The 100 Best Movies of the ’90s

“Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1999)

The idea of Forest Whitaker playing a modern samurai hitman who communicates only by homing pigeon is a fundamentally delightful prospect, one made all the more satisfying by “Ghost Dog” writer-director Jim Jarmusch’s utter reverence for his title character, and Whitaker’s commitment to playing the New Jersey mafia assassin with all the pain and gravitas of someone at the center of an ancient Greek tragedy.

Never one to settle on a single tone or milieu, Jarmusch followed his 1995 acid western “Dead Man” with this modestly budgeted but equally ambitious film about a dead man of a different kind; as tends to happen with contract killers — such as the one Alain Delon played in Jean-Pierre Melville’s instructive “Le Samouraï” — poor Ghost Dog soon finds himself being targeted by the same men who retain his services. But Melville was hardly Jarmusch’s only source of inspiration for this fin de siècle pastiche, which also pays tribute to genre titans like Seijun Suzuki and John Sturges even when confronting Ghost Dog with the kind of Italian-American tough guys who might be more closely associated with Martin Scorsese or Dick Tracy.

Looking over its shoulder at a century of cinema at the same time as it boldly steps into the next, the aching coolness of “Ghost Dog” may have seemed silly if not for Robby Müller’s gloomy cinematography and RZA’s funky trip-hop score. But Jarmusch’s film and Whitaker’s character are both so beguiling for the strange poetry they find in these unexpected combinations of cultures, tones, and times, a poetry that allows this (very funny) film to maintain an unbending sense of self even as it trends towards the utter brutality of this world. No matter how bleak things get, Ghost Dog’s rigid system of belief allows him to maintain his dignity in the face of deadly circumstance. More than that, it serves as a metaphor for the world of independent cinema itself (a domain in which Jarmusch had already become an elder statesman), and a reaffirmation of its faith in the idiosyncratic and uncompromising artists who lend it their lives. —LL

“Until the End of the World” (dir. Wim Wenders, 1991)

It’s difficult to describe “Until the End of the World,” Wim Wenders’ languid, far-flung futuristic road movie, without feeling like you’re leaving something out. It’s about a couple of drifters (luminous Solveig Dommartin and gruff William Hurt) meeting and un-meeting while hopping from France to Germany to Russia to China to America on the run from factions of law enforcement and bounty hunter syndicates, but it’s also about an experimental technology that allows people to transmit memories from one brain to another, and about a planet living in suspended animation while waiting for a satellite to crash at an unknown place at an unknown time and possibly cause a nuclear disaster. A good portion of it is just about Australia.

Depending on which cut you see (and there are at least five, not including fan edits), you’ll get a different sprinkling of all of these, as Wenders’ original version was reportedly 20 hours long and took about a decade to make. The two theatrical versions, which hover around three hours long, were poorly received, and the film existed in various ephemeral states until the 2015 release of the newly restored 287-minute director’s cut, taken from the edit that Wenders and his editor Peter Przygodda put together themselves. Perhaps it’s fitting that a road movie — the ultimate road movie — exists in so many different iterations, each longer than the next, spliced together from other iterations that together create a sense of a grand cohesive whole. There is beauty in its meandering quality, its focus not on the sort of end-of-the-world plotting that would have Gerard Butler foaming at the mouth, but on the comfort of friends, lovers, family, acquaintances, and strangers just hanging out. —ES

“The Apple” (dir. Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998)

The Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf directed her first feature in 1998 when she was just 17 years old. She grew up observing her acclaimed filmmaker father Mohsen Makhmalbaf as he directed and edited his work, and he is credited alongside his daughter as a co-writer on her glorious debut, “The Apple.”

The tale centers on twin 12-year-old girls, Zahra and Massoumeh, who have been cloistered inside for nearly their entire lives. Their mother is blind and their father, concerned for his daughters’ safety and loss of innocence, refuses to let them beyond the padlock of their front gate, even for proper bathing or schooling. The movie begins with a handwritten letter from the family’s neighbors to social services, and goes on to chart the aftermath of the girls — who walk with limps and have barely learned to speak — being permitted to wander the streets and meet other children for the first time.

The movie was inspired by a true story in Iran and stars the actual family members who went through it. Mere days after the news item broke, Makhmalbaf turned her camera on the family and began to record them, directing them to reenact certain scenes based on a script. The ethical questions raised by such a technique are complex. But Makhmalbaf’s storytelling praxis is so patient and full of temerity that the film outgrows its verité-style portrait and becomes something mythopoetic. Like the allegory of the cave in Plato’s “Republic,” “The Apple” is ultimately an epistemological tale — a timeless parable that distills the wonders of a liberated life. —NW

“Lost Highway” (dir. David Lynch, 1997)

The dark has never been darker than it is in “Lost Highway.” In fact, “inky” isn’t a strong enough descriptor for the starless desert nights and shadowy corners humming with staticky menace that make Lynch’s first official collaboration with novelist Barry Gifford (“Wild At Heart”) the most terrifying movie in his filmography. This is a “ghastly” black. An “antimatter” black. A black where monsters live. 

As with all of Lynch’s work, the progression of the director’s pet themes and aesthetic obsessions is clear in “Lost Highway.” The film’s discombobulating Möbius strip structure builds on the dimension-hopping time loops of “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” while its descent into L.A.’s snuff-film underground anticipates his Hollywood cautionary tale “Mulholland Drive.” Lynch plays with classic noir archetypes — namely, the manipulative femme fatale and her naive prey — throughout the film, bending, twisting, and turning them back onto themselves until the nature of identity and free will themselves are called into question. 

