The 10 Best Movies of 1996, Ranked – Collider

1996 was a diverse year for film. While not quite as memorable as 1994 or 1999, it still featured an impressive mix of box office titans and indie gems. Commercially, Independence Day, Mission: Impossible, and Twister raked in big returns. For viewers with more niche tastes, directors like Alexander Payne, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Wes Anderson burst onto the scene with electric debuts.

The finest films of the year range from musicals to slashers, gritty dramas to black comedy. Many of them have aged remarkably well, and remain engaging and vivid almost three decades later.

Waiting for Guffman is a mockumentary following the residents of the fictional town of Blaine, Missouri as they prepare for their 150th-anniversary celebration. The town's amateur theater group, led by the enthusiastic but clueless Corky St. Clair (Christopher Guest), who also directs), is determined to put on a show that will put Blaine on the map.

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The ensemble cast features several frequent Guest collaborators including Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Fred Willard, and Parker Posey, who are all on top form. It makes for a hilarious satire of small-town life and the eccentric characters who inhabit it.

Based on the Michael Ondaatje novel, The English Patient tells the story of a critically burned man (Ralph Fiennes), and his memories of his past. As his nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) takes care of him in an abandoned Italian villa, the patient begins to reveal his history to her.

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The film also features notable performances by Kristin Scott Thomas as the patient's lover Katharine Clifton and Willem Dafoe as a thief named Caravaggio. It won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Anthony Minghella, and Best Supporting Actress for Binoche. It's a sweeping, beautifully filmed epic and possibly Fiennes's best performance.

Billy Bob Thornton wrote, directed, and starred in this drama about Karl Childers, a man with intellectual disabilities who was committed to a mental institution for murdering his mother and her lover when he was a child. After spending most of his life in the institution, Karl is released into the world. He befriends a young boy named Frank (Lucas Black) and his mother Linda (Natalie Canerday) and begins to build a new life for himself.

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As Karl becomes more involved in their lives, he must confront his past and the demons that still haunt him. It works because of Thornton's committed, authentic performance. A sleeper hit, Sling Blade catapulted Thornton to the forefront of Hollywood.

Paul Thomas Anderson's debut follows John (John C. Reilly), a down-on-his-luck gambler who meets a mysterious older man named Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) in a Reno diner. Sydney takes John under his wing and teaches him how to gamble and make a living off of it. Along the way, they encounter Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a cocktail waitress with a troubled past, and Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), an acquaintance of Sydney's with a violent streak.

As the plot unfolds, the characters become entangled in a web of deceit and double-crossing. While it only hints at the powers Anderson would unleash on later projects, Hard Eight is still a stylish and gripping exploration of the seedy world of gambling with a cast of three-dimensional characters.

"You had me at hello." Tom Cruise stars in this romantic comedy-drama as a successful sports agent who has a crisis of conscience and writes a mission statement advocating for fewer clients and a more personal approach to the business. After being fired from his job, Jerry sets out to start his own agency and enlists the help of Dorothy Boyd (Rene Zellweger), a single mother who shares his ideals.

Along the way, Jerry and Dorothy fall in love but face numerous obstacles as they try to balance their personal and professional lives. Cruise and Zellweger have great chemistry, but the real star is Cuba Gooding Jr., who won an Oscar for his performance

After helping to create the slasher film back in the 70s, Wes Craven revolutionized the genre yet again with this self-aware horror starring Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, a high school student who becomes the target of a mysterious killer known as Ghostface. Along with her friends, including Tatum (Rose McGowan) and Randy (Jamie Kennedy), Sidney tries to unravel the identity of the killer and stop them before it's too late.

Scream is unusually funny for a horror of its time, and delights in subverting genre tropes. It spawned a mega-franchise that continues to dominate the box office today and more than deserves its place in the horror pantheon.

Controversial filmmaker Lars von Trier directed this drama featuring Emily Watson as Bess McNeill, a young woman who falls in love with Jan (Stellan Skarsgrd), an oil rig worker. After Jan is injured on the job and left paralyzed, Bess becomes convinced that God is calling her to perform sexual acts with other men in order to heal Jan. As she becomes more and more desperate to save her husband, Bess begins to lose touch with reality and faces increasing opposition from her religious community.

Breaking the Waves is a challenging film, but it works thanks to Watson's raw and fearless performance. Cinematographer Robby Mller also deserves praise. Edgar Wrightdescribed him as a "wizard" and "a true poet of the screen."

Secrets and Lies is a powerful drama from the master of realism Mike Leigh. Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) is a working-class woman in her 40s who discovers that she was adopted and sets out to find her birth mother. Along the way, she meets her estranged brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) and his wife Monica (Phyllis Logan), and the three of them must confront painful family secrets.

As with most of his movies, Leigh's direction is understated and naturalistic, and he expertly captures the everyday rhythms of life and the complexities of family dynamics. The result is an empathetic portrait of ordinary people struggling to come to terms with their past and find a way forward.

While not his first film, this black comedy-drama is the project that put Danny Boyle on the map. Ewan McGregor is Mark Renton, a young heroin addict living in Edinburgh who is trying to kick his addiction and start a new life. He and his friends, including Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) and Spud (Ewen Bremner) take part in various harebrained criminal schemes as they struggle to find meaning and purpose in their lives.

Trainspotting is a visceral movie that captures the anarchic spirit of the 1990s counterculture. McGregor's performance as Renton is compelling, and Boyle's direction is innovative and stylish. He infuses the film with a frenetic energy that perfectly captures the hedonism and nihilism of the characters.

Among the Coen brothers' most beloved projects, this black comedy stars Frances McDormand as Marge Gunderson, a pregnant police chief in a small Minnesota town who investigates a series of murders connected to a botched kidnapping scheme. She's joined by William H. Macy as Jerry Lundegaard, a car salesman who orchestrates the kidnapping, and Steve Buscemi as Carl Showalter, one of the criminals involved in the scheme.

Suspenseful and darkly funny, Fargo influenced many crime films that would follow, not to mention its own TV spinoff. The highlight is McDormand, whose quirkiness, sharp wit, and accent rightly won her the Academy Award. She has innumerable iconic lines, like "Sir, you have no call to get snippy with me. I'm just doing my job here."

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The 10 Best Movies of 1996, Ranked - Collider