1990: A Year In Cinema

it was not a year in cinema.

it was a GREAT year in cinema.

Kindergarten Cop is one of my favorite childhood films. Truly ridiculous but very watchable.

"Not so tough without your car, are ya!?"

This is an underrated gem from that year: The Long Walk Home

Some of the most embarrassing, cheesy films ever released grace that list. I have to admit that as a 9/10 yoa kid - I loved both Total Recall and Flatliners and I was super excited when my father took me to see that bore-fest Dances with Wolves (not so excited after sitting through it however). In retrospect, the year did give us some epic films - Goodfellas and Misery to name a couple. Wild at Heart and Edward Scissorhands hold up amazingly as "art house" classics.

1990 favorites: The Grifters, Misery, Kindergarten Cop, Alice, Edward Scissorhands, Postcards from the Edge, Goodfellas, Exorcist III, I Love You to Death, Wild at Heart, A Killing in a Small Town, The Queen of Mean, The Witches, La Femme Nikita, Tremors, Night of the Living Dead, Home Alone, Long Walk Home, and Pump Up the Volume.

r3 is why I love Datalounge. It's shocking how The Long Walk Home was - and continues to be - overlooked. Forget The Help. This film is 1000 times better.

Although Whoopi won for Best Supporting Actress for Ghost she was equally worthy for this film and Sissy Spacek was just as worthy.

Richard Gere became a box office star again with Pretty Woman but Internal Affairs is one of his best performances (and he was so hot with the salt and pepper hair).

Men Don't Leave is one of Jessica Lange's best performances.

Anjelica Huston was a tour de force in both The Witches and The Grifters.

Michael Caine gave one of his best performances in A Shock to the System.

The Freshman and Quick Change were very clever comedies.

Wasn’t “Dead Again” 1990?

Love that movie.

1990 was not a great year for film or music

Postcards From The Edge. Loosely based on terrific book of Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher's relationship. So many great things in one film. The cast. Meryl , who said her character in the film was the closest role she'd had to playing herself. Shirley, so funny and she gets to sing "I'm Still Here" from Follies with special lyrics written for her by Sondheim. Dennis Quaid, sexy and funny as her cad bf, and a shower scene! With Gene Hackman, Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Reiner, Annette Bening and a slew of classic character actors. Such a great script with so many quotable lines. So dark and funny, every scene moving and charming. A love letter to LA, Hollywood, and the mother and daughter caught in between. Directed by the great Mike Nichols. And the dvd and blu ray have a fascinating commentary by Carrie Fisher. A must! MUST!

Few great films but a lot of entertaining ones.

Entertaining, The Witches, Goodfellas, The Hunt For Red October, Reversal Of Fortune, Mermaids, Crybaby, and Wild At Heart.

iconic

Watched Wild at Heart last night. What a trip. Diane Ladd and Willem Dafoe were amazing and stole the movie from Cage and Dern.

Underrated Gem that was quickly forgotten

It made a whopping $300k opening weekend

I loved "Dances with Wolves" even though I thought I'd hate it. Go figure.

I love it, too r16. It gets so much hate because it won over Scorsese's Goodfellas. Goodfellas is the superior film in my opinion but I still really appreciate Dances with Wolves. The score by John Barry is stunning and one of his best.

It's interesting how in 1980 and actor-turned-director won both Best Picture and Best Director (Robert Redford for Ordinary People) over Scorsese (Raging Bull) and ten years later the same scenario with Costner over Scorsese.

Wow, can't remember a recent year with such a variety and large number of fantastic films.

yuck!

R19

G did that wonderful coma movie Reversal of Fortune. I always tell her to do more films where she is in a coma. It is her strong suit.

They don’t make movies like this anymore. It’s a shame.

What a terrible year for movies. They were ALL dreck.

Goodfellas is still an incredibly watchable movie.

Definitely not a year of dreck.

Thought I have to say Total Recall hasn't aged well.

But Total Recall is, if anything, fun. It's almost cartoonish.

