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: 3.5★
There is a very specific, hazy nostalgia to the airwaves of 1970s suburban America, and Sofia Coppola bottles that exact feeling perfectly in her 1999 directorial debut. From the very first frame, you are enveloped by a cracking supporting soundtrack and the melancholic, omniscient narration of Giovanni Ribisi, voicing the
Rating: 2.5★
Two Jean-Claude Van Dammes do not, in fact, make a right. That is the hard-won conclusion I arrived at somewhere around the midpoint of Double Impact, a 1991 action vehicle built on a premise so wonderfully absurd that you have to admire the sheer, unadulterated audacity of it.
Rating: 2.5★
When a film sits in Letterboxd's top 250 animations of all time, you go in expecting something. A hidden gem, maybe. A stroke of forgotten genius that somehow slipped past you in childhood. So I finally ticked off Kevin Lima's A Goofy Movie, fully prepared to
Rating: 4.5★
The Omaha Beach sequence. Twenty-seven minutes of controlled chaos that still has the power to leave you genuinely shaking. I went back to Saving Private Ryan recently to see whether it held up after all this time, and the honest answer is: almost entirely, yes. From the moment that
Rating: 3.0★
If you've ever stumbled across Who Killed Captain Alex? and found yourself completely won over by the sheer, unbridled enthusiasm of Wakaliwood cinema, then Jean-Pierre Bekolo's 1996 Cameroonian/Zimbabwean oddity Aristotle's Plot is going to feel like a surprisingly polished cousin of that
Rating: 2.0★
There's a sound in Little Angel, Make Me Happy that will haunt me, and not in any good way. A high-pitched whistle, thin and relentless, drones across practically every outdoor scene like a frequency no one in post-production could be bothered to fix. It's
Rating: 3.0★
Here's a confession that probably undermines any claim I have to serious horror credibility: I watched Gore Verbinski's American remake of The Ring years before I ever sat down with Hideo Nakata's original. The remake absolutely terrified me at the time, burrowed deep into
Rating: 2.5★
There's something genuinely stirring about sitting down with a film that carries the weight of a nation's entire cinematic identity on its shoulders. The Island of Contenda holds the remarkable distinction of being the very first feature film both set in and produced entirely by native
1990s
Some films exist purely to make you grin like an idiot, and The Mummy is one of them. There's a moment early on where Brendan Fraser's Rick O'Connell, outnumbered, outgunned, and about to be executed in the middle of the desert, still manages to
Rating: 4.0★
That final frame. I'm not going to describe it, I'm not going to hint at it, I'm just going to tell you that it stopped me cold. In a single, perfectly held image, A Moment of Innocence earns everything that came before it, including
Rating: 3.0★
Batman Forever is a weird one. There's no getting around it. Joel Schumacher's 1995 outing represents such a massive tonal departure from the brooding, gothic pictures Tim Burton gave us that you almost feel like you've wandered into a completely different franchise. Gone is
Rating: 3.0★
There's a version of Batman Returns that could've been one of the great superhero films. Tim Burton, coming off the back of his brilliant 1989 original, reunited with Michael Keaton and went darker, weirder, stranger. All the ingredients are there. And yet, sitting down to rewatch
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