Photograph by Peter Kapak.

One of my most vivid memories of my early life as a filmgoer is of cutting school in ninth grade (sorry, Mum) on a snowy Friday to go see Paul Thomas Anderson’s early magnum opus (and still my favorite of his films), Boogie Nights, in 1997. My sister and I, not yet 17, bought tickets to Flubber and then sneaked into another theater drawn in by the promise of seeing our infamous hometown antihero, Mark Wahlberg, in a new kind of role, but probably not prepared for the riot of style and formal daring that awaited us.

Riding the T back home, gazing out at dreary Boston, I was still dazzled by, and almost afraid of, that film’s cool glide, the way Anderson so keenly understood the physics of the medium. He really reveled in the motion of motion pictures, and in so doing seemed to fling something open, baring a vast landscape of jangly possibility. Of course, Anderson was referencing older masters—Scorsese and De Palma among them—but for me, at 14, it all seemed excitingly fresh, a heralding of a new era of daring, confident auteurship designed for my hungry generation.

When thinking of the last 25-ish years in American movies, so many indelible images crowd my mind. Julie Delpy doing a lazy dance to a rambling Nina Simone song as she tells Ethan Hawke he’s going to miss his plane in Richard Linklater’s lo-fi masterpiece Before Sunset (2004). A lens splashed with blood as it makes its way, foot by agonizing foot, up Omaha Beach in Steven Spielberg’s game-changing war movie Saving Private Ryan (1998). A boy floating halfway between the water below and the sky above in Barry Jenkins’s seismic, best-picture-winning Moonlight (2016).

Top, from New Line Cinema; bottom, from Gramercy Pictures, both from the Everett Collection.

These last two and a half decades have produced an abundance of such moments, when cinema did its real searing, imprinting itself on us as if we had lived these scenes ourselves. The medium has had some help in that: this is the first generation of movies whose legacies have been near-immediately solidified by the Internet. As Americans immigrated online, film iconography was carried beyond stills in movie magazines and trailer glimpses to become its own widespread vernacular, memed and YouTubed and disseminated as common language.

And yet, despite that mass-market availability, these movies have instilled themselves in deeply personal ways, specific to individual experience. The films of 1995 and beyond awed, uplifted, wrecked, and inspired me throughout my turbulent teen years and the long blur of post-adolescence. What luck it was that, as my movie consciousness dawned, American independent film was basking in an unprecedented heyday.

Where so much indie filmmaking before had been ragged, here were films that were elegant in their weirdness.

The Coen brothers, already darlings of the art-house circuit, had their first mainstream hit with Fargo (1996), setting them on the course to become among the most influential directors of their era. There have been few better models of how to maneuver in a changing world than Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, whose sighs and perky humor in the face of boggling grimness never feel sick with cynicism. The Coens may have veered into less optimistic territory since Fargo, but Marge’s light has long been a beacon of pragmatism and decency, shining through national turbulence with a comforting plainness. (Indeed, there was the Fargo poster to greet me when I staggered back to my dorm room on September 11, in my second week of college.)

Fargo and Boogie Nights were followed by Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998) and then Sofia Coppola’s dreamy-dreadful The Virgin Suicides and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, two 1999 films that glowed with idiosyncratic gloss. These films mixed studied form with an aching, experimental hipness. Where so much indie filmmaking before had been ragged, out of necessity or deliberate alt intent, here were films that were elegant in their weirdness. They enjoyed the kind of mass-media attention once reserved for big studio films, because independent film was increasingly attracting big-name talent and because studios were beginning their gradual devolution into franchise factories.

Of course the studios’ retrenchment from prestige, loss-leader filmmaking has critically destabilized an already volatile industry. But this shift has also given independent films and filmmakers thrilling territory to claim. Some directors learned to deftly pivot between the two poles, like Ang Lee, who made a superhero film (2003’s bizarre Hulk) and then, two years later, changed Hollywood optics forever with Focus’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), introducing a thin strand of gay love and intimacy into the hallowed canon. I first saw that bitter tragedy in the middle of my initial year of post-college independence, swooning at Gustavo Santaolalla’s plaintive strings and figuring the world suddenly a more progressive, more open, more understanding place.

Photograph by Peter Hapak.

It was, in some small ways. But in so many others, the Bush years marked the beginning of a global existential horror still so painfully realized today. That feeling of cosmic unease and despair was made acutely palpable in 2006’s Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s then timely and now horribly prescient grand mural of civilization going to seed, propelled by environmental cataclysm and xenophobia. After seeing the film, a friend and I walked down Second Avenue in Manhattan in a dazed silence. Blocks later, we found a quiet bar where I declared over several glasses of cheap red wine that Cuarón’s film had finally solved the meaning of life. The meaning, of course, is more life. Which was maybe an oddly rosy sentiment to extract from such a dark film, but there it was, a hope amid the ruin.

A year or so later, the housing bubble burst with a terrible crack, and an already ailing national psyche suffered another serious wound. In that light, movies seemed to get more jittery, more concerned with the bleak mechanics of things than with broad sweep. Sure, Avatar existed, but for all the money it made, it has not endured in the cultural consciousness—or, at least, my consciousness—the way, say, the harrowing epidemiology of David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) has, or the grinding scramble of Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010).

