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1 THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS After years of schlock horror movies, the word nightmare has been devalued-we hear it and think, thrills and chills. A true nightmare movie, though, does more than just scare us or give us the cold creeps. It can also be a dark fairy tale for adults, a vehicle for recapturing our childlike wonder in the face of the primal unknown. So it is with Jonathan Demme's great thriller, the most magical act of storytelling I saw all year. Adapting Thomas Harris' best-seller about a rookie FBI investigator on the trail of a serial killer, Demme spins a shimmering web of dread and suspense. Jodie Foster plays Agent Starling as a brave, exploratory, life-size heroine: It's her desperate need to know-to uncover the true face of evil-that propels the movie forward. And Anthony Hopkins' Dr. Lecter is that face in all its disturbing, seductive glory. As the glittery-eyed genius psychopath whose malevolence is a direct extension of his intelligence, Hopkins-witty, charming, monstrous-gives the most memorable performance of the year, creating a timeless portrait of the demonic made human. 2 CAPE FEAR Another superb thriller, this time from Martin Scorsese, who transforms the 1962 Cape Fear into a hypnotically engrossing exercise in high anxiety. Scorsese blends cinematic wizardry and guilt-driven moral melodrama the way Hitchcock did: He makes them one and the same.
3 PARIS IS BURNING Why is a documentary about black and Latino gays who compete in drag balls one of the best movies of the year? Because Jennie Livingston's revelatory film uncovers a world that's like a media-saturated fun-house-mirror reflection of our own. And also because these young men, who turn their entire lives into a floating costume party, are memorable company- some of the wittiest, dreamiest, most resonant characters the movies have given us all year.
4 DEAD AGAIN After his triumphant 1989 version of Shakespeare's Henry V, the young British actor-director Kenneth Branagh did something truly daring: He had the audacity not to take himself seriously-to make a knowingly preposterous thriller, one that mocks its own hokiness even as it keeps you riveted. Is that scene at the end with the scissors Too Much? Of course. That's the joke. The work of a true showman, Dead Again is a reminder that movies are really intricate games of make-believe.
5 MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO Though not as seamless as his 1989 Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant's road movie about two young hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) drifting through the Pacific Northwest is delicate, forlorn, haunting; it casts its own spell. The movie isn't really about being a gay prostitute. It's about being lonely and rootless, spiritual states that River Phoenix-in an extraordinary performance-embodies with startling purity.
6 CITY OF HOPE The lost movie of the year. John Sayles' teeming urban epic is his best work since 1983's Baby, It's You, yet perhaps because of its searing bleakness (not to mention its impersonal title and ad campaign), almost no one saw it. Sayles interlocks the lives of 36 characters in a decaying New Jersey metropolis. The film is crackerjack entertainment-simply as a narrative machine, it's amazing-yet what powers it is Sayles' anger, intelligence, and clear-eyed despair over an era in which institutionalized corruption has trickled into every crevice of urban life.
