VHS Nostalgia

Quentin Tarantino’s legendary debut, a cornerstone of ’90s independent cinema, reshaped the way characters speak in crime films and redefined cinematic cool for generations of cinephiles and filmmakers to come. — Six criminals with aliases, all complete strangers to one another, are hired for a diamond heist. When the robbery is ambushed by the police, the gang is forced into a chaotic escape under a hail of gunfire. Regrouping at their warehouse hideout, the shaken survivors, certain they were set up, try to uncover the traitor in their midst. — Nomination for Grand Jury Prize | Sundance Film Festival | 1992 FIPRESCI Award | Toronto International Film Festival | 1992 Bronze Horse for Best Film | Stockholm Film Festival | 1992 Best Director | Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival | 1992 Best Screenplay | Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival | 1992

One of the most notorious films of the ’90s, initially torn apart by critics but recently reclaimed as a cult landmark: a brazen, unapologetic satire of the American Dream through the unflinching gaze of Paul Verhoeven. — A mysterious young drifter calling herself Nomi Malone hitchhikes to Las Vegas, where she lands a job as a stripper and begins clawing her way to the top of the showgirl hierarchy by any means neccesary.

For many, Steven Soderbergh’s best film, a haunted noir of guilt and legacy featuring Terence Stamp in a career-defining performance and an unconventional approach to editing: a mystery film unlike any other. — Fresh out of prison, an ex-con heads to Los Angeles determined to find out who murdered his daughter. He quickly realizes he is utterly out of place, unable to grasp the culture surrounding him. His investigation leads him to the doorstep of a powerful man, and forces him to confront his own failures as a father.

In one of the finest Philip K. Dick cinematic adaptations, Paul Verhoeven makes inventive use of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s formidable screen presence and, with the crucial contribution of visual effects and makeup artists, delivers some unforgettable images. — In the distant year 2084, Mars has been colonized by humanity. A construction worker on Earth purchases an implanted augmented-reality experience, only to find himself entangled in a far-reaching adventure. — Special Achievement Award for Visual Effects | Oscars | 1991 Nomination for Best Sound | Oscars | 1991 Nomination for Best Sound Effects Editing | Oscars | 1991

Emir Kusturica’s America is a place where everyone lives inside a private fantasy: Jerry Lewis sells Cadillacs and Faye Dunaway builds a flying machine. The shoot ran for a year, which is why Johnny Depp’s hair keeps changing length, and the surreal ride comes with a soundtrack you won’t forget. — Axel catalogues fish for a naturalist in New York and likes his life quiet, until a messenger arrives to take him to Arizona for his uncle’s wedding. The wedding is just an excuse. What the family really wants is for Axel to take over the business, which happens to be a Cadillac showroom. — Special Jury Prize | Berlin International Film Festival | 1993 Audience Award | Warsaw International Film Festival | 1994

“Whoa!” What else is there to say? A turbo-charged cult comedy that defined Keanu Reeves’ career and was embraced equally by slackers and cinephiles (and slacker cinephiles alike). A wildly improbable time-travel romp that turns the ultimate chore - “homework assignment” - into a riotous sci-fi adventure. Slackers of the world, we salute you. — Two endearingly dim slackers (Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter) enlist the help of a time-traveling guide in a desperate bid to pass their history class. What follows is a hilariously absurd journey through time, where amid a string of increasingly unlikely scrapes, the only true constant is friendship.

In Los Angeles, even the highway signs have strong opinions about your love life. Steve Martin writes and stars in a delightful satire of the absurdities of modern living, relationships and the alienation of the metropolis. — With the help of a talking highway sign, an eccentric TV meteorologist sets out to win the heart of an English newspaper reporter, who is herself struggling to make sense of the peculiar world of early-’90s Los Angeles.

Inextricably tied to the VHS era and the dawn of private television in Greece, Ted Kotcheff’s farce remains, even today, the very definition of a cult guilty pleasure. — Two employees discover that their boss is dead just before a weekend at his villa. Afraid they’ll be blamed, they decide to pretend he’s still alive, lugging his body from party to party, as a cascade of misunderstandings and escalating dangers unfolds around them.

One of the best gialli of the 1990s came out of Spain, from a 24-year-old Alejandro Amenábar who had never made a feature. He cast Ana Torrent (“The Spirit of the Beehive”) as a student who can’t tear her eyes from the screen, in a horror about violence and tapes that should never exist. — Ángela is writing her thesis on violence in cinema and needs material to work with. Somewhere on her own university’s grounds she stumbles on a videotape of a girl being tortured to death, and the footage isn’t staged. The girl was a student there too. — Best Film | Goya Awards | 1997 Best New Actor (Fele Martínez) | Goya Awards | 1997 Best New Director | Goya Awards | 1997 Best Original Screenplay | Goya Awards | 1997 Best Editing | Goya Awards | 1997 Best Sound | Goya Awards | 1997

With a sensual atmosphere and a vein of jazz-infused melancholy, this poignant portrait of American nightlife turns music into a language of desire, disillusionment, and fragile hope. Michelle Pfeiffer has perhaps never been more radiant, grounded, and alluring than she is here - a performance that rightfully earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. — Two brothers travel from venue to venue, performing piano in small-time clubs. When they decide to bring in a singer to refresh their act, her arrival unsettles the delicate balance, both on stage and within their relationship. — Nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Michelle Pfeiffer) | Oscars | 1990 Nomination for Best Cinematography | Oscars | 1990 Nomination for Best Film Editing | Oscars | 1990 Nomination for Best Original Score | Oscars | 1990 Best Actress in a Leading Role (Michelle Pfeiffer) | Golden Globes | 1990 Best Sound | BAFTA | 1991

One of the most iconic cult horror films of the early 21st century, a fierce and wickedly entertaining allegory about the violence of girlhood, reinventing the werewolf myth with bold imagination. — Teenage sisters Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald live on the fringes, morbidly obsessed with death. When Ginger is bitten by a werewolf on the night of her first period, she undergoes a horrifying transformation that mirrors adolescence and its uncontrollable, destructive hormonal surges, putting their pact to the test: “Forever together.”