The Grifters is one of my all-time faves.

The late 80s and early 90s were by and large a low point in film. Things got a lot better in the late 90s. ‘97 and especially ‘99 were great years.

I do agree about The Long Walk Home though. And actually Reversal of Fortune is a great movie — and I love The Freshman.

Silence of the lambs

LMFAO @ Dances with the Wolves winning. Goodfellas should have won, no question. Wild at Heart is a movie I watched when I was going through my David Lynch phase. It's really good on the first viewing or two but I feel like it gets weaker every time I revisit it. Strangely, the only other Lynch movie I feel that way about is Mulholland Drive.

The entire nineties decade was bookended by two great years of film (1990 and 1999), IMO. Quality varies quite a bit in the middle there though.

Silence of the Lambs is 1991, not 1990.

Came out at Christmas 1990

Sorry it was 1991. I’m old forgive me

Mermaids is my most watched movie from This year totally under-rated. Although it seems more 1991 than 1990 ( it came out december 1990)

I remember Siskel and Ebert said 1993 was the best year in film since the '70s.

R35 some trivia: I went with my mom and sister to see both Mermaids and Alice on Xmas Day. Alice sucked.

R36 I definitely don’t agree with that; but you could certainly make that argument for ‘99.

R36 what about 1994? Shawshank, Pulp Fiction, baby’s day out, The Usual Suspects, Forrest Gump etc

Crazy to think how many original movies are on that list. Comedies, romances — not all sci-fi/superhero shit. And only two sequels. Wow.

Baby's Day Out defined the '90s.

No movie in 1990 was as classic as Dunstin Checks In. Faye Dunaway felt at home with Dunstin.

That bitch was bananas.

"Definitely not a year of dreck."

All the movies the OP mentioned were dreck. "Dances With Wolves", which won the Best Picture Oscar, is now considered an undeserving piece of shit. And all the others: Ghost, Pretty Woman, Home Alone, etc., were all popular, trivial, worthless movies. It was a movie year filled with garbage.

R41 Didn't Faye fall into a giant cake in that movie?

Also Dick Tracy and Gremlins 2 were released the same day. Both are classics.

1989 and 1991 were pretty spectacular too. It’s because you had the 1970s-1980s film crowd making Amazing films. Ghost was the first real movie from one of the directors of Airplane.

Also it was before the aids crisis had taken its full toll on Hollywood. I think there’s a reason the mid to late 1990s were so ugly and dark on film

1993/1994 are my favorite years for both movies and music but 1990 was great too. I have really fond memories of my family and I seeing Ghost, Ghost Dad (with Bill Cosby) and Rocky V in the theater. Dont laugh at the selections, I was nine years old.

It's easy to hate Dances with Wolves w/o even considering Goodfellas or the Oscars. Kostner is a terrible actor, the film is usual white guy learns from (fill-in the blank) and is the focus rather than the learning. It's morable only for Kostner's ass.

R47 Costner is only attractive to straight women and femme Baby Boomer Queens.

R46 Ghost Dad is a guilty favorite of mine, so i won't laugh.

1990 was a year of movies made for future cable TV reruns.

Goodfellas and The Grifters were the only good films.

OP's list is dreck.

r50 Pls share a list of your favorite movies just for reference. And pls point to a year that you think exemplifies the best work of Hollywood cinema.

R51: I'll explain by staying within OP's year and suggesting a few titles [bold]not[/bold] on OP's list that are much better choices for me:

Miller's Crossing

The Grifters

Goodfellas

Jacob's Ladder

Europa, Europa

The Comfort of Strangers

I prefer any of these to any in OP's initial list, but then I rarely like the most popular films of any year. (And no, I don't want to pick from the best biggest box office Hollywood films, that's a different question from what the title suggested )

Europa, Europa and The Comfort of Strangers are very good films. Thankfully, Criterion released the former on Blu-Ray and was rumoured to be issuing the latter but I haven't heard anything. Rupert Everett was so gorgeous in it and all four leads were excellent. Creepy film.