We can never be sure who’s who in this film, and whether the blood on their hands is real or a diabolical trick. That being said, one thing about “Lost Highway” is absolutely fixed: This is the Lynch movie that’s the most of its time. Not in a bad way, of course, but the film just screams ’90s goth, thanks mostly to a best-selling soundtrack featuring tracks from David Bowie, Trent Reznor, and German industrial rockers Rammstein — although the black nail polish and Marilyn Manson cameo help to further affix it in place. —KR

“Compensation” (dir. Zeinabu irene Davis, 1999)

It’s rare to see a film that equally engages with the past and present, yet feels ahead of its time. Zeinabu irene Davis’ “Compensation” manages the incredible feat with aplomb. Set in Chicago, Marc Arthur Chéry’s smart script oscillates between two eras: The first follows the deaf, highly educated Malindy (Michelle A. Banks) as she falls for the illiterate, kind stockyard worker Arthur (John Earl Jelks) in the early 1900s. Davis renders period piece scenes as a Oscar Micheaux-inspired black-and-white silent film replete with inclusive intertitles and archival photographs. One particularly heart-warming scene finds Arthur and Malindy seeking refuge by watching a movie in a theater. It’s brief, but exudes Black joy by granting a rare historical nod recognizing how Black people of the past experienced more than crushing hardships. 

The second arc switches to color, uses subtitles, and takes place during the ’90s. Malaika (Banks), a deaf dancer, and Nico (Jelks), a smitten, hearing man, fall in love despite the communicative gulf between them. Davis, a product of the LA Rebellion, rejects Hollywood conventions for bruising realism by using these romances to interrogate segregation (both racial and ableist) and the impact of the HIV/AIDs crisis on Black folks, while providing Black deaf representation for a diverse storytelling that remains actively progressive and eternally bold. For those reasons and more, “Compensation” is a movie ripe for rediscovery. —RD

“The Girl on the Bridge” (dir. Patrice Leconte, 1999)

There are manic pixie dream girls, and there are manic pixie dream girls. And then — 1,000 miles beyond the borders of “Elizabethtown” and “Garden State” — there’s Vanessa Paradis as a disaffected, suicidal, 21-year-old nymphomaniac named Adèle who throws herself into the Seine at the start of Patrice Leconte’s romantic, intoxicating “The Girl on the Bridge,” only to be plucked from the freezing water by an unlucky knifethrower (Daniel Auteuil as Gabor) in need of a new ingenue to play the human target in his traveling circus act. It didn’t work out so well for the last girl, but what does Adèle care? The hole in her heart is almost as big as the gap between her teeth, and there isn’t a man alive who’s been able to fill it so far.

The magic of Leconte’s monochromatic fairy tale, a Fellini-esque throwback that fizzes along the Mediterranean coast with the madcap energy of a “Lupin the III” episode, begins with the fact that Gabor doesn’t even try (the recent flimsiness of his knife-throwing act suggests an impotence of a different kind). Instead of acting like Adèle’s knight in shining armor, Gabor blindfolds himself and throws razor-sharp daggers at her face. Over time, however, the trust these lost souls place in each other blossoms into the kind of ineffable bond that only the movies can make you believe in, as their act soon takes on an erotic quality that cuts much deeper than sex.

For all of its sensorial timelessness, “The Girl on the Bridge” may be too drunk on its own fantasies — male or otherwise — to shimmer as strongly today as it did in the summer of 1999, but Leconte’s faith in the ecstasy of filmmaking lingers all the same (see: the orgasmic rehearsal sequence set to Marianne Faithfull’s “Who Will Take My Dreams Away,” proof that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a knife). Beyond that, this buried gem will always shine because of the simple wisdom it unearths in the story of two people who come to appreciate the good fortune of finding each other. “There’s no wrong road,” Gabor concludes, “only bad company.” —DE

“Boogie Nights” (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)

A dizzying epic of reinvention, Paul Thomas Anderson’s seedy and sensational second film found the 28-year-old directing with the swagger of a young porn star in possession of a massive amount of natural talent. But it’s not just the mind-boggling confidence behind the camera that makes “Boogie Nights” such an incredible piece of work, it’s also the sheer generosity that Anderson shows towards even the most pathetic of his characters. See how the camera lingers on Jesse St. Vincent (the great Melora Walters) after she’s been stranded at the 1979 New Year’s Eve party, or how Anderson redeems Rollergirl (Heather Graham, in her best role) with a single push-in during the closing minutes. When Amber Waves, played by a peak Julianne Moore as the original MILF, tells Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) that he deserves his brand new 1978 Corvette, she means it from the bottom of her heart. Anderson loves these people, and so we do, too. 

More than just a breakneck look inside the porn industry as it struggled to get over the hump of home video, “Boogie Nights” is a story about a magical valley of misfit toys — action figures, to be specific. All of these horny weirdos have been cast out from their families, all of them are looking for surrogate relatives, and all of them have followed the American Dream to the same ridiculous place. Sure, there’s a world of darkness waiting for them when they get there, but that’s just how it goes. There are shadows in life, baby! —DE

“Strange Days” (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)

It’s fascinating watching Kathyrn Bigelow’s dystopian, slightly-futuristic, anti-police film today. Partly because the director’s later films, such as “Detroit,” veer so far away from the anarchist bent of “Strange Days.” And yet it’s our relationship to footage of Black trauma that is different too.

