The 1990s was the decade indie sensibility crashed into the mainstream, with Miramax at its peak and a new generation of directors rewriting what popular cinema could look and sound like. Pulp Fiction arguably split the decade in two, but there was plenty happening before and after it, from prestige drama to grunge-era thriller. Browse Macca's reviews from the era below.
Rating: 4.0★
There is a version of David Lynch's career that reads as a consistent exercise in the uncanny: industrial wastelands, dream logic, violence lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. Under the Skin fans will recognise that particular brand of alienating, unsettling cinema, even if Lynch had no
Rating: 3.0★
Roald Dahl's 1983 novel The Witches occupies a particular corner of children's literature: charming on the surface, genuinely alarming underneath. Dahl never much softened his edges for younger readers, and the book, with its bald premise that witches are real, hate children, and walk among us
Rating: 3.5★
By 1990, Philip K. Dick had already become one of Hollywood's more reliably plundered source authors, with Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) having set a high bar for adapting his paranoid, reality-questioning fiction. Total Recall draws from Dick's 1966 short story "We
Rating: 3.0★
By 1992, Sam Raimi had already built a reputation as one of American independent cinema's more resourceful and inventive directors, having dragged The Evil Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987) out of near-nothing budgets and into genuine cult immortality. Army of Darkness, the third instalment in
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that arrive with serious artistic intent, and then there are films that arrive wearing a Ronald Reagan rubber mask and sprinting straight at you. Point Break, released in the summer of 1991, falls very much into the second category. Written by W. Peter Iliff from a story
Rating: 2.0★
By the early 1990s, the RoboCop franchise had already begun to show the strain that comes with any Hollywood property asked to keep producing sequels beyond its natural lifespan. The original 1987 film, directed by Paul Verhoeven, was a genuinely sharp piece of work: a satirical, R-rated skewering of
Rating: 3.5★
By 1990, RoboCop had already earned its place as one of the more pointed pieces of science fiction cinema to come out of the previous decade. Paul Verhoeven's 1987 original was a film that used the Detroit crime wave, the rise of corporate privatisation, and Reagan-era excess
Rating: 3.5★
Jeffrey Eugenides published his debut novel The Virgin Suicides in 1993 to considerable critical attention, praised for its unusual collective narration and its unflinching portrait of suburban American grief. It took a few years to make the journey to the screen, but when it did, the adaptation landed in the
Rating: 2.5★
By the early 1990s, Jean-Claude Van Damme had carved out a reliable niche for himself in the action market. His 1988 breakthrough Bloodsport had turned him from a Brussels-born martial arts hopeful into a genuine box-office name, and Columbia Pictures were understandably keen to keep the momentum
Rating: 2.5★
By the mid-1990s, Disney's theatrical animation division was riding one of the most celebrated winning streaks in the studio's history. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King had redefined what audiences expected from a Disney release: sweeping scores, polished visuals,
Rating: 4.5★
Few events in twentieth-century history carry the weight of the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944, and relatively few filmmakers had attempted to render them on screen with any serious commitment to their horror before Steven Spielberg arrived with Saving Private Ryan in the summer of 1998. The
Rating: 3.0★
Jean-Pierre Bekolo arrived at Aristotle's Plot as one of the more provocative voices to emerge from Francophone African cinema in the early 1990s. His debut feature, Quartier Mozart (1992), had already marked him out as a filmmaker more interested in subverting genre conventions than playing it safe,
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free