Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)įew films infiltrate the collective American psyche quite the way Forrest Gump managed. The film may nominally be about Burnham’s obsession with the titular Angela Hayes, but its real message is that a more powerful beauty can be found in unexpected places. This is the story of Lester Burnham’s complete journey from imprisoned office worker to carefree teenager to enlightened adult, although each character undergoes a similar transformation. Although Ball originally intended it for the stage, director Sam Mendes made the film intensely personal for each character, adding the kind of emotional heft that only a film-when expertly executed-can provide. Screenwriter Alan Ball mined his experience as an unsatisfied member of the television industry to pen American Beauty-a beautiful meditation on the hollowness of American suburbia and its materialism.

But we just couldn’t resist sharing with you some of the fun we had in reminiscing about one of our favorite decades in film history. There are gaping holes, to be sure (even with a dozen nations on the list, foreign films are highly underrepresented, for instance). So what follows is a very unscientific gathering of the approximate collective opinions of our editors and film critics on the best movies of the 1990s.

Or maybe it’s just that we all have a soft spot in our hearts for our post-college-era movies. Maybe it was the emergence of the New World Order (certainly the fall of Communism was directly responsible for Krzysztof Kieslowski, among many others, to do his finest work). Maybe it was the birth of the modern American indie film movement, led by Steven Soderbergh and Richard Linklater, that produced such an explosion of memorable movies in the decade. But even just my personal worksheet of no-brainers for the Best 90 Movies of the 1990s added up to over 100 films-not to mention everyone else’s exhaustive picks. You’d think that narrowing down a list of the Top 90 films of any decade would be relatively painless. It was shocking just how difficult the task was.

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