In “Strange Days,” the love-sick grifter Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), who sells people’s memories for bio-VR escapism on the blackmarket, becomes embroiled in a vast conspiracy when one of his clients captures footage of a heinous crime – the murder of a Black political hip hop artist. Lenny’s friend Mace (a kick-ass Angela Bassett) believes they should expose the footage in the hopes of enacting real change. 

Produced in 1994, but taking place on the eve of Y2K, the film – set in an apocalyptic Los Angeles – is a clear commentary on the police assault of Rodney King, and a reflection on the days when the grainy tape played on a loop for white and Black audiences alike. The friction in “Strange Days,” however, partly stems from Mace hoping that her white friend, Lenny, will make the right decision, only to see him continually fail by trying to save his troubled, white ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis). Nearly 30 years later, “Strange Days” is a difficult watch due to the onscreen brutality against Black folks and women, and because through today’s cynical eyes we know such footage rarely enacts the change desired. Even so, Bigelow’s alluring and visually arresting film continues to enrapture because it so perfectly captures the misplaced hope of its time. —RD

“Ravenous” (dir. Antonia Bird, 1999)

Studio fuckery has only grown more frustrating with the vertical integration of the streaming era (just ask Batgirl), but the ‘90s sometimes feels like Hollywood’s last true golden age of hands-on interference; it was the last time that a Disney subsidiary might greenlight an ultra-violent Western horror-comedy about U.S. soldiers eating each other at a remote Sierra Nevada outpost during the Mexican-American War, and the last time that a Fox 2000 executive would roll up to a set three weeks into production and abruptly replace the acclaimed Macedonian auteur she first hired for the job with the director of “Home Alone 3.” 

So how did “Ravenous” survive this tumult to become such a delectable end-of-the-century treat? In a beautiful case of life imitating art, the film’s cast mutinied against Raja Gosnell, leaving actor Robert Carlyle with a taste for blood and the strength required to insist that Fox hire his frequent collaborator Antonia Bird to take over behind the camera. 

The end result of all this mishegoss is a wonderful cult movie that reflects the “Eat or be eaten” ethos of its own making in spectacularly literal fashion. The demented soul of a studio film that feels like it’s been possessed by the spirit of a flesh-eating character actor, Carlyle is unforgettably feral as a frostbitten Colonel who stumbles into Fort Spencer with a sob story about having to consume the other members of his wagon train to stay alive, while Guy Pearce — just shy of his breakout success in “Memento” — radiates square-jawed stoicism as a hero soldier wrestling with the definition of courage in a stolen country that only seems to reward brute strength. The old joke goes that it’s hard for a cannibal to make friends, and Bird’s bloody smile of a Western delivers the punchline with pieces of David Arquette and Jeremy Davies stuck between its teeth, twisting the colonialist mindset behind Manifest Destiny into a bonafide meal plan that it sums up with its opening epipgrah and then slathers all over the screen until everyone gets their just desserts: “Eat me.” —DE

“Lessons of Darkness” (dir. Werner Herzog, 1992)

These days, it can be hard to separate Werner Herzog from the meme-driven caricature that he’s cultivated since the success of “Grizzly Man” — his deadpan voice, his love of Baby Yoda, his droll insistence that a chicken’s eyes betray “a bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity… that they are the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creatures in the world.” It’s a nihilistic schtick that he’s played up in interviews, in episodes of “The Simpsons,” and most of all in his own films.

Back in 1992, however, Herzog had less cozy associations. His sparsely narrated 50-minute documentary “Lessons Of Darkness” was defined by a steely detachment to its subject matter, far removed from the warm indifference that would characterize his later non-fiction work. The film cast its lens over the destroyed oil fields of post-Gulf War Kuwait, a stretch of desert hellish enough even before Herzog brought his grim cynicism to the catastrophe. Even when his subjects — several of whom have been literally struck dumb by trauma — evoke God, Herzog cuts to such vast nightmare landscapes that it makes their prayers seem like they are being answered by the Devil instead. The ingloriousness of war, and the root of pain that would be passed down the generations like a cursed heirloom, can be seen even in the most unadorned of images. Devoid of even the tiniest bit of hope or humor, “Lessons of Darkness” offers the most chilling and powerful condemnation of humanity in a long career that has alway looked at us askance. —LL

“Fucking Åmål” (dir. Lukas Moodysson, 1998)

The fact that Swedish filmmaker Lukus Moodysson’s “Fucking Åmål” had to be retitled something as anodyne as “Show Me Love” for its U.S. release is a perfect testament to a portrait of teenage cruelty and sexuality that still feels more honest than the American movie business can handle.

But don’t be fooled by the edginess of its original title; like Moodysson’s later “We Are the Best!,” “Fucking Åmål” is defined by the empathy and understanding it offers its young characters, rendering with compassion the excitement and confusion they confront together after Elin (Alexandra Dahlström) kisses the introverted Agnes (Rebecca Liljeberg) on a cruel dare. There’s a purity to the poetic realism of Moodysson’s filmmaking, which often ignores the low-budget constraints of shooting at night. Grittiness becomes quite beautiful in his hands, creating a rare and visceral comfort for his young cast and the lives they so naturally inhabit for Moodysson’s camera. —CO

“But I’m a Cheerleader” (dir. Jamie Babbit, 1999)

Long before conversion therapy became the setting du jour for austere dramas, Jamie Babbit satirized the religious extremists to the nines in her campy comedy “But I’m a Cheerleader.” The kind of movie that invented terms like “offbeat” and “quirky,” this film makes low-budget filmmaking look easy. Released in 1999 at the tail end of the New Queer Cinema wave, “But I’m a Cheerleader” bridged the gap between the first scrappy queer indies and the hyper-commercialized “The L Word” era.

