usher in the “Die Hard on a …” sub-genre.
Elsewhere in the genre, Christopher Lambert appeared in Stuart Gordon’s futuristic prison actioner Fortress and thriller Knight Moves, while Chuck Norris played himself and attempted to expand his fan base with the family-friendly Sidekicks. Two inventive foreign-language action titles with plenty of flair, John Woo’s Hard Boiled and Robert Rodriguez’s lean and thrifty El Mariachi, served as Hollywood calling cards for their directors, pointing to new possibilities for the American action film. Both would work in Hollywood from their next pictures on and have a hand in steering Hollywood action cinema throughout the decade, though neither really fulfilled the promise of those 1992 releases.
Cronos served as a similar talent announcement for director Guillermo Del Toro, as did Braindead for Peter Jackson. Innocent Blood was a return to horror-comedy for John Landis; while better than his subsequent films of the decade, and despite his knack for the genre and skill with actors, it pales in (perhaps unfair) comparison to An American Werewolf in London. Buffy the Vampire Slayer introduced IP that would flourish in another medium; Mick Garris kickstarted his long collaboration with Stephen King on Sleepwalkers; and Brett Leonard spun a 3-page King short story into the ropey VR sci-fi The Lawnmower Man. Keeping up the “man” theme, Bernard Rose’s Candyman is a stylish urban thriller with a Phillip Glass score and strong Virginia Madsen performance, while Belgian film Man Bites Dog is an ugly mockumentary. Jennifer Beals and Kate Nelligan headline memorably titled telemovie Terror Stalks the Class Reunion, while Monster in a Box, contrary to its title, is not a horror film but a filmed Spalding Gray monologue.
Australian features released in 1992 included the abovementioned Strictly Ballroom; Geoffrey Wright’s blunt and provocative Romper Stomper, further cementing Russell Crowe’s rising status; the similarly blunt and provocative Resistance, a remote-set, politically-minded, dystopian action-thriller co-directed by Hugh Keays-Byrne, best known as the antagonist in those other famous remote-set dystopian action-thrillers Mad Max and Mad Max: Fury Road; and Gillian Armstrong’s The Last Days of Chez Nous, a women-centred family drama pragmatically shorn of surplus melodrama and elevated by Armstrong’s sensitivity to actors and excellent turns from Lisa Harrow, Kerry Fox, Miranda Otto, and Bruno Ganz.
Overseas productions from Australian directors included the aforementioned Patriot Games, Russell Mulcahy’s uncharacteristically unflashy and forgettable Blue Ice, George Miller’s heightened and unsentimental Lorenzo’s Oil, and Fred Schepisi’s surprisingly good Mr Baseball. I say surprisingly not because I mistrust Schepisi, but because for many years the film’s subject matter held little interest to me; as it turned out, Schepisi captures the circus and pageantry of its titular sport without the usual romantic blinkers, and there’s an anthropological curiosity and satirical clarity to Mr Baseball enabled, I would argue, by its Australian director and Japanese setting. The aforementioned Fern Gully and Fortress were also Australia-US co-productions, the latter shot in Queensland.
I’m aware that a degree of nostalgia pervades these pieces, but hope I don’t give off the vibe of a hapless 90s hopeless. I’ve given some side-eye to several titles above, and there are further titles from 1992 I find ridiculous and/or aesthetically objectionable, like wartime drama Shining Through, mockumentary Bob Roberts, and Medicine Man, which broke John McTiernan’s one-two-three punch from Predator through Hunt for Red October via Die Hard. However, I’m drawn to the decade as a product of it, with a built-in affinity and frame of reference for the era—and an innate comfort with the look and rhythms of its films—that’s less intuitive to other periods.
