The Best Films of 1990--Four Views

1--”Landscape in the Mist.” Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos’ austere, heartbreaking road movie about two illegitimate children and their search for a mythical father: the kind of film that often slips past viewers the first time around, only to re-emerge years later as a classic.

2--”GoodFellas.” A movie of wild cinematic and dramatic pyrotechnics about crime with the wraps off: Martin Scorsese takes the real-life history of sub-Mafia informant Henry Hill and sets the screen ablaze.

3--”Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams.” Probably the most personal work ever by the Japanese cinematic master, eight dreams in which he shares his fears, artistic disquiet and overpowering hatred of war.

4--”The Travelling Players.” Angelopoulos again: his 1975 classic about a group of itinerant actors, whose peregrinations in time and across the Greek landscape during World War II and its aftermath, symbolize the schisms, betrayals and tragedies of an entire era.

5--”Life and Nothing But.” Bertrand Tavernier crafts a great old-fashioned love story for stars Philippe Noiret and Sabine Azema--as well as a stirring anti-war drama, set in the post-World War I era, when identifying the dead became as devastating as consoling the survivors.

6--”The Godfather Part III.” Flawed as it certainly is, Francis Coppola’s under-written and over-flamboyant capstone to the Corleone family saga rounds out one of the American cinema’s finest sustained achievements.

7--”Wild at Heart.” David Lynch’s deadpan-hip film noir --with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as “Elvis and Marilyn in hell”--is full of scarringly memorable, surreally scary images of love and madness on a road to nowhere.

8--”Miller’s Crossing.” Set in the heyday of ‘30s urban crime and written in a marvelous pastiche of Dashiell Hammett’s style, Joel and Ethan Coen’s macabre comedy of love and murder in the mob had pungent mood and lots of juicily quotable dialogue.

9--”Time of the Gypsies.” The most flamboyant and ambitious work of the prodigious young Yugoslavian filmmaker Emir Kusturica: a chronicle of the Italian underworld and the amoral trade in Gypsy children.

10--”Vincent & Theo.” Robert Altman’s keen, unsentimental bio-movie on Vincent van Gogh and his art-dealer sibling Theo: an often startling portrait of the volatile relationship between art and commerce, brother and brother.