Schindler's List
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1993
More people have understood the Holocaust through this film than through any other: Spielberg took no fee, shot it in black and white, and gave the last word to the survivors.
★ 9.7
Browse by time · decade
1990s
1990 – 1999
Showing 107 films from the 1990s
Goodfellas
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1990
Every gangster film of the last thirty years is arguing with this one: Scorsese made the life so intoxicating for an hour that the comedown lands like a physical event.
★ 9.6
Pulp Fiction
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
1994
Young filmmakers were allowed to sound different after this one: Tarantino let two hitmen argue about hamburgers for ten minutes, and an entire decade of American cinema followed.
★ 9.5
The Silence of the Lambs
Directed by Jonathan Demme
1991
Hopkins is on screen for a fraction of the film and won an Oscar anyway: Demme shot the interviews straight down the lens so Lecter looks directly at you.
★ 8.9
The Shawshank Redemption
Directed by Frank Darabont
1994
It lost money in cinemas and has sat at the top of IMDb's ranking since 2008: a prison friendship, told patiently, that pays off better than almost anything.
★ 8.9
The Matrix
Directed by The Wachowskis
1999
Action filmmaking divides neatly into before and after this one: the Wachowskis fused Hong Kong wire work with a philosophy seminar's premise and everyone spent five years copying it.
★ 8.9
Saving Private Ryan
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1998
War films look different since the first twenty minutes of this one: Spielberg put the camera in the surf at Omaha Beach and veterans left cinemas unable to speak.
★ 8.8
Fargo
Directed by Coen Brothers
1996
Marge Gunderson is the warmest character the Coens ever wrote, and the reason this one lasts: a kidnapping goes wrong in the snow and she is the only calm person in it.
★ 8.8
Toy Story
Directed by John Lasseter
1995
First feature film animated entirely on computers, and the start of Pixar's extraordinary run: it holds up because underneath the toys it is a sharp story about jealousy.
★ 8.7
Unforgiven
Directed by Clint Eastwood
1992
Eastwood spent thirty years building the myth this film takes apart: no western has been harder on the pleasure of violence, or on the men who deal it out.
★ 8.7
Fight Club
Directed by David Fincher
1999
Twenty-five years of argument have still not settled what it is actually saying: Fincher made consumer despair look genuinely thrilling, which is either the joke or the problem.
★ 8.6
LA Confidential
Directed by Curtis Hanson
1997
Modern film noir does not get better than this: three Los Angeles cops with nothing in common, and a plot so tightly wired people rewatch it to follow the connections.
★ 8.5
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Directed by James Cameron
1991
Computer effects became believable overnight: Cameron spent more money than anyone ever had, put a liquid metal killer on screen, and every studio in town immediately started writing checks.
★ 8.2
Beau Travail
Directed by Claire Denis
1999
Denis turned Melville's Billy Budd into something closer to dance than to drama: Foreign Legionnaires drilling in the Djibouti heat, all bodies and sun and things nobody will say.
★ 8.2
Groundhog Day
Directed by Harold Ramis
1993
The title became a phrase people use without knowing the film: a comedy about repeating one day turned into the most quietly serious argument about how to live.
★ 8.2
Jurassic Park
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1993
The moment the first dinosaur appears is the moment audiences stopped trusting their own eyes: Spielberg mixed puppets and computers so well that the seams still do not show.
★ 8.2
Heat
Directed by Michael Mann
1995
Police forces train on the shootout and every heist film since has copied it: Mann also got De Niro and Pacino into one diner booth for the first time.
★ 8.1
The Big Lebowski
Directed by Coen Brothers
1998
It underwhelmed in cinemas and then grew a festival, a religion and a vocabulary: the Coens built a Chandler plot around a man whose only ambition is getting his rug replaced.
★ 8.1
Close-Up
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
1990
Kiarostami blurred documentary and fiction so completely that nobody has quite untangled it since: a man caught impersonating a director, with everyone involved playing themselves on camera.
★ 8.1
Seven
Directed by David Fincher
1995
The studio wanted the ending changed and Fincher refused, and studios then spent a decade trying to reproduce the atmosphere: a procedural so bleak the rain never stops.