Set in the present day with a bold retro aesthetic, the film stars a young Natasha Lyonne as Megan, an innocent cheerleader sent to a rehab for gay and lesbian teens. The patients don pink and blue pastels while performing straight-sex simulations under the tutelage of an exacting taskmaster (Cathy Moriarty). Of course, housing a bunch of queer teens under one roof is bound to create some sexual tension, and Megan stands no chance against the dark and brooding Graham (Clea Duvall, in one of the many iconic performances she gave that decade).

Babbit delivers the best of both worlds with a genuine and touching romance that blossoms amidst her wildly entertaining satire. While Megan and Graham are the central love story, the ensemble of try-hard nerds, queercore punks, and mama’s boys offers a little something for everyone. Featuring an all-star cast that includes RuPaul, Melanie Lynskey, Michelle Williams, Eddie Cibrian, and brief appearances by Julie Delpy and Ione Skye, “But I’m a Cheerleader” has proven itself way ahead of its time, and it continues to stand the test. —JD

“Central Station” (dir. Walter Salles, 1998)

The very premise of Walter Salles’ “Central Station,” an exquisitely photographed and life-affirming drama set during the same present in which it was shot, is enough to make the film sound like a relic of its time. Salles’ Oscar-nominated hit tells the story of a former teacher named Dora (Fernanda Montenegro), who makes a living writing letters for illiterate working-class people who transit a busy Rio de Janeiro train station. Severe and a bit tactless, Montenegro’s Dora is far from a lovable maternal figure; she’s quick to judge her clients and dismisses their struggles with arrogance. And yet, upon meeting a stubborn young boy whose mother has just died, our heroine can’t help but soften up and offer poor Josué (Vinícius de Oliveira) some help. The kid is quick to offer his own judgments in return, as his gendered assumptions feed into the combative dynamic that flares up between these two strangers as they travel across Brazil in search of the boy’s father.

The timelessness of “Central Station,” a film that betrays none of the mawkishness that elevated so much of the ’90s middlebrow feel-good fare, can be owed to how deftly the script earns the bond that forms between its mismatched characters, and how lovingly it tends to the vulnerabilities they expose in each other. The ease with which Dora rests her head on Josué’s lap in a poignant scene suggests that whatever twist of fate brought this pair together under such trying circumstances was looking out for them both. Montenegro became the first — and still only — Brazilian actor to be nominated for an Academy Award, and Salles’ two-hander reaches the sublime because de Oliveira, at his young age, summoned a powerful concoction of mixed emotions. Profoundly touching yet never saccharine, Salles’ breakthrough ends with a fitting testament to the idea that some memories never fade, even as our indifferent world continues to spin forward. —CA

“Bye Bye Africa” (dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 1999)

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun is one of Africa’s greatest living filmmakers, and while he sets the majority of his films in his native Chad, a few others look at Africans struggling in France, where he has settled for most of his adult life.

His first feature straddles both worlds, exploring the conflict that he himself felt as a young man in this lightly fictionalized version of his own story. Haroun plays himself, an up-and-coming Chadian film director based in France, who returns to his birth country to attend his mother’s funeral. There he is dismayed by the state of the country and the decay of his once-beloved national cinema. His chosen career — and his endearing instance upon the importance of film — is largely met with bemusement by old friends and relatives. 

A moving tribute to the audacious spirit of African filmmakers — who have persevered despite a lack of infrastructure, a dearth of enthusiasm, and precious little of the respect afforded their European counterparts — “Bye Bye Africa” is also a film of delicately profound melancholy. Haroun lays bear his own feeling of displacement, as he’s unable to fit in or be fully understood no matter where he is. The film ends in a chilling moment that speaks to his loneliness by relaying a simple emotional truth in a striking image, a signature that has led to Haroun building one of the most significant filmographies on the planet. In the decades since, his films have never shied away from difficult subject matters, as they tackle everything from childhood abandonment in “Abouna” and genital mutilation in “Lingui, The Sacred Bonds,” to the cruel bureaucracy facing asylum seekers in “A Season In France.” While the dejected character he portrays in “Bye Bye Africa” ultimately leaves his camera behind, it is to cinema’s great fortune that the real Haroun did not do the same. —LL

“The End of Evangelion” (dirs. Hideaki Anno & Kazuya Tsurumaki, 1997)

Where do you even start? No film on this list — up to and including the similarly conceived “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” — comes with a higher barrier of entry than “The End of Evangelion,” just as no film on this list is as quick to antagonize its target audience. Essentially a mulligan on the last two episodes of Hideaki Anno’s totemic anime series “Neon Genesis Evangelion” (and also a reverse shot of sorts for what happens in them), this biblical mental breakdown about giant mechas and the rebirth of life on Earth would be absolute gibberish for anyone who didn’t know their NERVs from their SEELEs, or assumed the Human Instrumentality Project, was just some hot new yoga trend. 

