1990 signaled a brand-new decade of films and, appropriately, it was an absolute banner year for the movies. From blockbusters, cult classics, unsung gems and beyond, the first year of the new decade had enough films to fill out more than a dozen lists for internet commenters to argue over.
Arachnophobia, Awakenings, Jacob's Ladder, Kindergarten Cop, King of New York, Miller's Crossing and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are just some of the beloved movies that won't be able to fit on this particular list but deserve their reputations all the same. It was a year stuffed with an overwhelming quantity of quality, so set the Wayback Machine to Nineteen Hundred and Ninety and hit play on the VCR for these ten essential movies.
10 'Pretty Woman' (1990)
Directed by Garry Marshall
Rom-coms were legion in the 90s and Julia Roberts was the undisputed queen of the subgenre. The actress kicked off the decade with Pretty Woman, cementing her A-list status and bringing her major awards recognition. While the plot, involving a wealthy businessman who pays an escort to be his exclusive companion for a week, was originally written to be a grittier drama (something akin to a 90s Anora), the producers decided to lighten the tone into a romantic comedy similar to My Fair Lady.
That tonal shift didn't necessarily do the movie any favors with critics, who took the film to task for applying a Hollywood gloss to the reality of life for sex workers, but the film was a massive box office hit because of it. A lot of that success is due to the chemistry between Roberts and Richard Gere, with the two megawatt stars giving all their charm and energy to the roles. That energy certainly carried the film over its more questionable elements, and it ultimately served as an entrée to the absolute meal that the 90s were for Roberts' career.
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Pretty Woman
R
RomanceComedy
- Release Date
- March 23, 1990
- Runtime
- 119 minutes
- Director
- Garry Marshall
- Writers
- J.F. Lawton
WHERE TO WATCH
Streaming
9 'Ghost' (1990)
Directed by Jerry Zucker
If there was one romance in 1990 that eclipsed Pretty Woman, it was the supernatural one between Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in Ghost. Most audiences may only be aware of the film's iconic pottery scene thanks to cultural osmosis, but the film was an absolute juggernaut at the box office, outperforming many other major releases and ultimately becoming the highest-grossing film of the year. The film marked the first solo effort for director Jerry Zucker, who was known for his spoof comedies Airplane! and The Naked Gun, which he'd co-directed with his brother David Zucker and Jim Abrahams.
Patrick Swayze, in one of his best performances, stars as a banker who is murdered during an apparent mugging and remains on Earth to solve his murder and protect his girlfriend, communicating through a fake medium played by Whoopi Goldberg, who won an Oscar for her comedic supporting performance. It's a completely cornball concept, and it's presented under a thick sheen of late 80s/early 90s aesthetics, but the mash-up of genres makes it far more watchable than some other rom-coms from the same era and the performances are all completely earnest.
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Ghost
PG-13
Drama FantasyMystery
Romance Thriller- Release Date
- July 13, 1990
- Runtime
- 127 minutes
- Director
- Jerry Zucker
- Writers
- Bruce Joel Rubin
WHERE TO WATCH
Streaming
RENT
BUY
8 'Home Alone' (1990)
Directed by Chris Columbus
The highest-grossing films of 1990 are evidence enough of the massive changes that the Hollywood system has undergone in the past several decades. In addition to the aforementioned romances, the other film that filled out the top three films of the year was Home Alone, a family comedy centered on a young boy left alone at Christmas who must defend his home from would-be robbers. It's a comedy with broad appeal that started a major franchise, the most recent entry of which was unceremoniously dumped on streaming, though that might have more to do with it being one of the worst Christmas movies ever made.
John Hughes' script is an essential midpoint in his career, mixing the smart, edgier humor of his 80s career with the more kid-centric slapstick that would dominate his 90s output, and director Chris Columbus jumpstarted his own directorial career with visuals that fully lean into the holiday setting, which elevated the film into an annually revisited Christmas watch. The performances are broad but undeniably funny, with Catherine O'Hara, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern and John Candy (in a fully improvised cameo) particular highlights, but Macaulay Culkin is the beating heart of the film, giving one of the most iconic child performances of any decade.
