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
Browse by time · year
1996
Showing 146 works across all media from 1996
Reasonable Doubt
1996
No label would sign him, so Jay-Z started his own with two friends and sold the CDs out of the trunk of a car.
★ 8.0
No Diggity
1996
Teddy Riley sang lead because none of his group liked it, then it ended Macarena's fourteen weeks on top.
★ 7.8
Selected Stories
1996 · 412 pages
Munro set her stories in Ontario towns where a woman's life can turn on something said at a kitchen table. She fits more into forty pages than most novelists get into a novel.
★ 7.7
Infinite Jest
1996 · 970 pages
Somewhere there is a film so entertaining that anyone who watches it stops eating. Wallace chases it through a tennis academy and a halfway house full of addicts he writes with real love.
★ 7.7
Endtroducing.....
1996
Built entirely out of other people's records, on a single sampler, in the basement of a Sacramento record shop full of unsorted vinyl.
★ 7.6
Mo Money Mo Problems
1996 · From Life After Death
Kelly Price sang the hook uncredited over Stevie J's flip of I'm Coming Out, a posthumous number one.
★ 7.6
Odelay
1996
The Dust Brothers spent two years layering it out of junk-shop records. The dog on the cover is a Komondor caught mid-jump.
★ 7.5
Killing Me Softly With His Song (Fugees)Fugees
Killing Me Softly With His Song (Fugees)
1996 · From The Score
Pras suggested the cover, the beat lifts Tribe's Bonita Applebum, and Hill sings it like she wrote it herself.
★ 7.5
Jerry Maguire · 1996
On & On
1996
Five-Percenter numerology over a bassline that barely moves, Badu's debut single, and a Grammy at the first attempt.
★ 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
Jerry Maguire · 1996
1979
1996 · From Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Flood said it wasn't good enough, so Corgan rewrote it that night and got the band's biggest hit.
★ 7.2
All Eyez on Me
1996
Recorded in a hurry after Suge Knight bailed him out of prison, hip hop's first great double album. He was dead within the year.
★ 7.1
Dead Presidents IIJay-Z
Dead Presidents II
1996 · From Reasonable Doubt
Ski looped Lonnie Liston Smith under a Nas vocal, and Jay-Z made money sound like a weary confession.
★ 7.1
ATLiens
1996
André 3000 had stopped drinking and eating meat, and the change shows: the record is cooler and stranger than anything Atlanta had made before.
★ 7.1
Bring the Pain · 1996
Trainspotting · 1996
Where It's At
1996 · From Odelay
The Dust Brothers built it around a Mantronix sample, and Beck's two turntables and a microphone became a catchphrase.
★ 6.8
Midnight in a Perfect World
1996 · From Endtroducing.....
An Akai MPC60, a Technics turntable, and David Axelrod's mournful piano lifted into the warmest track on Endtroducing.
★ 6.8
Wannabe
1996
Seven weeks at UK number one for a debut single, and a chorus that puts her friends before any suitor.
★ 6.7
Ready Or Not
1996 · From The Score
Uncleared, the Enya sample nearly brought a lawsuit; she heard the finished record and chose to settle instead.
★ 6.6
ATLiens
1996 · From ATLiens
OutKast were booed at the 1995 Source Awards and answered with a title splicing Atlanta and aliens over echo-heavy dub.
★ 6.6
Building Steam With a Grain of SaltDJ Shadow
Building Steam With a Grain of Salt
1996 · From Endtroducing.....
A Jeremy Storch piano loop, a drummer's interview about rhythm, and an MPC60 doing the work of a band.
★ 6.5
Angela's Ashes
A Memoir
1996 · 363 pages
McCourt's father drank the wages and his mother begged for coal in a Limerick lane, and three of his siblings died before he turned seven. He tells it laughing.
★ 6.3
Devils Haircut
1996 · From Odelay
Beck cut that riff himself through a broken twenty-watt amp while the Dust Brothers stacked Purdie drums beneath it.
★ 6.2
Return of the Mack
1996
Tom Tom Club's Genius of Love beat rebuilt as smooth British R&B, and Morrison sounding utterly unbothered about being wronged.
★ 6.2
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
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
A People's Tragedy
The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924
1996 · 923 pages
Figes runs the Russian Revolution from the 1891 famine to Lenin's death in 1924, following peasants, soldiers, and the writer Gorky. He shows the terror arriving with the Bolsheviks, not after them.
★ 6.0
Virtual Insanity
1996
Glazer put the set on wheels and never moved the floor; four VMAs followed, Video of the Year among them.
★ 6.0
Pinkerton
1996
Named after a character in Madame Butterfly. It failed so badly that Rivers Cuomo disowned it for a decade before everyone decided it was great.
★ 6.0
What I Got
1996 · From Sublime
Half Pint's Loving supplies the chorus, Lady Madonna the verse melody, and Nowell was gone two months before the album.
★ 5.9
Always Be My Baby
1996
Carey stacked her own harmonies with Kelly Price behind them, and Jermaine Dupri's shuffle carried her eleventh number one.
★ 5.9
One Day
1996 · From Ridin' Dirty
Pimp C built it on an Isley Brothers loop, Ronnie Spencer sings the hook, and Texas rap found its elegy.
★ 5.9
Stakes is HighDe La Soul
Stakes is High
1996 · From Stakes Is High
Dilla looped Ahmad Jamal's "Swahililand" into a warning shot at where hip hop was heading in 1996.
★ 5.9
The Score
1996
Recorded in a basement studio in New Jersey for about a hundred thousand dollars, and Killing Me Softly was a Roberta Flack hit from 1973.
★ 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
What They Do
1996 · From Illadelph Halflife
Charles Stone III's video walks the group through every rap-video cliche, which is exactly what the record is arguing.