In a satire eerily prophetic of the social media age, Gus Van Sant transforms a true story into a razor-sharp, ironic meditation on the relationship between image and morality, employing hybrid storytelling, a mockumentary structure, and an iconic performance by Nicole Kidman. — A woman trapped in a failed marriage dreams of becoming a famous TV presenter. When her husband stands in the way of her ambitions, she manipulates a group of teenagers to eliminate him - convinced that nothing can come between her and fame. — Best Actress in a Leading Role (Nicole Kidman) | Golden Globes | 1996 Nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Nicole Kidman) | BAFTA | 1996

Master provocateur Paul Verhoeven directs one of the most iconic thrillers in Hollywood history: Sharon Stone at her most indelible, Michael Douglas drenched in sweat and paranoia, an unforgettable whodunit steeped in sex, blood, and betrayal - and an ice pick that earns its place in the pantheon of cinematic murder weapons. Absolute cinema. — A bloodied ice pick, a white silk scarf tied to a bedpost, and crumpled sheets bearing witness to a torrid night are all the clues San Francisco detective Nick Curran has to go on. As the investigation deepens, his suspicions turn to the alluring Catherine Tramell, a novelist whose crime fiction bears an unsettling resemblance to the murder itself. — Nomination for Best Film Editing | Oscars | 1993 Nomination for Best Original Score | Oscars | 1993 Nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Sharon Stone) | Golden Globes | 2001 Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1992

Mickey Rourke is a broke private eye hired to find a singer who went missing after the war, in Alan Parker’s cult film steeped in New Orleans voodoo. Robert De Niro plays the devilish client whose fingernails grow a little longer with every scene. Rourke should never have taken the job. — Harry Angel is a small-time private eye in 1955 New York who will take any work going, so when a millionaire nobody has heard of asks him to find the singer Johnny Favorite, who vanished without a trace, he says yes. The money is good, but the trail runs somewhere hellishly dangerous.

What creates a monster? An iconic portrait of modern toxic masculinity, Mary Harron’s razor-sharp film catapulted Christian Bale to superstardom and became an indelible cultural touchstone, bringing Bret Easton Ellis’ cult novel to the screen. — In 1987 New York, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is handsome, young, and successful - a Wall Street golden boy. But beneath his immaculate public persona lurks a violent and sadistic alter ego, as Bateman leads a second life at night, committing murders that blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy. — Nomination for Best Film | Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival | 2000

One of the ultimate cult hits of the home video explosion, Vincenzo Natali’s (“Splice”) nightmarish enigma presents a seemingly unsolvable puzzle of death and survival. Who will find the exit? — A group of people wake up and, without knowing why, find themselves trapped together inside a deadly maze. They soon realize that each of them holds a key to unlocking it, as a mathematical formula for escape gradually reveals itself. Their survival hangs by a thread as they begin turning against one another. — Best Canadian First Feature Film | Toronto International Film Festival | 1997

Antoine decided as a boy that he would marry a hairdresser, and when he finally does, years later, he never leaves the salon again, his whole life shrunk to being her devoted husband. Patrice Leconte celebrates the dream of another life and quietly grieves for it too. — Antoine walks into a small salon in a French town for a haircut and asks Mathilde, the hairdresser, to marry him. Two weeks later, when he comes back for another trim, she says yes. He made up his mind as a boy, watching a woman at work in a different salon, and now he has settled onto the red sofa in hers with no plans to go anywhere. — Nominated for Best Film Not in the English Language | BAFTA Awards | 1992 Nominated for Best Film | César Awards | 1991

Carpenter (“The Thing”) thought his finished film was terrible and reshot a third of it, and it became a horror classic with scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis. A century ago a small town did something the sea has come back to settle, and the fog takes its time, which is the worst thing it could do. — On the beach, children huddle round a campfire as an old fisherman tells them about a ship that went down a hundred years ago and what became of the people on board. A piece of driftwood washed up by the sea starts to glow in a child’s hand, and out over the bay the fog is coming in.

Jean-Jacques Annaud (“The Name of the Rose”) tells this story with barely a human word: an orphaned cub, a wounded male and two hunters who have come into their valley. What it builds towards isn’t the fight but the fragile hope that people and the wild could live side by side. — A bear cub is out hunting for honey with his mother when a rockslide kills her and leaves him alone on the mountain. He latches on to a huge Kodiak bear who wants nothing to do with him. Down in the valley, two hunters have come for a big male, and it’s the same bear the cub now refuses to leave for a moment. — Nomination for Best Film Editing | Oscars | 1990 Nomination for Best Cinematography | BAFTA Awards | 1990 Best Director | César Awards | 1989 Best Editing | César Awards | 1989

At the crossroads of history and desire, Régis Wargnier crafts an epic, Academy Award–winning foreign-language melodrama, set against the twilight of French colonial rule in Southeast Asia, which earned Catherine Deneuve a César Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. — In a French colony in Indochina, a powerful plantation owner raises a Vietnamese princess as her own daughter. When both fall in love with the same man, their personal conflicts intertwine with the political upheavals leading to the country’s independence. — Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 1993 Nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Catherine Deneuve) | Oscars | 1993 Best Foreign Language Film | Golden Globes | 1993 Nomination for Best Film Not in the English Language | BAFTA Awards | 1994 Best Actress (Catherine Deneuve) | César Awards | 1993 Nominated for Best Film | César Awards | 1993