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Home Alone
PG
Comedy
Family
- Release Date
- November 16, 1990
- Runtime
- 103 minutes
- Director
- Chris Columbus
- Writers
- John Hughes
WHERE TO WATCH
Streaming
RENT
BUY
7 'Misery' (1990)
Directed by Rob Reiner
Stephen King pretty much defined 80s horror cinema, with the author's name basically a guarantor of box office success, and the 90s weren't unkind to him either. While non-horror efforts like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile were the most prominent of the decade's adaptations, it started out with one of the most horrific movies based on King's work with the Rob Reiner-directed Misery.
Reiner had previous success in adapting King with the coming-of-age film Stand By Me, but he took his only turn into horror with the story of author Paul Sheldon, played by James Caan, who crashes his car in a snowstorm and finds himself bedridden in the home of his most obsessed fan Annie Wilkes, played by Kathy Bates in an Oscar-winning performance. It's a two-handed horror with Caan and Bates playing expertly off each other and Reiner proving he can elicit scares just as well as he can laughs.
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Misery
R
Horror Thriller Drama- Release Date
- November 30, 1990
- Runtime
- 107 minutes
- Director
- Rob Reiner
- Writers
- William Goldman
WHERE TO WATCH
RENT
BUY
6 'Total Recall' (1990)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Arnold Schwarzenegger had two major films released in 1990, both placing in the top ten highest grossing films of the year, with the Ivan Reitman comedy Kindergarten Cop and the Paul Verhoeven sci-fi classic Total Recall. Schwarzenegger was instrumental in getting the film made, putting his star power behind it to push it through development and attaching Verhoeven as director because of his love for his previous film RoboCop.
Adapted from a Philip K. Dick short story, writers Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon supercharged the plot of a regular joe who discovers his memories have been erased into a pure Schwarzenegger vehicle, adding buckets of bullets and action setpieces that take full advantage of the Mars setting. Verhoeven brings his trademark ultraviolence and sexual content to the proceedings, making Total Recall one of the most essential sci-fi films of the 90s.
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Total Recall
R
Sci-Fi
Thriller Action9.5/10
- Release Date
- June 1, 1990
- Runtime
- 113 minutes
WHERE TO WATCH
Streaming
RENT
BUY
5 'Edward Scissorhands' (1990)
Directed by Tim Burton
Coming out of the 80s, hot off the thrilling success of Batman, Tim Burton made one of his most original and personal films with the visually stunning Edward Scissorhands. The gothic romance was another hit for Burton, and also began his long-running professional relationship with Johnny Depp, who played the title character, an artificial man built by a scientist, played by Vincent Price in his final film role, with scissor blades in place of fleshy digits.
Depp was desperate to shake his teen idol status he had been labeled with from his role on the popular television series 21 Jump Street, and the soft-spoken Edward, who finds himself out of sorts in the suburbs after being taken in by Dianne Weist's Avon lady, had the desired effect. Alongside Winona Ryder, the two fulfilled another of Burton's iconic gothic couples that were printed on half the t-shirts in Hot Topic in the 00s.
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Edward Scissorhands
PG-13
Romance Fantasy Drama- Release Date
- December 14, 1990
- Runtime
- 105 minutes
- Director
- Tim Burton
- Writers
- Caroline Thompson
WHERE TO WATCH
Streaming
4 'Dances with Wolves' (1990)
Directed by Kevin Costner
The early 90s saw Westerns reclaim some of their former box office glory, and that is almost entirely due to the success of Kevin Costner's directorial debut Dances With Wolves. The film was a massive hit and, controversially, won Best Picture and Director at the Academy Awards, which kicked open the saloon doors for further Western hits like Tombstone and Unforgiven. The film struggles with many of the same issues that the genre is known for, notably inaccuracies in its portrayal of the Lakota people, but also made major strides towards trying to correct the racist depictions of indigenous cultures that had dominated in Westerns for a long time.