To illustrate, if I attempted a series like this on the 1980s—McWeeny and Weinberg’s turf—I would be an outsider looking in, possessing the big and obvious puzzle pieces but with much less of the connective tissue; on the flip side, if I attempted to tackle any part of the 21st century, I’d be more of an insider, but the decades—especially post-Netflix—have outpaced me. The 1990s really is the perfect nexus of immersion, attention, curiosity, rediscovery, and a contained and manageable narrative.
Having said that, each decade brings its own special sauces, and though I was a 10-year-old in 1992 seeing Beethoven and Fern Gully in theatres, one quality of the 90s that’s very apparent looking back as an adult—despite the incrementally encroaching sway of IP—is a diverse ecosystem where small, medium, and large films of different genres and types co-existed on a leveller playing field. The titles in this paragraph don’t really cohere in terms of genre or place of production, but all eked out some market profile in the ecosystem of small-to-medium-sized releases, some making money, some scoring Oscar nominations. And some were Kuffs, best described as detective Ferris Bueller: very watchable and headlined by a game Christian Slater, but probably best remembered as a VHS cover. Similarly indebted to an 80s staple was Peter’s Friends, a British Big Chill directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Kenneth and Emma’s Friends. Also hailing from Albion were Sally Potter’s Orlando, with Tilda Swinton in an important early role, and an authentically grimy Wuthering Heights pairing Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche pre-English Patient, a far cry from William Wyler’s sanitary 1939 Hollywood spin on Emily Bronte’s novel. Indochine is a sweeping but draining epic that earned Catherine Deneuve a Best Actress Oscar nomination, as did the smaller and unmemorable Love Field for Michelle Pfeiffer; while the Academy, at least in the 90s, would never deign to nominate Pfeiffer for Batman Returns, that performance and Sharon Stone’s in Basic Instinct are two iconic turns thoroughly deserving of awards consideration. Finally, White Sands was a similarly forgettable but solid thriller from journeyman Roger Donaldson, with Mickey Rourke and Willem Dafoe as onscreen sparring partners.
There was a time towards the tail end of the 1990s when I was done going to the cinema, thinking all new releases were worthless and focusing on watching older films. Why see Lost in Space when you could watch a triple bill of Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, and The Untouchables? I’ve since settled from that high horse, and looking at the final ten films of this piece, if I was an adult moviegoer in 1992 I would be very content with the accomplished films from major directors below, even those that I’m a little iffy on.
For example, I’ve never been crazy about The Player, either as a Robert Altman film or as a Hollywood satire, feeling a ring of inauthenticity that undercuts its ostensibly scathing veneer. However, on a scene-to-scene basis with its cameos and bon mots, it’s entertaining enough. I’m also iffy on John Avildsen’s The Power of One, another film wheeled into the classroom for educational reasons (i.e. racism is bad). Based on a Bryce Courtney novel, it charts a youth’s rite of passage in South Africa from the outbreak of World War II to the cusp of Apartheid. I get the appeal for Avildsen of making a historical drama on a topical subject—previously tackled onscreen in A Dry White Season and Cry Freedom—while erring to some of the sports movie conventions he’d mastered with the Rocky and Karate Kid films (the latter’s screenwriter, Robert Mark Kamen, adapted Courtney’s novel). Though Chris Feil and Joe Reid haven’t covered it on their podcast This Had Oscar Buzz, The Power of One is emblematic of that podcast’s logline/focus on “movies that once upon a time had lofty Academy Award aspirations, but for some reason or another it all went wrong”. Having said that, in a purely nuts and bolts sense, The Power of One well-directed, well-acted, and Dean Semler’s photography is expectedly gorgeous.
Of writer-director Paul Schrader’s 1990s work, Light Sleeper—another Willem Dafoe starrer—is most of a piece with his wider filmography: there’s an umbilical cord stretching from his Taxi Driver script through Light Sleeper through his recent trilogy of First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener. Similarly, Woody Allen revisits frequent ground—romance, marriage, dating, relationships, infidelity, creativity—in Husbands and Wives, one of his strongest dramas, albeit peppered with wit. The film is notable for its Cassevetes-esque shooting style and as Allen’s last film featuring Mia Farrow. It’s also probably the last uncomplicated reception afforded a Woody Allen film, though the subplot about a flirtation between Allen and Juliette Lewis is not uncomplicated.