★ 8.1
Princess Mononoke
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
1997 · Japan
It held the Japanese box office record until Titanic arrived: Miyazaki staged a war between an iron town and the forest gods and refused to name a villain.
★ 8.0
Boogie Nights
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
1997
Anderson was twenty-seven and announced himself completely: a San Fernando Valley porn crew who treat each other like family, filmed with far more warmth than the subject suggests.
★ 7.8
The Truman Show
Directed by Peter Weir
1998
Psychiatrists named a delusion after it: a man begins to suspect his whole town is a set and everyone in his life is paid, and 1998 had no idea.
★ 7.6
The Lion King
Directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff
1994
Still the highest grossing hand-drawn film ever made: Disney sent a young cub into exile with a Shakespeare plot, and the opening sunrise raises the hair every time.
★ 7.5
Hoop Dreams
Directed by Steve James
1994
Its exclusion from the documentary Oscar shortlist caused enough outrage that the Academy changed its rules: five years with two Chicago teenagers, and it is barely about basketball.
★ 7.5
Reservoir Dogs
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
1992
Tarantino arrived fully formed with a heist film that never shows the heist: everyone is in a warehouse afterward, suspecting everyone else and talking far too much.
★ 7.3
Beauty and the Beast
Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise
1991
The peak of the Disney Renaissance, and the moment computers earned a place in hand-drawn animation: the ballroom sequence still looks like nothing anyone had done before.
★ 7.3
Dazed and Confused
Directed by Richard Linklater
1993
Nothing happens and that is the entire point: Linklater catches the last day of school in 1976 so exactly that people who were not there remember it anyway.
★ 7.3
The Usual Suspects
Directed by Bryan Singer
1995
Almost nobody guesses where it is going the first time: five criminals meet in a police lineup, and the whole story reaches you secondhand from an interrogation room.
★ 7.3
Trainspotting
Directed by Danny Boyle
1996
It made a heroin film feel like a night out without ever pretending the squalor was not there: Boyle cut the whole thing to a soundtrack that never sits still.
★ 7.3
Forrest Gump
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
1994
People still argue about whether it is sentimental or sly, and both readings hold: a simple man walks through forty years of American history without ever noticing.
★ 7.2
Titanic
Directed by James Cameron
1997
For twelve years no film made more money anywhere on earth: Cameron built the ship, sank it more or less in real time, and made a generation cry in public.
★ 7.2
The Thin Red Line
Directed by Terrence Malick
1998
Malick came back after twenty years and made a war film about grass, light and the voices in men's heads: Guadalcanal, filmed as though the island were the subject.
★ 7.2
Good Will Hunting
Directed by Gus Van Sant
1997
Two unknown actors in their twenties wrote it for themselves and it worked: a janitor at MIT can solve anything except himself, and Robin Williams sits opposite him.
★ 7.1
La Haine
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz
1995
France spent a year arguing over it and the government screened it for ministers: twenty-four hours with three young men in a Paris suburb after a riot.
★ 7.0
Toy Story 2
Directed by John Lasseter and Ash Brannon
1999
Pixar scrapped the whole film and rebuilt it in nine months, and it came out better than expected: the song about being outgrown is what people remember.
★ 7.0
Miller's Crossing
Directed by Coen Brothers
1990
The Coens wrote it in the voice of a 1930s crime novel and never break character once: a hat blowing through woods is the famous image, and nobody explains it.
★ 6.9
Magnolia
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
1999
Three hours, nine storylines, and a last act nobody sees coming: Anderson made the most ambitious American film of the nineties and dared it to collapse under itself.
★ 6.8
The Sixth Sense
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
1999
The ending changed how an entire generation watched films, and it is genuinely unguessable: a child psychologist takes on a boy who is frightened of something very specific.
★ 6.8
Casino
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1995
Scorsese's Las Vegas is a machine for taking money and the film shows you every gear: three hours of narration, costumes and a system that eats everyone inside it.
★ 6.8
Boyz n the Hood
Directed by John Singleton
1991
Singleton came straight out of USC film school and filmed the neighborhood he grew up in: South Central rendered as a place where a father raising his son is itself a full-time job.
★ 6.8
Glengarry Glen Ross
Directed by James Foley
1992
The best-acted film about work ever made: Mamet's salesmen speak in a rhythm nobody actually uses, and an ensemble of stars took deep pay cuts for the chance to say the lines.
