Let me be bold from the get-go and just say that Mike Figgis’s 1997 sort-of-melodrama One Night Stand has the one of the best mugging scenes ever committed to film. The movie’s central hetero couple (who are by no means the movie’s central couple) are walking through a Manhattan parking lot at night. Played by Wesley Snipes and Nastassja Kinski, they are both very beautiful and married to other people and do not yet know they are going to sleep together; they need some extra prodding. And so, from out of the shadows struts a louche, laughing Eurotrash couple in gaudy colored scarves, waving unlit cigarettes and tottering like casualties from a bad art party that nevertheless had plenty of coke to go around. The man leans in to ask for a light as the woman brandishes a knife, and suddenly Snipes and Kinski are at the mercy of these two weirdos, who get genuinely, intimately dangerous (in slow motion!) before Snipes fights them off and the traumatized pair finally make it back to the hotel to commit the adultery promised by the film’s title. It’s as if performance artist Ann Liv Young and some random friend of hers wandered into a movie released by the same studio that put out Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Don’t you dare tell me not to be sentimental about the ’90s.

People my age are especially nostalgic for that decade right now because of too many superhero movies or whatever, but for some reason Mike Figgis doesn’t seem to be included in our current collective panegyric to this particular “moment” in cinema. Who watches Leaving Las Vegas anymore? Or, for that matter, Timecode, which a critic friend of mine recently told me was a key early digital film that he has never managed to get all the way through (he teaches digital film). Jesus, remember The Loss of Sexual Innocence? Figgis isn’t forgotten, exactly, but there’s something about his particular concerns—both formally and thematically—that feels understandably passé; the wall-to-wall smoothish-jazz scores he composed for most of his movies don’t help, nor does the stubborn thread, running through all of them, that foregrounds and valorizes the tortured, misunderstood art-man. These movies were once considered very cool in some quarters, and on rewatch can seem very labored in their efforts to be cool. But damn, did I think they were cool when I was a kid, and One Night Stand—which, upon its release, got terrible reviews and didn’t make any money even though I recommended it to all my friends—might hold up better than any of them.

Based on a treatment sold by Joe Eszterhas during the height of his scuzzy erotic-thriller run, One Night Stand is very much not a Joe Eszterhas movie, in that it is pretty relaxed and not all of its characters are psychotic, though its constellation of complicated desire runs parallel to some of the high-pitched hard-R stuff that was also being released at the time. The plot concerns a successful director of commercials named Max (played by Snipes) who comes to New York one weekend to do some business and see an old friend named Charlie, who’s just been diagnosed with HIV. Charlie is played by Robert Downey Jr. at the height of his puckish, fuck-it-all phase, pre–prison and Iron Man; it is their relationship that is the film’s central one, a relationship that clearly included a physical component before Max left the New York theater world to sell out in L.A. But the One Night Stand proper—the one that we see—is with Kinski’s Karen, an art dealer who picks up Max by saying “You have a black heart” to him when she notices that his pen has leaked through his shirt. Max’s plane gets delayed, they go to a concert and get assaulted, and then they tentatively consummate their attraction in an unsweaty love scene that is (or was at the time) surprising in its tenderness.