Posts Tagged ‘ 1995 ’

With its story and its screenplay written by none-other-than James Cameron, Strange Days is director Kathryn Bigelow (K19: The Widowmaker) vision of a beautiful dystopian Los Angeles on the precipice of the turn of the millennium where violence is everywhere, the police are out in force like something in Bosnia or Northern Ireland with full-on riot gear and automatic weapons.

Martin Scorsese‘s fantastic follow-up to 1990′s Goodfellas, again teaming up with Nicholas Pileggi, who is also again both the author of the book and the writer of the screenplay.  Many of the faces of Goodfellas return here to Casino to tell the true story of how the mafia took Las Vegas from a small-scale military stop-over and turned it into the money-making machine that it is today–and how they screwed it all up on the way.

The best of the best, here are presented the ten best movies about crime which are based on true stories.  They are listed in alphabetical order and each is generally a quite good movie, but what makes them especially interesting, and in some cases, very, very terrifying, is that this is not complete fiction; in fact, most of what is being portrayed really did happen…

1.  Blow 2001 – Directed by Ted Demme

Starring Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz, Franka Potente, Paul Reubens, Jordi Mollà, and Ray Liotta, this Ted Demme directed picture tells us the story of George Jung (Depp) who goes from being the son of a lower-middle class plumber (Liotta) to drug dealer, to drug trafficker, to basically cocaine king of the United States, to inmate, to parolee trying to get back into his daughter’s life, and finally to permanent inmate.  The movie is heart-wrenching and the kind of movie men will in which men watching will tear up at the end because George finally realizes that the advice his father gave him long ago, when his father’s business was in trouble, was the truth, and George has realized it too late to do anything about it.  It is as tragic as it is brilliant with fantastic acting, a great cast and the never-changing excellence in direction of Demme.

Terry Gilliam‘s 1995 Twelve Monkeys went largely unnoticed by most of the cinema-going public, but contains one of the best performances of Brad Pitt‘s career and one of the best and most original performances in, at that time, Bruce Willis‘ career.  Also starring Madeleine Stowe, Twelve Monkeys is the story of a man named James Cole (Willis), a convict in the future who is drafted as a volunteer to go back in time to help restore his present-time.  Forgive me if this gets confusing, but it’s confusing to watch too, in a rewarding way.

Let me begin by saying that yes, there are many additional indie movies which were great in the 1990s. This is a list of what I consider to be the best ten of the decade, ranked according to their greatness. You’re welcome to disagree with titles on this list, omissions, rankings, or anything else, but choices and rankings had to be made and I made them. That said, here they are….