★ 6.7
Rushmore
Directed by Wes Anderson
1998
Wes Anderson's style arrives fully formed here, and so does the melancholy Bill Murray everyone loves: a prep-school boy who runs every club and fails every class declares war on a millionaire.
★ 6.7
JFK
Directed by Oliver Stone
1991
A film that changed federal law: the outcry over Stone's conspiracy case pushed Congress to pass the JFK Records Act, and the editing that sells it remains the most aggressive in American film.
★ 6.6
Thelma and Louise
Directed by Ridley Scott
1991
Callie Khouri's script did something no American road movie had done: put two women in the car and let the country outside it turn hostile, while the friendship becomes the only reliable thing.
★ 6.6
The Straight Story
Directed by David Lynch
1999
The strangest thing in David Lynch's filmography is this: a G-rated Disney picture in which an old man drives a riding lawnmower from Iowa to Wisconsin to reach his estranged brother.
★ 6.5
The Fugitive
Directed by Andrew Davis
1993
The train wreck was staged for real because it was cheaper than faking it: a surgeon convicted of his wife's murder runs, and Tommy Lee Jones's marshal is better company than the hero.
★ 6.4
The Last of the Mohicans
Directed by Michael Mann
1992
Michael Mann's most romantic film ends with twelve near-wordless minutes carried entirely by the score: Daniel Day-Lewis learned to live off the land for it, and the frontier looks genuinely unmapped.
★ 6.4
Edward Scissorhands
Directed by Tim Burton
1990
A boy with blades for hands is brought down from a gothic mansion into a pastel suburb: Tim Burton's most personal fairy tale, with the Danny Elfman score he calls a career favorite.
★ 6.4
12 Monkeys
Directed by Terry Gilliam
1995
Gilliam built it from La Jetee, a French short told in still photographs: a prisoner is sent up from an underground future to trace a plague, and nobody in 1990 believes a word.
★ 6.3
Election
Directed by Alexander Payne
1999
Reese Witherspoon has never been better used: a high-school student council election becomes a study of ambition and resentment, and Payne refuses to let a single character off the hook.
★ 6.3
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Directed by Anthony Minghella
1999
Nothing else captures the pull of wanting somebody else's life this well: Minghella fills the Italian coast with sunlight and good clothes, and lets a young man's envy curdle in plain sight.
★ 6.3
Braveheart
Directed by Mel Gibson
1995
Historians have been correcting it for thirty years and nobody cares: Gibson staged medieval battle with a physical brutality nothing before it had, and the speeches still work on an audience.
★ 6.3
Leon: The Professional
Directed by Luc Besson
1994
Natalie Portman was twelve and had never acted: Besson pairs her with a hitman who waters his houseplant like a dependent, and the film has been argued about ever since.
★ 6.3
Clueless
Directed by Amy Heckerling
1995
Amy Heckerling relocated Jane Austen's Emma to Beverly Hills without losing a thing: she collected the vocabulary from real teenagers, the film sent it back amplified, and the heroine is never the joke.
★ 6.3
Aladdin
Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker
1992
Robin Williams improvised for hours and the animators drew to whatever he gave them: the Genie is still the fastest thing in any Disney film, and every animated star cast since owes him.
★ 6.3
When We Were Kings
Directed by Leon Gast
1996
Leon Gast shot the footage in 1974 and could not finish the film for twenty-two years: Ali in Kinshasa, talking constantly, in the weeks before the biggest fight of his life.
★ 6.2
In the Name of the Father
Directed by Jim Sheridan
1993
Daniel Day-Lewis plays a man convicted of a bombing he had nothing to do with: the Guildford Four case, filmed while the wound in Britain was still fresh.
★ 6.2
Apollo 13
Directed by Ron Howard
1995
Ron Howard shot the weightless scenes in an aircraft flying parabolas, twenty-three seconds at a time: no effects, real floating, and engineers improvising with only what the crew already had aboard.
★ 6.1
Lone Star
Directed by John Sayles
1996
Sayles moves between past and present without a cut, panning from one decade into another: a Texas border town excavates a forty-year-old murder and finds the whole town's history attached.
