The Best Films of '89--The Critics' Choices

By SHEILA BENSON

Dec. 24, 1989 12 AM PT

If you were to do a caricature of the 1989 film year it would be pear-shaped, narrow at the top, broadening slightly in the middle, with all the weight at the bottom. For a while, as we slogged our way through “Gleaming the Cube,” “Her Alibi,” “Who’s Harry Crumb,” “Pet Semetary,” “Loverboy” or “Fletch Lives,” it was a grind. There would never be light at the end of the tunnel and no way to frame the same discouraging words, over and over.

Then slowly, the more interesting films began to surface, films that were clearly made with some purpose behind them other than to tread dutifully in the footsteps of a proven moneymaker. Some of these were “Powwow Highway,” “High Hopes,” “Little Vera,” “84 Charlie Mopic;” plus a few more that were pure enjoyment: “36 Fillette” and “Some Girls.”

The thaw may have taken longer to arrive than almost any year of the past 10, but it finally came mid-year, with “Dead Poets Society,” “When Harry Met Sally . . . ,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “A Taxing Woman Returns,” and “Parenthood.”

Then in this last three months, we’ve had a deluge: “Breaking In,” “The Story of Women,” “Sidewalk Stories,” “Mystery Train,” “Little Mermaid,” “Mala Noce,” “True Love,” “The War of the Roses,” “Blaze,” “Triumph of the Spirit,” “Glory,” and “Driving Miss Daisy,” enough to turn a mediocre year into a very creditable one indeed.

What 1989 may have proved is that stars are nice insurance, but if your film is compelling enough, a great ensemble can carry it. Think of “Do the Right Thing,” “Sidewalk Stories,” “True Love,” “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” or “Distant Voices, Still Lives.” On the other hand, a film may make its own stars: thus, James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Peter Gallagher and Laura San Giacomo from “sex, lies and videotape”; Kelly Lynch, taken seriously at last after “Drugstore Cowboy”; Casey Siemaszko and Sheila Kelley in “Breaking In”; Natalia Negoda in “Little Vera,” or Kenneth Branagh in “Henry V.”

If there was a hopeful sign to be read from among the litter of these used ticket stubs, it’s the astonishingly high percentage of fine, first-time directors on the scene this year. In fact, more than half of the list that follows are debut films, and many of those are by writer-directors, an alliance that seems to underline a personal stamp.

So without more preamble, let us get to that list:

1. “Enemies, A Love Story” How do some of us escape from under the shadow of profound calamity, while others founder? Isaac Bashevis Singer, the master storyteller, probes the question, and Paul Mazursky, in the best film of his career, gives it form, deep understanding and a cast so good as to seem the only one possible: Anjelica Huston, Ron Silver, Lena Olin and Margaret Sophie Stein. Amazing that this material can be as dryly humorous as this, but it is--oh, how it is.

2. “Distant Voices, Still Lives” The most painfully personal of this personal crop, Terence Davies’ memory film takes a World War II childhood spent under the domination of a terrifying father in an unremarkable Liverpool row house, and makes mesmerizing poetry of it. And just as you think you know every move he’s likely to make, Davies creates a scene of such shocking beauty that it takes your breath away.

3. “Do the Right Thing” Spike Lee’s behind-the-scenes tour of the sources of a racial conflagration in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy is the coming-of-age announcement of an already assured talent. Weaving the threads of his story in and around this long-standing racially mixed community, Lee creates three generations of characters, each drawn with a brilliant ear for speech--like the Corner Men or the owner and proprietor of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria--and caught with a sinuous, inventive camera. With all deference to the film that follows, this is the one that wuz robbed at Cannes.

4. “sex, lies and videotape” Steven Soderberg has made the funniest, the wisest and certainly the most compelling film yet dealing with the young, contemporary upward-bound scene. Half of its hypnotic power comes from its gaze at the very private lives of its two couples; the other half comes from MacDowell, Spader, San Giacomo and Gallagher. The work is wickedly assured, puncturingly witty.

5. “My Left Foot” If director Jim Sheridan had been even the least sentimental in his story of the Irish writer, painter and poet Christy Brown, who had only the use of one foot in a body given over to cerebral palsy, this might have been one of those treacly “triumph of the human spirit” cliches. Instead, it is a tight, tough-minded movie, blazing with grand performances, the most remarkable of which is Daniel Day-Lewis’ as Christy--ribald, demanding and triumphant.

6. “Drugstore Cowboy” Fascinating what director Gus Van Sant has done in this account of an amazingly dense Seattle-based gang of dopers. He manages to create the warm, stupid euphoria that is the drugged state, without for a second making it alluring. Funny and brilliantly acted, especially by Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch, it’s also a tragic love story told with beautiful visual style by one of cinema’s mainstream post-modernists.

7. “The Fabulous Baker Boys” One of the wittiest and most sensual of the year’s stash of comedies, this one was given extra panache by the fabulous Bridges boys and the screen’s current siren, Michelle Pfeiffer. Steve Kloves is a genially uninsistent director, pushing nothing, sure that we get all the nuances of his cheerfully unhousebroken film about the pangs and bonds of brotherhood and the sort-of-awful world of cocktail lounge piano, and we certainly do.

8. “Henry V” Actor/director Kenneth Branagh’s “Henry” is Shakespeare for today’s world. It has a king who is intelligent, canny and cruel when he needs to be, and a post-Falklands view of warfare as muddy, reeking carnage that will all come to the same end eventually, no matter who carries the victory today. Stocked with the cream of British theater, this is a young, nervy production, clearly done on a budget but able to soar when it must. You might wish Branagh’s palette were a little less liver-colored, but perhaps only if, like me, the brilliant blues and whites of the Olivier version were burned into your memory at an impressionable age.

9. “Roger & Me” Lively, mean-spirited fun in a good cause awaits you as Michael Moore’s documentary crew pursues the man whose company shuttered Moore’s hometown of Flint, Mich., when it closed down the General Motors plants. You’d make a fatal mistake if you took Moore for the rube he pretends to be, and you may wince at his treatment of his “cast,” especially the bunny lady, but Moore certainly has a nice anarchic eye and a highly developed sense of the ridiculous.

10. “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” You don’t have to be a child or a little mad to wallow in the sumptuous invention of Terry Gilliam’s epic fairy tale. When you hear that threadbare phrase, they don’t make movies like that any more, “Munchausen” is the that. Gilliam’s frame of reference is like an unabashed art history lesson and you are not going to have a more romantic moment this year than the sight of the Baron and Venus herself, waltzing around and around and finally up into the air, circling the walls of a semi-ruined castle. This, and every other bit of splendor, is magic for every age.

PETER RAINER

1. Casualties of War

2. Vampire’s Kiss

3. Batman

4. My Left Foot (Ireland)

5. Enemies, A Love Story

6. The Fabulous Baker Boys

7. Drugstore Cowboy

8. Roger & Me

9. Do the Right Thing

10. Let’s Get Lost

KEVIN THOMAS