Costner plays a Union soldier who is awarded a position at an outpost far out on the frontier, where he finds himself alone after the deaths of his compatriots and must befriend the Sioux tribe near to him if he hopes to survive. Costner had issues getting the film financed, as most studios viewed it as a project with few financial prospects but his persistence paid off when the film was released to rapturous acclaim. The white savior narrative hasn't aged well, but the film is still a major milestone in the genre that has a grandeur that even Costner's most recent Westerns haven't been able to recapture.
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Dances With Wolves
PG-13
AdventureDocumentary
Drama RomanceWestern
- Release Date
- March 30, 1990
- Runtime
- 181 minutes
- Director
- Kevin Costner
- Writers
- Michael Blake
WHERE TO WATCH
Streaming
3 'The Grifters' (1990)
Directed by Stephen Frears
The impeccably cast neo-noir The Grifters was adapted from Jim Thompson's novel by fellow crime writer Donald E. Westlake for producer Martin Scorsese, who brought in English director Stephen Frears. Despite multiple awards nominations, and some of the best reviews of the year, the film remains undervalued among the major crime movies released in 1990.
John Cusack, transitioning out of his own teen idol phase, plays a young hustler who finds himself caught between his con mother (Anjelica Huston) and his grifting girlfriend (Annete Bening). The plot twists and turns as the characters continually try to get one over on each other, and the film is noir at its most ruthless, offering no reprieve from the nastiness that infects the inner lives of the characters. Top-notch thrillers and crime movies dominated the 90s, and The Grifters is still one of the decade's best thanks to its sharp script and even sharper cast.
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The Grifters
R
Crime
Drama Thriller- Release Date
- January 25, 1991
- Runtime
- 110 Minutes
- Director
- Stephen Frears
- Writers
- Jim Thompson, Donald E. Westlake
WHERE TO WATCH
Streaming
RENT
BUY
2 'The Hunt for Red October' (1990)
Directed by John McTiernan
Before his career ended unceremoniously, thanks to several high-profile bombs and the little matter of him being sent to prison for wiretapping and lying to the FBI, John McTiernan was considered an S-tier action director with one of the greatest trifectas in the genre's history. McTiernan capped off his 80's with the action classics Predator and Die Hard, and he started the next decade with the Cold War classic The Hunt for Red October.
The submarine thriller was the first film adaptation of a Tom Clancy novel, and it kicked off a cinematic universe featuring the protagonist Jack Ryan, played here first by Alec Baldwin. In the film, Ryan is an analyst for the CIA who believes there is more beneath the surface of a Soviet sub-commander who has supposedly gone renegade, played by Sean Connery. McTiernan brings more tension to quiet scenes of anticipation aboard the sub and in conference room confrontations than many modern action films manage with millions of dollars of computer-generated explosions. The Hunt for Red October is a taut thriller with perfect pacing that perfectly encapsulates the end of the Cold War's impact on cinema.
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The Hunt for Red October
PG
Thriller- Release Date
- March 2, 1990
- Runtime
- 135 Minutes
- Director
- John McTiernan
- Writers
- Larry Ferguson, Donald E. Stewart
WHERE TO WATCH
Streaming
1 'Goodfellas' (1990)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas is as perfect a movie as has ever been made. From the iconic opening to one of the best gangster movie endings ever, Goodfellas is a true masterpiece of the 90s that never manages to get old. Scorsese found in Nicholas Pileggi's non-fiction book Wiseguy the perfect story for him to build the kind of gangster movie he had always wanted to make. Using real-life New York mobster Henry Hill as the focal point, the movie is an electrifying look into the mafia as they held immeasurable power over America in the 60s and 70s.
With Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci anchoring a perfect cast, Scorsese uses every filmmaking trick up his sleeve. From the narration and soundtrack to the whip-fast editing and cinematography, the movie mimics the fast-paced lifestyle of the earners of organized crime until the wheels come off as Hill's life comes crashing down around him. It's an intoxicating ride that never once makes heroes out of its violent and deplorable protagonists but shows why a life of crime would appeal to them. Goodfellas is the best film of 1990, and perhaps the whole decade.
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Goodfellas
R
DramaCrime
10/10
- Release Date
- September 19, 1990
- Runtime
- 145 minutes
WHERE TO WATCH
Streaming
RENT
BUY
