The Best Movies of the '90s

Quentin Tarantino's second feature took the Palme d'Or in 1994 and the original-screenplay Oscar in 1995, turning an $8 million budget into $213 million worldwide. Its influence on the decade's crime pictures is total, and it still plays like a party. The adrenaline needle slammed into Mia Wallace's chest is the hardest cut between laughter and panic the nineties produced. Imitators chased that chronology-shuffle for years and never caught it.

Martin Scorsese turned Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy into the decade's foundation stone — half the crime cinema and prestige TV that followed is chasing it. Joe Pesci took the 1991 supporting-actor Oscar as Tommy DeVito. The single-take Copacabana tracking shot, Henry steering Karen through the kitchen to a front-row table, sells the entire seduction of the life in under three minutes.

Frank Darabont's Stephen King adaptation — from the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption — grossed a feeble $29 million in theatres, then cable and home video made it the most rewatched drama of its generation. Influence is modest; rewatchability is off the chart, and our tiebreaker rewards exactly that. Andy emerging from the sewer pipe into the rain, arms spread under the lightning, pays off two decades of patience honestly.

Steven Spielberg refused a salary for this one, calling it blood money, and it swept seven Oscars including Best Picture at the 1994 ceremony. Shot almost entirely in black and white, it lets one red coat carry the argument: Schindler watching the girl drift through the Kraków liquidation never needs a single raised voice. The hardest film here to rewatch, and the least optional.

Jonathan Demme's 1991 thriller is still the only one of its kind to sweep the Big Five Oscars — picture, director, actor, actress, adapted screenplay. Clarice's first walk past the cells to Lecter's glass wall sets the grammar: straight-into-camera close-ups that turn every conversation into an interrogation of you. The night-vision finale gets the clips; that first meeting is what the decade's serial-killer films kept photocopying.

Bullet time was shot on a ring of still cameras fired in sequence and interpolated until motion ran at an effective 12,000 frames per second; the rooftop dodge it produced was imitated to death within eighteen months. The Wachowskis' 1999 breakout won four technical Oscars on a $63 million budget. Influence pushes it this high; the kung fu and Hugo Weaving's sneer keep it fun on a tenth pass.

Frances McDormand's pregnant police chief won Best Actress at the 1997 ceremony, and the Coens took the screenplay Oscar the same night. Minnesota-nice wrapped around a squalid kidnapping proves a perfect container for comedy and dread at once. Marge finding Gaear feeding Carl into the woodchipper — and responding with disappointed decency instead of horror — is the film's moral compass compressed into one snowy shot.

James Cameron spent what was then the largest budget ever assembled, roughly $100 million, and ILM needed a team of 35 for the T-1000's five minutes of liquid-metal screen time. All four of its 1992 Oscars were technical, which undersells how sturdy the chase construction is. Watch the chrome cop walk through the asylum bars without breaking stride and try not to gasp anyway.

David Fincher fought New Line to keep his ending and won; the desert delivery that closes the film pushed a grim procedural to $329 million worldwide. Seven deadly sins as murder method could have been schlock — Darius Khondji's rain-rotted city and Morgan Freeman's tired patience make it literature. Mention the box in any room and watch somebody flinch on cue.

Every computer-animated feature on earth descends from this 1995 release, the first ever made entirely in CG, and John Lasseter collected a Special Achievement Oscar for it in 1996. It sits on our Pixar ranking too; it earns this slot because the decade's whole animation economy pivots on it. Buzz's flight around the bedroom, looping the ceiling fan before landing with style, remains eighty seconds of pure showing off.

Spielberg's dinosaurs grossed over $914 million on the original run, taking the all-time record from E.T. and holding it until Titanic. Stan Winston's animatronics cut into ILM's computer shots so cleanly the seams still hold today. Concentric rings in a water glass — made by plucking a guitar string under the dashboard — announce the T. rex breakout better than any roar. Dread rendered as pure physics.

Hayao Miyazaki's forest war briefly stood as the highest-grossing film in Japanese history before Titanic arrived. Of its roughly 144,000 hand-drawn cels, he personally drew or retouched close to 80,000. Ashitaka crossing the forest of the gods while the little kodama click and tilt their heads settles any argument that animation for adults needed either apology or computers. Also on our Ghibli ranking; here it stands for 1997 itself.

Michael Mann rebuilt his own 1989 TV movie L.A. Takedown into this cops-and-crews epic, hiring ex-SAS sergeant Andy McNab to drill the cast until the downtown Los Angeles shootout sounded like a war report. De Niro and Pacino over coffee — their first scene together on screen — plays as two professionals studying the mirror. Every heist list wants it; the scale is what keeps it here.

Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel became a theatrical disappointment that then sold six million DVDs inside a decade — the clearest proof that the disc era built cults. David Fincher opens with a 90-second digital pullback from inside the narrator's brain, and that shot quietly states the terms: nothing here ever leaves one skull. The soap, the splices, the IKEA nesting instinct — all of it still lands.

Danny Boyle shot Irvine Welsh's 1993 novel for £1.5 million and handed British film its jolt of the decade. Ewan McGregor lost two stone to play Renton, then went head-first into the Worst Toilet in Scotland — the production used chocolate, which consoles nobody. Heroin comedy that refuses both glamour and sermon, cut to a soundtrack that sold the film twice over.

Written and shot inside a three-month pause in the making of Ashes of Time, Wong Kar-wai's double love story was meant as quick money and became the most imitated art film of the decade. Faye Wong blasting California Dreamin' behind the Midnight Express snack-bar counter, deaf to every customer, is pop cinema distilled. Cop 223's tins of pineapple, each stamped 1 May, run it close.

Jeff Dowd, a real producer the Coens knew, became the Dude, and America eventually built festivals around him. A shrugging reception and $18.7 million in its 1998 run looked like failure; the Library of Congress shelved it in the National Film Registry in 2014. The knockout dream where stars gather into an overhead nightscape of Los Angeles, then the full Gutterballs bowling number, is the Coens at their most gleefully unnecessary.

Krzysztof Kieślowski announced this final film as his retirement and was dead within two years, which makes its ending unbearable in hindsight. It earned three Oscar nominations — director, original screenplay, cinematography — at the 1995 ceremony. The Channel ferry disaster that closes the trilogy, seven survivors lifted from the storm with Valentine among them, is as near to grace as the decade's cinema gets.

Mathieu Kassovitz took Best Director at Cannes in 1995 for twenty hours in the lives of Vinz, Hubert and Saïd, shot in black and white after the crew spent three months living in the Chanteloup-les-Vignes estate. Vinz posturing as Travis Bickle in his bathroom mirror indicts a whole cinema of borrowed toughness. Hubert's falling-man refrain — so far, so good — has aged into prophecy.

Roberto Benigni directed himself to the 1999 Best Actor Oscar, one of three it took that night, after the 1998 Grand Prix at Cannes; worldwide it grossed $230 million. Guido's game — a thousand points wins a real tank, crying or asking for your mother loses them — is either the decade's most moving conceit or its most indefensible. We land on moving. The vote below exists to overrule us.