★ 6.1
Misery
Directed by Rob Reiner
1990
Kathy Bates turned a fan into the most frightening character of the decade: a novelist wakes up in the house of the reader who saved him, and she has opinions about his ending.
★ 6.1
American History X
Directed by Tony Kaye
1998
Edward Norton added thirty pounds of muscle for it and Tony Kaye tried to take his own name off the finished cut: a former neo-Nazi leaves prison and finds his brother following him.
★ 6.0
The Hunt for Red October
Directed by John McTiernan
1990
John McTiernan solves the language problem with a slow push in on the Russian political officer, and everyone speaks English from then on: submarine cat-and-mouse with almost no violence in it.
★ 6.0
Three Kings
Directed by David O. Russell
1999
Russell shot it on bleached film stock so the desert looks radioactive: four American soldiers go looking for Kuwaiti gold in the days after the Gulf War stops, carrying a stolen map.
★ 6.0
Life is Beautiful
Directed by Roberto Benigni
1998 · Italy
Benigni argued that a comedian could make a film about the camps, and half the critics said he was wrong: a father convinces his small son the whole thing is an elaborate game.
★ 6.0
Carlito's Way
Directed by Brian De Palma
1993
De Palma's best film with Pacino, and it took people twenty years to notice: an ex-convict tries to go straight in 1975 New York, and the Grand Central chase is a masterclass.
★ 5.9
Scream
Directed by Wes Craven
1996
Wes Craven revived a dead genre by having the characters name its rules out loud: the opening twelve minutes tell you this film knows every slasher convention and intends to use them anyway.
★ 5.8
A Bronx Tale
Directed by Robert De Niro
1993
Chazz Palminteri turned down large offers for his one-man play until someone would let him star: De Niro directed his first film out of it, about a boy with two fathers competing.
★ 5.8
True Romance
Directed by Tony Scott
1993
Tarantino sold this script to pay for Reservoir Dogs and Tony Scott shot it with real affection: a comic book clerk and a call girl leave Detroit with the wrong suitcase.
★ 5.7
The Green Mile
Directed by Frank Darabont
1999
Darabont's second Stephen King prison film runs three hours and nobody notices: a death row guard in 1935 takes delivery of the largest, quietest inmate the block has ever held.
★ 5.4
Office Space
Directed by Mike Judge
1999
It died in theaters and then took over every office in America on video: Mike Judge got the cubicle exactly right, down to the stapler, the printer and the phrase about the memo.
★ 5.3
Dances With Wolves
Directed by Kevin Costner
1990
Costner directed it himself, shot a third of it in Lakota with subtitles, and everyone expected disaster: a Union officer posted to an empty frontier fort starts keeping company with his neighbors.
★ 5.3
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut
Directed by Trey Parker
1999
It is a musical written by people who love musicals: Trey Parker and the composer Marc Shaiman took an Oscar nomination for a song nobody could print, and the censorship satire is exact.
★ 5.3
The English Patient
Directed by Anthony Minghella
1996
Minghella turned an unfilmable novel into the last great studio romance: a burned man in an Italian monastery remembers North Africa, and the desert photography is worth the length by itself.
★ 5.3
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Directed by Guy Ritchie
1998 · United Kingdom
Guy Ritchie raised the money out of favors and cast a professional footballer who had never acted: four London friends owe half a million pounds by Friday, and five plots collide getting it.
★ 5.2
Jerry Maguire
Directed by Cameron Crowe
1996
Cameron Crowe wrote a sports movie that is really about whether you can do a job decently: three catchphrases entered the language, and Tom Cruise has never been more likable.
★ 5.2
My Own Private Idaho
Directed by Gus Van Sant
1991
River Phoenix wrote the campfire scene himself and nothing else in the film touches it: Van Sant runs Shakespeare's Henry plays through two street hustlers on the Pacific Northwest road.
★ 5.1
Swingers
Directed by Doug Liman
1996
Jon Favreau wrote it about his own bad year and they shot in real bars without permits: two hundred thousand dollars total, and the answering machine scene is unbearable in the best way.
★ 4.8
As Good as it Gets
Directed by James L. Brooks
1997
Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt both won Academy Awards for a romantic comedy, which almost never happens: he plays a novelist nobody can stand, and the film does not soften him much.
★ 4.8