Also, another Natasha Richardson (RIP) film from 1990 - not perfect but still good was The Handmaid's Tale. Faye Dunaway had a good supporting role in it.

Does anyone remember this piece of crap?

I remember it R54, but I don't remember what the heck it was about. Over the years, I've always thought of Stella as the movie that isn't Beaches. Wasn't Trini Alvarado in it?

R55 Yes. She played Bette's daughter.

Stella made no sense. What worked in the 30s didn't work in the 80s or 90s.

Stella's martyrdom was hilarious.

I've seen everything twice. Except Bonfire of the Vanities. Woof!

Amazing how Tom Hanks started off the decade with two flops - Joe Versus the Volcano and Bonfire of the Vanities - and ended being one of the biggest stars of the decade, winning two consecutive Oscars.

1992 is another fun year for films.

R61 Basically the entire 90’s decade was good for Cinema.

Threads inactive for more than 1 year should not be bumpable.

It's great that old threads are there, but if someone wants to follow up on a topic from the distant past, let him create a new thread and reference the dead one within it.

(Or carry on as currently, but auto-translate the text into Russian).

Oops. Misplaced post at R63

An amazing amount of schlock was released that year. The only films I'd watch again are Goodfellas, The Grifters, Edward Scissorhands, Metropolitan, Avalon, Henry & June, Miller's Crossing, Postcards from the Edge, Jacob's Ladder, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, The Sheltering Sky, The Comfort of Strangers, Longtime Companion, The Long Walk Home, and Europa, Europa. Okay, maybe it wasn't such a bad year after all.

Oh, shit. I forgot Longtime Companion.

Am I the only person who liked White Huner, Black Heart?

Can't even think of a dozen great films released in 2019. Some were passable but nothing I could see holding up years from now. 1990 had a little bit of everything.

Home Alone was one of those lightning in a bottle films where everything would suggest that it would be terrible but everything came together. Perfect casting, perfect score by John Williams, released at the perfect time, etc.

I did a 1990 Oscars double feature tonight, watching Misery and Reversal of Fortune. The first was a fun popcorn flick. I didn’t understand at the time why Kathy Bates won over Anjelica Huston’s superior performance in The Grifters, and I still don’t. I can only assume that the Academy wasn’t quite ready for Huston to be a two-time winner.

Reversal of Fortune holds up beautifully. It’s a marvelous film, and Jeremy Irons was delicious and a very worthy Oscar winner. What puzzled me then and now was how Glenn Close was completely overlooked, awards wise, for what I thought was her second greatest performance, after Dangerous Liaisons. She was fantastic. It may have been category confusion, as her role felt too small to be lead and too large to be supporting. I hadn’t realized until I rewatched tonight that Felicity Huffman played a key role—this was very early in her career.

So many great films - I was itching for something I hadn’t seen in a while.

R9 reminded me I hadn’t seen Postcards since it was in theaters.

Got it going only to rediscover the second scene with Suzanne (Meryl) as Carrie.

Shocking to realize this incident that Suzanne survived is actually how Carrie ended up dying.

R70 Misery was a Hollywood movie. The Grifters was an indie that caught fire. Misery was probably watched by twice as many Academy voters. Annie Wilkes was a flashier role. Anjelica Houston was also Hollywood royalty and got an Oscar a few years earlier (for a role I have no idea why it was recognized). Kathy Bates was a respected stage actress so more of a story to give her a best actress oscar, kind of like Olivia Coleman last year.

Plus, the ending of the The Grifters is so upsetting, dark, and disturbing that it probably turned off a lot of viewers, despite the fact it was designed to evoke those unsettling emotions. Misery has a happy ending. The academy, which has gotten massively more diverse in the past 15 years, used to be made up mainly of old white men and most probably didn't have a college education. They had very, very simple tastes.

Of those films- my faves are Presumed Innocent and Home Alone.. followed in a distant 3rd by Misery.

Could care less about the rest of them..

Wasn't 1990 the year of Goodfellas?????? That is my favorite, of course.

