Here is a fear that I have: People who want to watch old movies take their cues from Google — and Google increasingly seems to recommend a smaller and smaller batch of films.
You Google “90s movies” and you will see the same titles over and over as you scroll: Clueless, The Truman Show, Scream, 10 Things I Hate About You, Forrest Gump, Goodfellas, Toy Story. (These are not hypothetical examples; those are literally the movies Google gave me this morning).
Those are very good movies for the most part. A movie lover interested in ’90s cinema should see those titles. But what movie lover interested in ’90s cinema hasn’t already seen them anyway?
The further the past recedes, the more an enormous collection of old films gets whittled down to just the smallest handful of “essential” classics.
What Are the Best Movies From the 1990s?
We can do better. And ’90s cinema did better too — there were so many interesting, funny, powerful, exciting films beyond the dozen or so you see on Google or lists of great ’90s movies.
Hopefully the list below of 15 overlooked ’90s movies does a little bit to fix that.
They’re arranged in descending box-office total order.
The first movie on the list did okay; not horrible by the standards of its genre, but not great, and it certainly is not regarded as one of its Oscar-winning director’s superior efforts.
The last film on the list made less than $1 million in theaters and was almost entirely forgotten until recently, when it was restored and re-released to theaters.
Which just goes to show you: It’s never too late to rediscover an overlooked film. Provided Google actually shows you pieces like this instead of those same titles you see over and over again.
Overlooked ’90s Movies That Should Have Been Bigger
These movies should have ’90s classics. Maybe they still can be.
2005 Movies That Could Never Be Made Today
These movies are only 20 years old. They almost certainly couldn’t be made today.