Two outstanding historical “boy’s” films with muscular direction elevated their genres in 1992: Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-minted Unforgiven and Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. There’s a degree of care and craft discernible in Unforgiven that’s absent from prior and later Eastwood films favouring expedience of production, while Mann’s achievement on Mohicans, while obvious in hindsight, must have been revelatory to those only familiar with his modern crime fare and prior failed stab at historical storytelling with The Keep.
Men coming between sisters—blood or situational—is the theme of two other great 1992 titles: Merchant Ivory production Howard’s End, one of their finest works, where Anthony Hopkins’ widowed man of influence comes between siblings Emma Thompson & Helena Bonham-Carter and a spectre from his past creates a thorny familial situation, and Death Becomes Her, where a bespectacled Bruce Willis comes between best friends Goldie Hawn & Meryl Streep and they turn to elixirs of youth, with dire consequences, to level the competition and each other. Both acting trios are fantastic, the latter featuring a largely unsung Willis performance and further proving Streep’s then-unrecognised knack for comedy. Zemeckis’s effects-pushing black comedy is also potentially more scathing as a satire of Californian vanity than The Player, and a high-profile extension of his mischievous lower-profile work that decade producing Tales from the Crypt and launching William Castle remake shingle Dark Castle.
Finally, two features from esteemed Oscar-winning directors tackled larger-than-life characters: Chaplin and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. One’s a biopic, the other a work of fiction, but both Count Dracula and Charlie Chaplin are mythic and monumental figures. In the medium of film alone, the Count is the subject of well over 200 features, while Jonathan Rosenbaum says of Chaplin:
Chaplin doesn’t simply belong to the history of cinema; he belongs to history … Has there ever been another artist—not just in the history of cinema, but maybe in the history of art—who has had more to say, and in such vivid detail, about what it means to be poor? Conceivably Dickens … Because there is arguably no other figure in the world in Chaplin’s heyday who was more widely known and loved—not even a politician like his arch-enemy Hitler, much less another artist—discussing him as if he were just another writer-director or actor ultimately means short-changing that world and that history.
Consequently, Richard Attenborough’s lovingly and tastefully made film can’t help but be a noble failure; unlike Gandhi, which can at least trace its subject’s tangible impact on the world through a series of major events enacted in the screen story, Chaplin can only enact the events of Chaplin’s life, with his profound impact on the world inadequately conveyed by trappings of success, wealth, and adoration. At the very least, the film served as a guarantor of Robert Downey Jnr’s potential in subsequent turbulent years professionally and personally.
In contrast, Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel is exceptional and, befitting its title, the best adaptation of the material put to film, capturing the sweep, full gallery of characters, and epistolary style of the source text whilst also concocting a high romance purely for celluloid. The film also captures the modernity of the second Industrial revolution and mines its technologies as part of its own filmmaking apparatus. Yes, Keanu is dreadful and rightly pinged for his performance, but Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, and Sadie Frost are all tremendous.
For the record, some notable films of 1992 that I have not included because I haven’t seen them: Damage, Thunder Heart, Noises Off, Singles, Gas Food Lodgings, Freejack, Trespass, Captain Ron, Mr Saturday Night, Leap of Faith, Blame it on the Bellboy, The Mambo Kings, The Cutting Edge, Rich in Love, Mediterraneo, Johnny Suede, Diggstown, and Rock Hudson’s Home Movies.
If you’re still here, thanks for enduring and see you back here for 1993, when Jurassic Park roars into theatres, Holly Hunter goes mute, Harrison Ford goes on the lam, Schwarzenegger is the least action hero, and cinema declares ‘Game over’ to the Mario Bros. for the next thirty years. Til then …