Look—they just made movies better in the ’90s.
While today’s landscape is crammed with sequels and remakes and endless discourse, the best films of the 1990s were, for the most part, true originals. To add to that, a good film resulted in a long relationship with it. Rather than watching something once, writing a pithy Letterboxd review, and forgetting about it within three days, ’90s films existed on love-worn VHS tapes, to be played again and again until the outfits and most quotable one-liners were practically imprinted on the brain.
While I’m not going to list every single ’90s movie worth watching—that would take an age—there are definitely a few stand-out cult classics worth returning to. Below, the best ’90s movies to watch—or rewatch—for some much-needed escapism.
Wild at Heart (1990)
What happens when you bring two weirdos together and have them star in a David Lynch film? Watch Wild at Heart to find out. The film follows lovers Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) and Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), who are separated after Sailor is jailed for killing a man who attacked him with a knife. Two years later, Lula picks him up, hands him his snakeskin jacket, and takes him to see the thrash metal band Powermad. As this is a Lynch film, explaining the rest of the plot would be a pointless exercise, but expect plentiful violence, stylish surrealism, and a road movie that’ll shock and delight in equal measure.
