Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)
A vapid Californian housewife willfully develops crippling allergies to have some sense of identity. She joins a cultish New Age commune where the primary villain is a gay man with AIDS ("His perspective is incredibly vast"). Foreshadows the totalitarian California liberal identity of today based on made-up trend allergies and various self-help replacements for true religion.
Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994)
An erotic thriller focused on the dangers of women in the workplace and the feminist-driven sexual harassment legislation mania of the 1980s and 90s, Disclosure has Demi Moore as a corporate femme fatale who games the system and "rapes" Michael Douglas, whom no one believes because he is a man. It concludes with a climactic virtual reality showdown that feels like an apt visual representation of the bureaucratic claustrophobia of #MeToo.
Storytelling (Todd Solondz, 2001)
Storytelling is a blistering 80 minutes of contempt that uncannily predicts the future we're living in. A pink-haired college art thot lies about rape to soothe her conscience after pursuing her black professor for leftist bragging rights. An upper-middle-class Jewish family lives in a continual state of inherited Holocaust victimhood while obliviously exploiting their maid, whose son is on death row for rape ("When you love someone and they don't love you back and you do something about it.") This would be called alt-right if it came out now, none of these actors would do it, and it would never be released by a major studio. Solondz's abject contempt for victims is what makes his best work truly transgressive.
Citizen Ruth (Alexander Payne, 1996)
Payne was a brilliant satirist for his first two films before lapsing into Oscar-friendly solipsism. Though Citizen Ruth is finally a pro-abortion movie, even the attempt at even-handed mockery regarding this issue makes CR feel like it is from a completely different Hollywood than the one that now churns out nothing but radicalized anti-white propaganda. This was the time of South Park centrism, where one had the luxury of pretending to consider both sides of the political system equally crazy. Quaint.
American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000)
I can't think of another movie that has aged as well as American Psycho. In 2000, fans of the book were disappointed that they were given a comedy instead of extreme violence, but this is why it seems so modern. It took balls to give a performance as OTT comedic as Bale gave here, and talent to maintain absolute control in every frame. The Who's Who supporting cast (who would not touch this material in 2018) is uniformly excellent. AP is also a cinematic unicorn--a movie adeptly directed by a woman which does not have an obvious feminist overlay applied to the source material. Reductive critiques of AP go, "These people are rich and materialistic, lol they are bad," but the unapologetic white male milieu depicted in this film seems imminently desirable now and contributes to the film's popularity among young right-wing men. The 80s seen here are a paradise of masculine beauty, rich scents, and white marble modernist interiors. Were it made now there would be obligatory scolding all-knowing women and POCs signaling virtue and polluting the satire.