And The Grifters!!!! YES!

Surprised no-one has mentioned Paris Is Burning. Remember loving this when it first came out.

Whoa, R75. I had no idea Paris is Burning was 1990. Jennie Livingston was really waaay ahead of the times. It's a must-see, absolute classic.

I love Goodfellas! I just wanted to sit with all of those mob wives and get the tea. I found Ray Liotta so handsome in that film.

Did anyone else have their childhood scarred by this film?

1990 does not stick in my memory. 1993, however, was one of the better years for movies. A mix of lighter and heavier movies.

The Age of Innocence

A Bronx Tale

Dave

Dazed and Confused

The Fugitive

Groundhog Day

In the Name of the Father

King of the Hill

Manhattan Murder Mystery

Mrs. Doubtfire

Naked

Orlando

Philadelphia

The Piano

The Remains of the Day

Schindler’s List

Shadowlands

Six Degrees of Separation

Sleepless in Seattle

This Boy’s Life

Three Colors: Blue

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

In addition to Paris is Burning, there were a handful of genuinely great 1990 films (in my opinion, of course):

1) Truly, Madly, Deeply. Anthony Minghella directs Alan Rickman at the top of his game as a cellist who dies prematurely, then returns to haunt (or perhaps it's her imagination?) his bereft wife, Juliet Stevenson. It's literate, moving, and funny. Ebert called it "Ghost for grownups.

2) Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Just a great example of mid-career Almodovar (& Banderas)

3) Metropolitan - Love or hate him, Whit Stillman's debut is a fascinating period piece. Upper crust Manhattan teenagers who know they're closing out an era, talk (and talk) in multiclausal sentences, and have opinions on Fourierism vs Marxism.

4) To Sleep with Anger - Charles Burnett's magical realism meets black LA family drama with classic western overtones. It's so good the Library of Congress chose it for the National Film Registry. A remastered version came out last year.

5) Last but hardly least, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Tom Stoppard writing & directing Tim Roth and Gary Oldman in one of the best films of any year or decade.

So Goodfellas vs Godfather (taken as I and II) what do we vote? Or maybe it should be a separate poll/thread.

R81 I vote Goodfellas and Casino all day over The Godfather. They are all good, but the Scorsese films are more realistic and gritty.

R82 I generally agree, although the ending to Godfather II is devastating. I’m not sure any moment in the Scorsese gangster oeuvre quite reaches that level/ has an impact of that magnitude. That said, I can hardly sit thru Part II anymore (especially with all the flashbacks). The Scorsese movies fly by.

R83 I think that’s the major difference right there. You hit on it when you talk about the end of GF2, when Michael is all alone. Those films are more Greek tragedy than actual mafia epic. They deal more with family and the characters than what the mafia or organized crime actually is. Vito is the people’s don. He is loved and feared. Michael has gone full Darth Vader and is loved by few. He trusts no one and pushes them all away or destroys them. The Scorsese films rake elements from true crime and really get into the life and what these people do. There is no romanticizing it. It’s a scary world where you can’t even trust your friends. And you’re 100% correct that his films don’t seem like 160 minutes.

Boys In the Hood is the best movie of the 90s

I still remember seeing GoodFellas at a theater on the west side, I forget which. It was stunningly good.

I love both Goodfellas and The first two Godfather movies. But I really do have to be in the right mood to watch the Godfather movies, especially the second one. The Godfather movies are deeper but Goodfellas is masterclass filmmaking. There is no wasted scene in the entire movie. And it gave us like half the actors in The Sopranos. The Sopranos is has the depth and darkness of Goodfellas with the humor and grit of Goodfellas, just in a different way.

R85, Agree that Boys N the Hood was a landmark, but it was released in 1991. There's a separate thread for best films of the 90s as a decade.

bump

Watched Dick Tracy again and was surprised at how well it holds up. Beautiful visuals. Al Pacino's overacting was put to good use. Glenne Headley was absolutely charming. She is missed. Madonna's performance is much better than I remember.