Join us in our decade-based film retrospective, as we delve backwards all the way from 2009 to 1910. Most decade-based best movie lists grant you a whooping 50-100 entries, which makes perfect sense given all the years you have to take into consideration. But what if you were defining a decade in just ten films? Which movies would you recommend to somebody who might only watch a handful from a given decade? This week, join us as we look back at the Nineties.
The further we seem to move away from the Nineties, the better it seems to appear as a decade for filmmaking. And as you delve deeply into its rich canon, you begin to realise that this is a ten-year period that has truly defined the stylistic tendencies still clinging to cinema today. Here, after all, was where cinematic post-modernism began to make a name for itself, where irony and genre deconstruction thrived, and where audiences were treated to narrative innovation and sequences of sexual and violent realism like they’d never seen before.
The Nineties changed the scene. This is where some of today’s best directors like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson moved in to take the reigns from masters like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Is this cinema’s coolest decade? That’s arguable, though many might reserve such a tag for the Seventies. But for its hipness, its willingness to experiment, to tackle narrative in new and interest ways, and with CGI finally coming full circle in ways we might’ve never dreamed, the Nineties is a period to be treasured: Here’s our pick of its ten best films.