To such uncultured fools/people who aren’t complete nerds, Anno’s psychedelic film might seem like the incomprehensible story of a traumatized (but extremely horny) teenage boy who’s forced to sit in the cockpit of a big purple robot and decide whether all humanity should be melded into a single consciousness, or if the liquified red goo that’s left of their bodies should be allowed to reconstitute itself at some point in the future. To anyone familiar with Shinji Ikami’s tortured psyche, however — his daddy issues and severe doubts of self-worth, not to mention the depressive anguish that compelled Shinji’s actual creator to revisit the kid’s ultimate choice — Anno’s “The End of Evangelion” is nothing less than a mind-scrambling, fourth-wall-demolishing, soul-on-the-screen meditation on the upside of suffering. It’s a self-portrait of an artist who’s convincing himself to stay alive, no matter how disgusted he might be with what that entails. 

“The End of Evangelion” was ultimately not the end of “Evangelion” (not even close), but that’s only because it allowed the series and its author to zoom out and out and out until they could each see themselves starting over. —DE

“The Celebration” (dir. Tomas Vinterberg, 1998)

When it premiered at Cannes in 1998, the film made with a $700 one-chip DV camera sent shockwaves through the film world — lighting a fire under the digital narrative movement in the U.S. — while at the same time making director Thomas Vinterberg and his compatriot Lars Van Trier’s scribbled-in-45-minutes Dogme 95 manifesto into the start of a technologically-fueled film movement to shed artifice for art that set the tone for 20 years of low budget (and some not-so-low budget) filmmaking.

The story of a son confronting the family’s patriarch at his birthday gathering about the horrors of the past, the film chronicles the collapse of that family under the weight of the buried truth being pulled up by the roots. Vintenberg uses the camera’s inability to handle the natural low light, and the subsequent breaking up of the grainy image, to perfectly match the disintegration of the family over the course of the day turning to night. Like Bennett Miller’s one-person doc “The Cruise,” Vintenberg’s film showed how the textured look of the inexpensive DV camera could be used expressively in the spirit of 16mm films in the ’60s and ’70s. Above all else, though, “The Celebration” is an incredibly powerful story, well told, and fueled by youthful cinematic energy. —CO

“Léon: The Professional” (dir. Luc Besson, 1994)

Peak Luc Besson in every way, “Léon: The Professional” delivers the cinéma du look auteur’s most endearing Jean Reno character, his most discomforting portrayal of a (very) young woman on the verge of a (very) personal transformation, and his most instantly percussive Éric Serra score. It prioritizes cool style over common sense at every possible juncture — how else to explain Léon’s superhuman ability to fade into the shadows and crannies of the Manhattan apartments where he goes about his business? — and it hinges on an unlikely friendship that could only exist in the movies. It’s the most Besson thing that is, was, or ever will be, and it also happens to be the best.

Besson succeeds when he’s pushing everything just a bit too far, and Reno’s lovable turn in the title role helps cement the movie as an urban fairytale. A lonely hitman with a heart of gold and a soft spot for “Singin’ in the Rain,” Léon is perhaps the purest movie simpleton to come out of the decade that produced “Forrest Gump.”  Meanwhile, pint-sized Natalie Portman sells us on her homicidal Lolita by playing Mathilda as a girl who’s so precocious that she belittles her own grief. Danny Aiello is deeply endearing as the old school mafioso who looks after Léon, and Gary Oldman’s performance as drug-addicted DEA agent Norman Stansfield is so big that you can actually see it from space. Who’s great in this movie? EEVVVVERRRRYYYOOOOONEEEEE!

Cut together with a degree of precision that’s almost entirely absent from the rest of Besson’s work, “Léon” is as surgical as its soft-spoken hero. The action scenes are crazed but always character-driven, the music feels like it’s sprouting directly from the drama, and Besson’s vision of a sweltering Manhattan summer is every bit as evocative as the film worlds he created for “Valerian” or “The Fifth Element.” He may be a foreigner, but this is a world he knows like the back of his hand: Big guns. Brutish men. Delicate-looking girls who harbor more power than you could possibly imagine. And binding them all together is a sense that the most beautiful things in life aren’t meant for us to keep or contain. Whether a houseplant or a troubled kid with a bright future, if you love something you have to let it grow. —DE

“My Own Private Idaho” (dir. Gus Van Sant, 1991)

Gus Van Sant’s gloriously sad road movie borrows from the worlds of author John Rechy and even the director’s own “Mala Noche” in sketching the humanity behind trick-turning, closeted street hustlers who share an ineffable spark in the darkness. The film underscored the already evident talents of its two leads, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, while also giving us all many a reason to swoon over their indie heartthrob status. Together, Mike (Phoenix, a narcoleptic drifter with mommy issues) and Scott (Reeves, another street hustler with daddy ones) cut a beautiful image on a motorbike zipping up and down black-top highway stretches of the United States, powering the movie’s dreamy haze. It’s hard not to imagine anyone behind the camera not falling in love with them, too.

Out of the gate, “My Own Private Idaho” promises an uncompromising experience, opening on a close-up of River Phoenix getting a blowjob. There’s a subversion here of Phoenix’s up-til-now raffish Hollywood image, and the moment establishes the level of vulnerability the actors, both playing extremely sensitive male sex workers, will put on display. Van Sant’s autumnal-toned tale of innocence lost did major work for shepherding into the mainstream the idea of a New Queer Cinema, with a taboo-busting, subtly avant-garde style that transplanted a riff on Shakespeare’s “Henry” plays to a street story set in the grungy corners of Portland, Seattle, Idaho, and Italy.

