They told us what to watch then, now it's my turn.
Welcome to the first installment of what is sure to become the biggest thing on the ‘net since it stopped making those NIN-inspired up dial up noises. This will be an ongoing series of articles in which I recommend a film from the decade that gave me the love of the medium. The nineties were by no means the golden age of cinema, but it was a pretty damn good era to come of age in. I will try to find titles a lot of people may have missed, but I’ll also be encouraging you to take a second look at movies you may have dismissed the first time around while hopefully helping you discover some bargain bin gems. Our first nineties notable was directed by a man who made his name acting cool in the eighties.
Before Sean Penn was milking the Academy for a yearly performance nomination, he made his directorial debut with an extremely savvy, underrated film called The Indian Runner. The few films he’s directed since (The Crossing Guard, The Pledge and Into the Wild) have generally been well received as mature, realized projects, but I still feel this often overlooked first film is his strongest. The year was 1991, and the barely 30 year old actor demonstrated that he was a lot more than just that, and was in fact very well versed in cinema, its past masters as well as its capacity for artistic expression.