As Obama ascended in America, so too did a vital discourse about social justice and the ways the film industry has systematically failed marginalized people. Hollywood is a big ship, and is slow to change course. But there have at least been some attempts to widen cinema’s gaze beyond that of straight white men. Personally, I’ve been thrilled to catch a glimpse of the new world that Brokeback Mountain promised flicker into being, with a little boom in queer cinema arising in recent years, maybe kicked off by Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011), a sad and intimate film that I regularly return to as a sort of text on gay discourse. Nothing in my life has ever felt quite so sexy and articulate as the talk-heavy scenes in that jewel of a movie, but it’s still been a valuable touchstone.

This is the first generation of movies whose legacies have been near-immediately solidified by the Internet.

Of course, Weekend isn’t a Hollywood film, which is sort of what we’re focusing on here. The fact is, Hollywood has been slower to include gay stuff, especially studio fare. Weekend also is about two cis white men, and to revere it as a sort of paragon of gay cinema ignores broader intersectionality, the kind that made Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, about a young gay black man coming to grips with his identity, so thrilling to see, though in some senses also a little heartbreaking, as that excitement was partly born of how rare a film it was. It sated something, but also stoked a hunger for more.

Those individual moves forward are good, and important, but they are only parts of what one hopes is a broader institutional advancement, one in which Get Out (2017) does not seem like so much of an outlier in a few years’ time, and Love, Simon (2018) someday seems like just another studio rom-com about a gay kid. That latter film depressed me for days, not because it’s bad (it’s not), but because I realized how lonely it seemed out there, and how nice it might have been to not have to do quite so much to place myself inside a teen comedy from my era.

Top, by David Bornfriend/A24; bottom, from Sony Pictures Classics, both from the Everett Collection.

Not all advancement need happen in the art house, though of course that is still where you’ll find the most diversity of voices. What’s heartening to some and unsettling to others is how studios are now plucking directors from those relative fringes. Chloé Zhao had one of the best-reviewed films of 2018 with The Rider, a compassionate docudrama about a ravaged rodeo cowboy, and is now on tap to direct a movie for Marvel. Hollywood has recognized the power of authorship, which may lead to more interesting blockbusters. But that farm-leaguing could also redirect, or derail, the course of a filmmaker’s ordained career, swallowing them up in big-budget expectations just as their true art finds traction.

Still, twisting and contorting as the film industry may be—losing more and more ground to television with each passing year—from certain angles, cinema still looms large and glittering. I, for one, remain rapt as ever, as entranced by the lovely closing credits of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017) as I was by the ending sequence of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000)—similarly determined to keep audiences in their seats—nearly 20 years ago. As life has changed, so much of it now staged on the fraught battleground of the Internet, movies have proved a necessary haven for both retreat and reinforcement, enlightenment and diversion.

There’s been a pageant of varied and rewarding splendor since this magazine first dedicated an issue to an often vexing and capricious industry. It’s a business, and an art form, still rife with problems, be they of representation or access or eroding attention span. But as I sit here and assess a quarter-century of American film (with some Australian and British co-productions thrown in), an uneasy wealth presents itself.

To say we’ve been lucky would imply that we’d be greedy to ask for more, an idea quickly negated by the dearth of movies made by and about people of color, by women, by the queer community, by people with disabilities. Despite those egregious lacks, though, there has been a lot of good stuff, so many arresting and complicated movies that probably couldn’t have existed without the industry quakes of the 1990s.

I’ve been thrilled to catch a glimpse of the new world that “Brokeback Mountain” promised flicker into being.

Back to particular indelible moments. Two spring to mind here at the end of this ramble. The first is recent. It’s standing in the thin, crisp air of Telluride, Colorado, after a screening of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), trying to explain to my boss, with quivering voice and teary eyes, how big and holistic and thorough an experience the film is. How complete its sensory immersion, how rapturously it reminds me that movies born of this fractious era can challenge and expand one’s view of the world while also binding us closely to it with rich, genuine empathy.

The second standout moment is a little older, and involves one of the great clichés of 21st-century cinema. But! It’s cliché for a reason. How teased so many of us have been for 15 years now, wondering what it is that Bill Murray’s character whispers to Scarlett Johansson’s at the end of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). To be fair, I’m maybe haunted less by that unknowable last line and more by the company I had when I first watched the film, on a couch in a ratty college apartment on the edge of Boston.

The friend who sat next to me, both bored and enrapt by Coppola’s languid vision, is gone now. She’s since slipped into the silvery whatever that lies past life. I can’t think of the movies of my adolescence without thinking of that evening with a now dead friend: the shared tension of seeing something different, of inching closer to the screen, of being tantalized with a secret while invited in by a film’s murmuring intimacy.

From Focus Films/Everett Collection.

I don’t remember what my friend and I did with the rest of our night—we probably went to some theater majors’ party to dull our brains. But I do remember the immediate sensation after, because it’s one I’ve felt so many times since—albeit without her. The lights flickering back on, a film’s spell lingering in the aftermath. Eyes open anew, turning to a fellow fan, glad to have so much to talk about.

Full ScreenPhotos: 1 / 14 Photos: Your Passport to Vanity Fair’s 25th Annual Hollywood Cover Shoot Previous Next Henry Golding, John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicki, Tessa Thompson. Chadwick Boseman. Timothée Chalamet. Nicholas Hoult and Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki. John David Washington. Saoirse Ronan. Henry Golding. John David Washington and Tessa Thompson. Chadwick Boseman being captured by film. Yalitza Aparicio. Rami Malek. Timothée Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan. Elizabeth Debicki. Tessa Thompson with members of the Los Angeles Fire Department.

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