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1995

Showing 143 works across all media from 1995

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

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

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

Waterfalls

1995 · From CrazySexyCool

Organized Noize's horns, a million-dollar F. Gary Gray video, and the first number one record to confront AIDS.

★ 7.6

Wonderwall

1995 · From (What's the Story) Morning Glory?

Owen Morris showed Bonehead the root notes for a Mellotron cello, and the track was largely done in a day.

★ 7.3

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

Liquid Swords

1995

Dialogue from a dubbed samurai film runs between the tracks, spoken by a child, which is where the record gets its atmosphere.

★ 6.9

Brown Sugar

1995 · From Brown Sugar

Every instrument on it is D'Angelo's, cut at Battery Studios, and the groove barely bothers to move.

★ 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

The Rings of Saturn

1995 · 304 pages

Sebald walks the Suffolk coast, and each mile opens onto herring fleets, the wandering skull of the physician Thomas Browne, a town swallowed by the sea. Essayists have spent thirty years imitating this.

★ 6.7
Gangsta's ParadiseCoolio

Gangsta's Paradise

1995

A Stevie Wonder interpolation cleared on condition the profanity went, L.V.'s stacked one-man choir, and 1995's biggest-selling single.

★ 6.5

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

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

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

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
MissingEverything but the Girl

Missing

1995

Todd Terry's remix pushed a subdued album cut into New York house, then held the Hot 100 for a year.

★ 6.1

Lincoln

1995 · 714 pages

The standard one-volume Lincoln, and the method is severe: Donald allows him only the information he actually had when he acted. Out of it comes colossal ambition joined to a fatalist's passivity.

★ 5.9

Blindness

1995 · 352 pages

One driver stops at a traffic light and cannot see. Within days the city is blind and quarantined, and one woman who kept her sight watches how fast people stop being people.

★ 5.8

A Fine Balance

1995 · 603 pages

A widow takes in two tailors fleeing caste violence and a student, and under Indira Gandhi's Emergency the four become a family. Mistry lets you love them before the sterilization camps arrive.

★ 5.7

Back for Good

1995

Barlow says it took fifteen minutes to write; the BRIT Awards debut pushed the release forward to an instant number one.

★ 5.5

Dreaming of You

1995

Cut in Corpus Christi with Selena fighting bronchitis, her first take kept, and released months after her murder.

★ 5.5