Sightlines · reception
How The Ice Storm was received
1997 · Ang Lee · The Ice Storm on Sightlines
The arc
It won Best Screenplay at Cannes in 1997, then underperformed at the box office and was shut out entirely at the Oscars — Sigourney Weaver's snub still gets brought up. Now it's Criterion-canonised and routinely ranked among the best American films of the '90s.
What’s debated
The perennial split: is its glacial restraint devastating emotional precision, or is the film too chilly and detached to actually feel — and is this, not Brokeback or Crouching Tiger, secretly Ang Lee's best?
Its footprint
This is the movie that made the '70s 'key party' a permanent cultural reference point — the image of car keys in a bowl is shorthand for suburban swinger malaise largely because of this film. It's also become the go-to 'sad Thanksgiving movie' for people who find the holiday melancholy.
Where it stands
A canon climber turned Letterboxd seasonal ritual — every November it resurfaces as the anti-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving film, with a cast (Ricci, Maguire, Wood, Holmes) that makes it catnip for '90s-kids-all-grown-up rewatches.
Did you know? Katie Holmes made her film debut here, in a cast of pre-fame kids — Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood were still years away from Spider-Man and Frodo.