From ‘Gremlins 2’ to ‘Blair Witch’ — these 10 movies shaped the ’90s

It’s hard enough to make a list of the 10 best films of any given year, let alone a decade. Still, such exercises are typically easier — and more interesting — with the benefit of real hindsight, the great leveller against hype and recency bias. That said, this list — made up of one title per year from the 1990s — isn’t meant to represent greatness anyway.
A few of the movies on it are arguably masterpieces, and a few are most definitely not. Some of them are obvious picks and some are out of deep left field. What they all have in common — in their different and distinctive ways — is that they retrospectively and collectively illustrate something about their specific social, political or cultural moments. Taken together, they tell the story of where movies were in the ‘90s — and where they were heading.
A good rule of thumb for aspiring satirists: if you’re going to bite the hand that feeds, you might as well gnaw it all the way off. Few studio movies in history have had a more insatiable appetite for destruction — or deconstruction — than Joe Dante’s spectacularly self-reflexive followup to his 1984 horror comedy, in which the titular critters move from their small town haunt to the big city, taking Manhattan even more zealously than the Muppets. Nearly every scene pokes fun at the essential superfluousness of franchise sequels, while the villain is a brain-dead, vertically integrated Donald Trump/Ted Turner hybrid who’s so malevolent he wants to colourize old back-and-white movies. How dare he?
John Singleton was all of 24 years old when he wrote and directed this evocative, tough-as-nails coming-of-age fable, which drew on his childhood experiences of growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s. For extra street cred, Singleton cast the controversial NWA word-slinger Ice Cube in a key role, rounding out a superb ensemble cast. At a moment when many in the industry were still skeptical about the commercial potential of films geared toward Black audiences, Singleton’s debut not only allayed their concerns but created a template for an entire cycle of gritty inner-city dramas.
“You gonna bark all day, little doggy? Or are you gonna bite?” The characters in Quentin Tarantino’s exuberantly nasty heist picture don’t just talk — they snarl and howl and whimper their way through a screenplay seemingly composed almost entirely of four-letter words. Few filmmakers have ever been so in love with the sound of their own voice; that so many viewers were similarly smitten is the stuff paradigm shifts are made of. QT would go on to make better movies in the ‘90s and beyond, but “Reservoir Dogs” paved the way, and remains its maker’s leanest, meanest entertainment, punctuated by one of the most sadistic needle-drops in cinema history.
For about 10 years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Michael Douglas was an unlikely Hollywood alpha, surfing the zeitgeist in a series of thrillingly sleaze-coated roles. His performance in Joel Schumacher’s action drama “Falling Down” is less famous than “Wall Street” or “Basic Instinct,” but the movie remains a fascinatingly reactionary artifact: an attempt to explore (and selectively empathize) with white male alienation and rage. With its hothouse atmosphere and scenes of racially charged violence — much of it perpetrated by Douglas’ nameless anti-hero — “Falling Down” plays like a malign West Coast cousin to Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” piling on provocations until it collapses under its own weight. In retrospect, it was a signpost pointing toward an embrace of aggressive political incorrectness as a coping mechanism in an America forever chasing some vanished and imaginary greatness.
Sometimes, the Academy gets it right: when a movie is as shamelessly middlebrow as “Forrest Gump,” it’s obviously the correct choice for Best Picture. Essentially a fable of the meek inheriting the earth — but not before scoring touchdowns in college, serving in Vietnam, and investing in Apple stock — the movie simplified seismic moments in 20th-century history and solidified Tom Hanks as America’s sweetheart, transforming a gifted comic actor into a hollow-eyed emblem of aw-shucks decency, posing against the sunset to a selection of hand-picked period radio hits. Critics swooned, audiences cheered, and, with its mix of state-of-the-art technique and slack-jawed awe, the film out-Spielberged the man himself — for better or for worse.
Four years before “The Matrix” mainstreamed millennial anxieties about our increasingly virtual sense of reality, Kathryn Bigelow’s brutal and brilliant thriller plunged headfirst into plug-and-play metaphysics. As a street hustler peddling downloaded memories, Ralph Fiennes gave the most underrated performance of his career, sneering his way through a tech-noir nightmare that ruthlessly critiqued voyeurism, misogyny and police brutality without sacrificing kinetic excitement.
The world kept getting smaller at the end of the 20th century, and Olivier Assayas’ giddy, delirious “Irma Vep” addressed the spectre of globalization through the lens of cinephilia. Set-up: a prestigious but diminished French auteur hires a hotshot Hong Kong actress (Maggie Cheung as herself) to star in his remake of a silent serial. Backstage chaos — and a strange slippage between fantasy and reality — ensues. A modern art-house classic, the film endures both in its original incarnation and Assayas’ recent HBO remake, which updated its industry satire for the era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Several of the most compelling pop-cultural characters of the ‘90s were serial killers: think Hannibal Lecter, Patrick Bateman, and “Se7en”’s John Doe, all of whom proved charismatic devil’s advocates for a nihilistic world view. Scariest of all, though, was the malevolent villain of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo-set procedural “Cure” — a master manipulator who hypnotizes (ostensibly) innocent civilians into doing his dirty work. Not only was it arguably the scariest movie of the decade, it was also one of the most trenchant — a mediation on free will that skilfully implicated viewers in its terrors.
The definitive American cult movie of the late ‘90s, and a great example of how sometimes it takes a while for such reputations to coalesce. In retrospect, “The Big Lebowski” was doomed to be (mostly) DOA with audiences and critics given its proximity to “Fargo” — the most visceral and humane movie Joel and Ethan Coen had made to date. By contrast, its followup was eccentric, arcane and deceptively impenetrable — a political allegory slyly relitigating the idealistic cultural clashes of the ‘60s in a nihilistic present tense. If you got it, you got it, and over time, more and more people have come to recognize the movie’s sublime brilliance as a profane slapstick noir. The Dude and his movie abide.
The last year of the 20th century famously offered an embarrassment of riches, cinematically speaking: you could just as easily list “Fight Club,” “Magnolia,” “Eyes Wide Shut” or “The Matrix.” Ultimately, though, the biggest game-changer was a micro-budget horror movie that used negative space to mop the floor, commercially speaking, with every CGI spectacle in its path. Whether you thought the hand-held imagery and narrative ambiguity of “The Blair Witch Project” made it a minimalist masterpiece or a clever exercise in fraud, the film represented a dual landmark in both found-footage esthetics and viral marketing strategies, introducing the internet as the best way to sell a movie to a media-savvy, logged-on generation.