★ 5.8
LovefoolThe Cardigans
Lovefool
1996
A bossa nova sketch until the drummer swapped in a disco beat, and Persson made pleading sound like sunshine.
★ 5.8
Unbreak My Heart
1996
Diane Warren built it from the title alone, Braxton resisted recording it, then held number one eleven weeks.
★ 5.7
On Television
1996 · 104 pages
Television censors without a censor, Bourdieu argues: the clock and the ratings guarantee that only fast thinkers trading in received ideas can speak, and journalism drags politics and scholarship down with it.
★ 5.7
Santeria
1996 · From Sublime
Built on a bassline lifted from a Robbin' the Hood dub, and issued months after Nowell's death.
★ 5.6
If It Makes You Happy
1996
Jeff Trott's hook arrived first, the country arrangement went out, and Crow won a Grammy singing her own backlash.
★ 5.5
Bring the Pain · 1996
Crash Into Me
1996
Desire watched from a distance, an acoustic figure circling, and Steve Lillywhite catching all of it at Bearsville.
★ 5.4
Virginia Woolf
1996 · 944 pages
Lee refuses the fragile madwoman of legend and gives back a working writer: funny, ambitious, hard on her friends. She holds the breakdowns and the novels together and lets neither explain the other.
★ 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
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
The Distance
1996
Guitarist Greg Brown wrote it, McCrea narrates deadpan over trumpet, and the driver keeps racing long after everyone left.
★ 5.2
I Believe I Can FlyR. Kelly
I Believe I Can Fly
1996
Written for Space Jam, Paul Riser's strings taped in Detroit, the Luv Club Choir massed behind the vocal.
★ 5.1
Being There
1996
Singer Jeff Tweedy asked the label to sell the double album at single-album price and took the royalty cut himself so people could afford it.
★ 5.1
Say You'll Be There
1996
Judd Lander, the harmonica player from Karma Chameleon, gives the record its Stevie Wonder swing over Absolute's production.
★ 5.1
Doin' ItLL Cool J
Doin' It
1996 · From Mr. Smith
Built for Biggie, sold to Def Jam instead: Rashad Smith's beat rides a Grace Jones sample, LeShaun trading verses.
★ 5.0
Into the Wild
1996 · 207 pages
Chris McCandless gave his savings to charity, burned the cash in his wallet, and walked into the Alaskan bush in April 1992. Krakauer refuses to file him under either fool or saint.
★ 5.0
Ridin' Dirty
1996
There were no singles and no videos, and it sold on word of mouth across the South while nobody in New York noticed.
★ 4.9
Long December
1996
Duritz wrote it before dawn while a friend lay in hospital, and the band cut it almost entirely live.
★ 4.9
The Clash of Civilizations
1996 · 367 pages
Ideology no longer divides the world, Huntington argued: culture does, along fault lines between seven or eight civilizations. After 9/11 nobody could discuss the West and Islam without answering him.
★ 4.8
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
Fight Club
1996 · 208 pages
Men beat each other in basements because nothing else in their lives is real. Palahniuk's narrator fakes illness for the support groups, meets the soap salesman Tyler Durden, and builds an army.
★ 4.8
It's All Coming Back to Me NowCeline Dion
It's All Coming Back to Me Now
1996
Steinman wrote it out of Wuthering Heights for Pandora's Box in 1989, and Dion made it enormous.
★ 4.8
Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)
1996
Two million US copies, a Stockholm session from 1995, and a vocal Nick Carter recorded once his voice settled.
★ 4.8
3AM
1996
Thomas drew on his mother's cancer fight, and his earlier band Tabitha's Secret put it on record first.
★ 4.7
April 29, 1992
1996 · From Sublime
Nowell sings the wrong date, April 26, and the band kept the take anyway; he died before the album arrived.
★ 4.7
The Book of Jewish Food
1996 · 668 pages
From Aleppo and Samarkand to Vilna and New York, Roden gathered eight hundred recipes and the histories that traveled with them. She was born into Cairo's Jewish community and expelled along with it.
★ 4.7
Bring the Pain · 1996
Change the World
1996
Wynonna Judd cut it first as country; Babyface gave Clapton a soul groove and the Grammys gave back three.
★ 4.5
Wrong Way
1996 · From Sublime
Jon Blondell's trombone solo quotes Rhapsody in Blue over a ska bounce carrying Nowell's bleakest subject.
★ 4.4
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood · 1996
All By Myself
1996
Eric Carmen's verse borrowed from Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto, and Dion nailing the high F Foster dared her to try.
★ 4.4
Sublime
1996
Bradley Nowell's dalmatian appears on the cover and in half the songs. He died two months before the record came out.
★ 4.3
Bow DownWestside Connection
Bow Down
1996
Bud'da's beat, Ice Cube, Mack 10 and WC in formation, a West Coast declaration that topped the rap chart.
★ 4.1
My Boo
1996
Bass from Atlanta, an R&B vocal on top, and a 2016 dance craze that beat its 1996 chart peak.
★ 4.1
Follow You Down
1996
Jesse Valenzuela had the chords by the time the sessions ended; the double A-side climbed to number nine.
★ 4.1
Twisted
1996
Eric McCaine and Sweat cut the track together, Athena Cage answering him line for line, his biggest pop hit.
★ 4.0
Let Me Clear My Throat
1996
Cut live at Philadelphia's Bahama Bay over The 45 King's saxophone loop, the crowd doing half the work.
★ 3.8
Shine
Directed by Scott Hicks
1996
Geoffrey Rush learned the Rachmaninov himself so the hands would be right: the pianist David Helfgott, filmed across three ages, and a father who cannot let a prodigy leave home.
★ 3.8