Many friends and colleagues have been moaning about what a bad year 1994 was for movies, but I disagree. The main issue, I think, isn’t so much how we feel about the same movies–though there are a few differences there, including in some cases where and when we happened to see them–as it is what we saw. If you’re lucky enough to be living in Chicago, you had loads of terrific movies to see last year, new as well as old, and if you didn’t see very many of them, it’s possible that you were looking in the wrong places–where the mass media was telling you to look.

  1. Satantango. Bela Tarr’s riveting sarcastic comedy about self-interest and self-deception was the surest sign all year that personal filmmaking is alive and well, at least as long as some personal filmmakers are sufficiently gifted and original–as well as persistent enough to go the limit with their projects. In this case, Tarr spent 120 shooting days in ten separate parts of Hungary over two years to make a movie so concentrated, single-minded, and clear-headed that it puts most of Hollywood to shame. Tarkovsky is one of Tarr’s acknowledged influences, this film’s despiritualized landscapes, its exciting and singular narrative structure, its uncanny capacity to deal cogently with a couple of characters in isolation over long periods, and its gallows humor are worlds apart from the films of the late Russian director. So is its literary source, a 1985 novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (who collaborated with Tarr on the script); it still hasn’t been translated, but if it ever is, it’s the first Hungarian novel I’ll want to read. The film played here only once, at the film festival, with Tarr in attendance, and it says something about the involvement of the audience (most of whom stayed the film’s duration) that the subsequent question-and-answer session lasted about an hour.

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  1. Little Women. I’ve never read Lousia May Alcott’s 1869 novel, nor do I recall ever seeing the previous screen adaptations directed by George Cukor (1933), Mervyn LeRoy (1949) or David Lowell Rich (1978, for TV). But unlike almost every other example of mainstream, English-language fiction filmmaking that I saw last year, this film was one I could enjoy and admire without feeling I had to make excuses or apologies. Its impeccable craft (including its wonderful cast) is a virtue I’ve come to expect from the Australian writer-director Gillian Armstrong, but her lovely sense of period tied to a fresh and intelligent grasp of the American past is something a good deal rarer nowadays. (The only other commercial movie that showed this sort of flair was also made by a non-American–Alan Parker’s uneven but underrated The Road to Wellville.) If fans of Pulp Fiction (or The Age of Innocence, for that matter), scoff at Little Women’s genteel subject matter, that’s only because the sentimentality of girls’ pictures has less prestige at the moment than that of boys’ pictures. (For the sentimentality of men’s pictures, see #8 and #9 and for the sentimentality of a women’s picture, see I Like It Like That, listed under #10.) In any case, this movie, surprisingly tough-minded about its characters and what they want, isn’t fairly labeled as a girls’ movie; it also deserves to be seen by grown-ups.

And here are 35 perfectly respectable runners-up–again, not an exhaustive list, but enough to prove my point about the quality of this year’s films: Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Actor (at the Film Center), John N. Smith’s The Boys of St. Vincent (at Facets Multimedia), Bullets Over Broadway, Clerks, Cobb, Ann Turner’s goofy Dallas Doll (at the festival), Godard’s Deadly Beauty (part four of Histoire(s) du cinema, at the Film Center), Jacques Rivette’s Divertimento, Claude Chabrol’s The Eye of Vichy (at Facets), Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (at the festival), Dang Nhat Minh’s The Girl on the River (at Facets), Godard’s Helas pour moi, Godard’s JLG by JLG (at the Film Center), Ken Loach’s Ladybird Ladybird (at the festival), Louis Antonelli’s Last Day in Chicago (a one-shot at the Patio), Allison Anders’s Mi Vida Loca, Naked, Adolfo Aristarain’s A Place in the World, Chantal Akerman’s Portrait of a Young Girl from Brussels (at the festival), Robert Redford Quiz Show, Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (which had a respectable run both here and elsewhere after Gerima resourcefully went outside the usual channels and venues and simply rented theaters in order to show it), Michael Haneke’s Seventh Continent (at the festival and at Facets), Russell Mulcahy’s The Shadow (especially for its fabulous sets), Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption, Ake Sandgren’s The Slingshot, Starting Place (Robert Kramer’s affecting documentary about Vietnam today, at the festival), Eric Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter, Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (at the festival), Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made (Sam Fuller holding forth about the unmade film to Jim Jarmusch, courtesy of Mika Kaurismaki, at the festival), Marcel Ophuls’s The Troubles We’ve Seen (at the festival), Joseph Ramirez’s Viridian (at the Film Center), Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was…, Sara Driver’s When Pigs Fly (at the festival), Alexander Sokuruv’s Whispering Pages (at the festival), and Andre Techine’s Wild Reeds (at the festival).