Mike (Phoenix) and Scott’s (Reeves) tremulously erotic but deeply-felt friendship is a gold standard for queer onscreen not-quite-couples, with Phoenix’s brooding style proving a fascinating counterpart to Reeves’ charming stiltedness. (These were, after all, young actors coming up.) Their chemistry is no greater rooted than in a scene set over a campfire in which Mike attempts to declare his love for Scott, and one that Phoenix himself expanded to make his character’s homoerotic affections more explicit. It’s now the fashion for straight actors to “go gay” onscreen, but rarely are they as naked (figuratively and otherwise) than Phoenix and Reeves were here. —RL

“Rumble in the Bronx” (dir. Stanley Tong, 1995)

The ‘90s were a particularly spectacular decade for martial arts movies, with Hong Kong alone churning out a century’s worth of genre classics that came from the grindhouse and the arthouse alike, ranged from the balletic (“Iron Monkey”) to the fantastical (“A Chinese Ghost Story II”), and saw Jet Li (“Once Upon a Time in China”) battling it out with Brigette Lin (“The Bride With White Hair”), Donnie Yen (“Wing Chun”), Michelle Yeoh (“Supercop 2”), and a murderer’s row of other contenders for a place in film history. That Stanley Tong’s “Rumble in the Bronx” emerged from that embarrassment of riches as the only Hong Kong action movie on this list is both a perverse testament to the fact that everyone has their own personal favorites — how do you pick between “Hard Boiled” and “Bullet in the Head?” — and a clear reminder that one star managed to fight his way above the fray and conquer the world without leaving home behind.

“Rumble in the Bronx” may be set in New York (though hilariously shot in Vancouver), but this Golden Harvest production is Hong Kong to the bone, and the decade’s single giddiest display of why Jackie Chan deserves his frequent comparisons to Buster Keaton. While the story is whatever — Chan plays a Hong Kong cop who comes to the Big Apple for his uncle’s wedding and soon finds himself embroiled in some mob drama about stolen diamonds — the charisma is off the charts, the jokes connect with the power of spinning windmill kicks, and the Looney Tunes-like action sequences are more spectacular than just about anything that had ever been shot on these shores. The climactic hovercraft chase is up there with the ’90s best action setpieces, and the end credits gag reel (which mines “Jackass”-level laughs from the stunt where Chan demolished his right leg) is still a jaw-dropping example of what Chan put himself through for our amusement. He wanted to entertain the entire planet, and after “Rumble in the Bronx” there was no turning back. —DE

“The Last Days of Disco” (dir. Whit Stillman, 1998)

Whit Stillman’s warm and witty brand of Austenian aristocratic comedies are sorely missed today, and, if anything, their very ’90s-centered mores make for a fascinating time capsule of that moment. The best of the bunch is “Last Days of Disco,” starring Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale as two recent grads working as junior associates at a publishing house (how romantic to think that was ever seen as such an aspirational career).

They’re looking for love and sex in the last days of disco, at the start of the ’80s, and have to swat away plenty of Stillmanian assholes, like Chris Eigeman as a drug-addicted club manager who pretends to be gay to dump women without guilt. But there is a sweet love story at the movie’s core, with Sevigny’s drifting Alice forging a connection with a district attorney (Matt Keeslar). A final fantasy sequence of the pair dancing to “Love Train” on a packed subway is a fade-out for the ages. —RL

“Earth” (dir. Deepa Mehta, 1999)

Based on “Cracking India” by Bapsi Sidhwa, the second installment in Deepa Mehta’s “Elements” trilogy begins in pre-independent India, where a Zoroastrian girl named Lenny (Maia Sethna) lives with her parents and her caretaker Shanta (Nandita Das) in Lahore. As a love triangle develops between Shanta, the local ice candy man (Aamir Khan), and a handsome masseur (Rahul Khan), India races toward independence and the religiously motivated upheaval that came with it, triggering shockwaves that reverberated throughout the 20th century and beyond. Lenny’s family and friends try to stay neutral, but Lahore won’t stay idyllic for long. 

“Earth” uniquely examines the split between India and Pakistan through the eyes of a child who witnessed the old India’s multiculturalism firsthand. Mehta writes and directs with deft control, distilling the films darker themes and intricate dynamics without a heavy hand (outstanding performances from Das, Khan, and Khanna all contribute to the unforced poignancy). A.R. Rahman’s soundtrack provides a soulful throughline, but not as it might in a traditional Bollywood movie musical; the songs are diegetic or entirely in the background, helping to weave scenes together without breaking the film’s collective spell or pulling focus from its unforgettable ending. —PK

“The Watermelon Woman” (dir. Cheryl Dunye, 1996)

When “The Watermelon Woman” came out almost 25 years ago, it was the first feature by and about a Black lesbian filmmaker. A cutting-edge work at the height of the culture wars, it won the Teddy Award at the Berinale as well as Best Feature at Outfest L.A. But to say that’s all that made it special would downplay Cheryl Dunye’s inspired and fearless filmmaking style; a unique blend of homegrown humor, a scrappy low-budget aesthetic, and the self-reflexive centering of Dunye herself as the movie’s charismatic subject.

Set in Philadelphia, the film follows Dunye’s attempt to make a documentary about Fae Richards, a fictional Black actress from the 1930s whom Cheryl discovers playing a stereotypical mammy role. Struck by her beauty and yearning for a film history that reflects someone who looks like her, Cheryl embarks on a journey that — while fictional — tellingly yields more fruit than the real Dunye’s ever had. When the director’s archival search for Black women onscreen turned up nothing, Dunye invented her own.

