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1990

Showing 115 works across all media from 1990

Gangster · Crime drama

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
Drama · Docudrama

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
Dance pop · Dance

Vogue

Madonna
1990 · From I'm Breathless

Pettibone built it as a B-side, Madonna lifted the dance from New York ballrooms, and Fincher filmed it monochrome.

★ 7.8
Fiction · War novel

The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien
1990 · 256 pages

O'Brien lists what a platoon in Vietnam hauled around, down to the ounce, then tells war stories and takes them back. The invented ones carry the war more exactly than facts could.

★ 7.8
R&B · Soul

Vision of Love

Mariah Carey
1990

Written with Ben Margulies in a studio behind his father's cabinet factory, and the whistle-register note that reset pop singing.

★ 7.3
Hard rock · Rock

Thunderstruck

AC/DC
1990 · From The Razors Edge

Angus called it a little guitar trick; Malcolm added the rhythm underneath, and it lands before Johnson sings a word.

★ 7.1
Nonfiction · Sports

Friday Night Lights

A Town, A Team, And A Dream
Buzz Bissinger
1990 · 367 pages

Bissinger spent the 1988 season in Odessa, Texas, where a whole town's self-worth rode on schoolboy football and one black star's ruined knee took his only way out. Odessa answered with death threats.

★ 6.4
Nonfiction · History

The Great Game

Peter Hopkirk
1990 · 565 pages

Britain and Russia crept toward each other across Central Asia until two thousand miles between them became twenty. Hopkirk tells it through the officers who rode alone into Bukhara, Khiva, and Kabul.

★ 6.4
Romantic fantasy · Romance

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
Hip hop

Poison

Bell Biv DeVoe
1990

Elliot Straite, as Dr. Freeze, turned a letter to an ex-girlfriend into new jack swing at its sharpest.

★ 6.3
Psychological thriller · Thriller

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
Nonfiction · Financial history

The House of Morgan

An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
Ron Chernow
1990 · 812 pages

Four generations of one bank, from Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Chernow's Pierpont Morgan locks New York's bankers in his library until they agree to end the Panic of 1907.

★ 5.3
Nonfiction · Urban history

City of Quartz

Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
Mike Davis
1990 · 512 pages

Los Angeles read as a machine for excluding people: Davis strips the sunshine myth to find speculators, bum-proof benches, and a police force patrolling from helicopters. Two years later the city burned.

★ 5.3
Epic · Western

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
Film · Crime (film) · Crime

We were goodfellas. Wiseguys. But Jimmy and I could never be made because we had Irish blood. It didn't even matter that my mother was Sicilian. To become a member of a crew you've got to be one hundred percent Italian so they can trace all your relatives back to the old country. See, it's the highest honor they can give you. It means you belong to a family and a crew. It means that nobody can fuck around with you. It also means you could fuck around with anybody just as long as they aren't also a member. It's like a license to steal. It's a license to do anything.

Henry Hill
Goodfellas · 1990
★ 1.9
Have You Seen HerMC Hammer
Hip hop

Have You Seen Her

MC Hammer
1990

Eugene Record and Barbara Acklin wrote it for the Chi-Lites in 1971; Hammer's hushed remake reached number four.

★ 1.9
Soft rock · Rock

Forever (Kiss)

Kiss
1990 · From Hot in the Shade

Paul Stanley and Michael Bolton co-wrote the ballad that returned Kiss to the Top 40 after eleven years away.

★ 1.8