In true ‘90s underground fashion, Dunye enlisted the photographer Zoe Leonard to create an archive of the fictional actress and blues singer. The Fae Richards Photo Archive consists of 82 images, and was shown as part of Leonard’s career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in 2018. This spirit of collaboration, and the radical act of writing a Black and queer character into film history, is emblematic of a ‘90s arthouse cinema that wasn’t afraid to revolutionize the past in order to create a more possible cinematic future. That “The Watermelon Woman” so elegantly maps its overt politics onto a funny and entertaining character study is all Dunye’s special sauce, and it has allowed this singular debut to endure as more than a product of its time. Fae Richards may have been hopelessly obscured by an industry that failed to appreciate her value, but Dunye ensured that her own trailblazing history would be much harder to overlook. —JD

“Starship Troopers” (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1997)

Of all the things that Paul Verhoeven’s dark comic look at the future of authoritarian warfare presaged, the way that “Starship Troopers” uses its “Would you like to know more?” refrain seems most prescient now. The creature design still holds up and the uniforms basically became a template for modern football gear, but that curiously-placed question almost seemed to envision an internet-based future of media silos and confirmation bias.

As authoritarian tendencies are seeping into politics on a global scale, “Starship Troopers” paints shiny, ugly insect-infused allegories of the dangers of blind adherence and the power in targeting an easy enemy. It’s a finely-calibrated exercise in tone, finding the satirical sweet spot between the horrors of a war movie and a winking indictment of those who misinterpreted its message. —S. Greene

“Underground” (dir. Emir Kusturica, 1995)

Emir Kusturica’s characteristic exuberance and frenetic pacing — which often feels like Fellini on Adderall, accompanied by a raucous Balkan brass band — reached a fever pitch in his tragicomic masterpiece “Underground,” with that raucous energy spilling across the tortured spirit of his beloved Yugoslavia as the country suffered through an extended period of disintegration.

“Underground” is an ambitious three-hour surrealist farce (there was a five-hour version for television) about what happens to the soul of a country when its people are forced to live in a constant state of war for 50 years. The twists of the plot are as absurd as they are troubling: One part finds Marko, a rising leader in the communist party, shaving minutes off the clock each day so that the people he keeps hidden believe the most recent war ended more recently than it did, and will therefore be inspired to manufacture ammunition for him at a faster rate. But nothing — absolutely nothing — can stop Kusturica’s boisterous characters from drinking, fighting and fucking, and that unwavering resilience in the face of death helped keep the party going long enough for “Underground” to win Palme d’Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. —CO

“The Virgin Suicides” (dir. Sofia Coppola, 1999)

Gauzy pastel hues, flowery designs and lots of gossamer blond hair — these are a few of the images that linger after you emerge from the trance cast by “The Virgin Suicides,” Sofia Coppola’s snapshot of five sisters in parochial suburbia. The film was Coppola’s debut, and it left audiences in awe. It also quelled the skeptics; her last name may have been familiar, but her rhapsodic cinematic language was anything but.

Adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides’s wistful novel and featuring voice-over narration lifted from its pages (read by Giovanni Ribisi), the film peers into the lives of the Lisbon sisters alongside a clique of neighborhood boys. Mesmerized by the willowy young women — particularly Lux (Kirsten Dunst), the household coquette — the young gents study and surveil them with a sense of longing that is by turns amorous and meditative. “We knew the girls were really women in disguise,” muses the narrator. “We knew that they knew everything about us, and that we couldn’t fathom them at all.”

In her masterful first film, Coppola uses the tools of cinema to paint adolescence as an ethereal fairy tale that is both ridden with malaise and as wispy as a cirrus cloud. Like the pubescent boy clique that serves as our guide, we are left mystified and beguiled by the saga, with little to do but bask in its glow. —NW

“Silvia Prieto” (dir. Martín Rejtman, 1999)

The delightfully deadpan heroine at the heart of “Silvia Prieto,” Argentine director Martín Rejtman’s adaptation of his own novel of the same name, could be compared to Amélie on Xanax. Her day-to-day life  is filled with chance interactions and a fascination with strangers, though, at 27, she’s more concerned with trying to change her own circumstances than with facilitating random acts of kindness for others. Silvia wanders through Buenos Aires with a sort of dazed detachment, quitting one job and getting another, traveling to Europe with her pet canary, and chopping up raw chicken with a meat cleaver.

Played by Rosario Bléfari, Silvia feels like a ’90s incarnation of aimless 20-something women like Frances Ha or Julie from “The Worst Person in the World,” tinged with Rejtman’s typical brand of dry humor. When our heroine learns that another woman shares her name, it prompts an identity crisis of sorts, prompting her to curl her hair, don fake nails, and wear a fur coat to a meeting arranged between the two. The film’s tangential nature allows us to follow other characters in Silvia’s orbit, including her ex-husband Marcelo (Marcelo Zanelli) and his new girlfriend (Valeria Bertuccelli), whom he meets while she’s passing out samples of “Brite” detergent (the fact that her name also happens to be “Brite” is hilariously never explained).

Countless other characters pass in and out of this rare charmer without much fanfare, yet thanks to the film’s sly wit and fully lived-in performances they all leave an improbably lasting impression. The same is true of “Silvia Prieto” itself, another compelling (but too infrequently cited) argument in favor of 1999 being such a meaningful year at the movies. —SG

“Deep Cover” (dir. Bill Duke, 1992)

“What’s the difference between a Black man and a n****r?” A landmark noir that hinges on Black identity and the so-called war on drugs, Bill Duke’s “Deep Cover” wrestles with that provocative question to bloody ends. It follows an undercover DEA agent, Russell Stevens Jr. (Laurence Fishburne at his absolute hottest), as he works to atone for the sins of his father by investigating the cocaine trade in Los Angeles in a bid to bring Latin American kingpins to court. He befriends David (Jeff Goldblum at his most dashing and unhinged), a white Jewish lawyer hoping to distribute a synthetic drug, who’s fascinated with Black folks as exotic objects of desire. 

“Deep Cover” is many things at once, including a quasi-male love story between Russell and David, a heated denunciation of capitalism and American imperialism, and ultimately a bitter critique of policing’s effect on Black cops once Russell begins resorting to murderous underworld tactics. At its core, however, Duke’s exquisitely neon-lit film — a hard-boiled genre picture that’s carried by a banging hip-hop soundtrack, sees criminality in both the shadows and the sun, and keeps its unerring gaze focused on the intersection between noir and Blackness — is about the duality of identity more than anything else. Is Russell a cop or a dealer? A Black man or that dreaded slur? That question, left complicated and slippery, troubles Russell himself to the bitter end. —RD

“Cure” (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

The crisis of identity at the heart of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 international breakthrough “Cure” addresses an essential truth about Japanese society, where “the nail that sticks up gets pounded down.” But the provocative existential question at the core of the film — without your job and your family and your place in the world, who are you really? — speaks to the fears and anxieties of any culture where a person’s worth is judged in relation to their usefulness to the capitalist machine. (So, nearly all of them.) In Kurosawa’s film, defining one’s self in relation to the other leaves a human being with nothing but a howling void at their center, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. 

The story revolves around a homicide detective named Tanabe (Koji Yakusho), who’s investigating a series of inexplicable murders. In each case, a seemingly ordinary citizen gruesomely kills someone close to them, with no motivation and no memory of committing the crime. Tanabe is chasing a ghost, and “Cure” crackles with the paranoia of standing in an empty room where you feel a presence you cannot see. The sound design in the movie is fantastic, the editing cold and sharp. Overcast colors dominate the film, and Kurosawa uses clinical wide shots to create a sense of dissociation, as if the viewer is watching their own actions from far away. At the same time, the violence is immediate and bloody and the stakes are very high, creating a hot-and-cold sensation that’s at its most thrilling in a series of interrogation scenes where one wrong word could lead to death. —KR

“The Blair Witch Project” (dirs. Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)

The cleverly deceitful marketing campaign that turned co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s first feature into one of the most profitable movies since “Deep Throat” was designed to goad people into assuming “The Blair Witch Project” was real (the trickery involved the use of something called a “website”). And it did just that for a while. Even after Artisan Entertainment acquired the micro-budget movie for distribution at the Sundance Film Festival, the cast avoided public appearances in order to preserve the illusion that three students actually ventured into the Maryland woods to make a documentary about a local legend, and were never heard from again.

The terror of “the footage” derived from watching the almost pathologically ambitious Heather (Heather Donahue) begin to deteriorate as she and her and her crew members Josh (Joshua Leonard) and Mike (Michael C. Williams) get lost in the forest. Our disbelief was effectively suppressed by a DYI aesthetic that interspersed low-quality video with 16mm testimonials, each giving validity to the nonfiction concept in their own way. Yet, the fascinating operation behind how this footage was created — with the actors filming each other without the directors around and following instructions left for them at specific points in the location during the intense eight days of shooting — blurs the lines between truth and fabrication even more.

No supernatural being or predator enters a single frame of this visually economical affair, but the committed turns of its stars as they descend into madness, along with the piercing sounds of horrific events that we’re forced to imagine in lieu of seeing them for ourselves, are still more than sufficient to instill a visceral fear. “It’s not quite reality,” says Josh as he points the camera at Heather halfway through the deadly ordeal, a tongue-in-cheek statement that seems to describe what the fictional characters have captured, as well as the entirety of a unique genre experiment that still proves eerier than any of the countless knock-offs that came in its wake. —CA

“Eve’s Bayou” (dir. Kasi Lemmons, 1997)

Set in an affluent Black community in ’60s-era Louisiana, Kasi Lemmons’ 1997 debut begins with a regal artfulness that builds to an experimental gothic crescendo, even as it reverberates with an almost “Rashomon”-like relationship to the subjectivity of truth. That uncertainty starts with the very first words we hear from Jurnee Smollett’s young protagonist, Eve Batiste: “Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain. The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old.” 

The film that follows spans the story of that summer, during which Eve comes of age through a series of brutal lessons that force her to confront the fact that her family — and her broader community beyond them — are not who childish folly had led her to believe. Lemmons’ grounds “Eve’s Bayou” in Creole history, mythology and magic all while assembling an astonishing group of Black actresses including Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, and the late-great Diahann Carroll to create a cinematic matriarchy that holds righteous judgement over the weakness of men, who are in turn are still performed with enthralling complexity by the likes of Samuel L. Jackson and Roger Gueunveur Smith. For a film of such intricate gender, racial, and sexual politics, the choice to focus it through the lens of a child gives the film an innate warmth (even at its cruelest), and keeps the plot machinations on the right side of melodrama. Throughout it all, Smollett gives an extraordinary performance that belies her age, grounding the far-reaching tragedy around her while gradually building to the bittersweet catharsis she earns for Eve by the end. —LL

“Saving Private Ryan” (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1998)