If the blockbuster movie was born in the 1970s, then the 90s was the decade it became fully realised, with the advent of CGI powering a string of glossy disaster movies and action flicks. Dinosaurs, aliens, asteroids, Titanic and Will Smith changed the medium for good. With an increasingly expensive mainstream – bigger hits, needing bigger budgets – the lower budget cult movie was allowed to flourish outside it.
But, what defines a 90s cult movie? It’s a broad church, and there are huge smashes of previous decades that would probably have felt like cult movies if they’d come out in the 90s. “Cult” doesn’t mean wilfully obscure or impenetrably arthouse. But they were, at the least, films that swam outside the blockbuster world; films happy to find their own audience rather than tap into the general blob of ever more amusement-park-ride-like commercial cinema.
It was a good decade for auteur film-makers. And it was one in which serious works of global film connected with western cinephiles who’d simply lost interest in the big domestic hits of the day.
It’s not always easy to find these smaller-but-just-as-mighty productions these days, but thankfully BFI Player has dozens available on subscription – such as these nine, any of which might be your new favourite movie …
Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)
Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust earns its place in history by dint of being the first feature film by an African American woman to receive a release in North American cinemas. But that’s mere trivia in the face of the movie itself, a lush, non-linear, dreamlike depiction of three generations of Gullah women as they weigh up departure from their isolated island off the coast of Georgia. There’s still nothing quite like it, though it was said to be a huge influence on Beyonce’s Lemonade visual album.
Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993)
Mike Leigh has remained one of British cinema’s great constants: he had a fine 90s that yielded several classics including 1996’s bona fide smash Secrets & Lies. The connoisseur’s choice, though, is Naked, which made a star of David Thewlis who plays Johnny, a conspiracy theory-spouting intellectual who wanders the streets of east London getting into an endless series of scrapes in a dark tragicomedy that some have described as Leigh’s Hamlet.
La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995)
While the gangster flick was enjoying a resurgence in Britain, something altogether more unsettling was bubbling up from the streets of Paris. Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (The Hatred) follows a trio of small-time criminal friends as they spend an aimless day and night wandering through a rough Parisian suburb. Gripping and violent, it’s a bleakly effective window on France’s deep-rooted social divisions.
Welcome II the Terrordome (Ngozi Onwurah, 1995)
Ngozi Onwurah’s bleak, inventive dystopia about a failed state future Britain where Black people live in a bizarre ghetto called Transdean – AKA the Terrordome – was initially met with bafflement: it didn’t exactly chime with the optimistic mood of the era. Thirty years on, however, and Welcome II the Terrordome looks unnervingly prescient.
Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)
David Cronenberg’s mid-decade masterpiece tops the BFI’s 90 best films of the 90s list, and that’s a handy place to start because actually describing Crash is a little tricky. An erotic thriller of sorts – but far from glitzy decade staples like Basic Instinct or Showgirls – the James Spader and Holly Hunter-led film concerns a couple in an open marriage who fall in with a cultlike group of car crash fetishists. The result is an unsettling collision of sex, violence, technology and – in a more literal sense – cars, which still stands as one of the most singular films to come out of that decade or any other.
Trees Lounge (Steve Buscemi, 1996)
Though his career has long outlasted the decade, Steve Buscemi is the quintessential 90s character actor, a Zelig-like presence in everything from Reservoir Dogs to Armageddon. More obscure is his delightful debut as a writer-director: Trees Lounge is a bittersweet comedy about Tommy, an alcoholic attempting (poorly) to pull his life back together. It’s an affecting portrait of alcoholism but also an amusing slice of New York City life, blessed with fine performances from – among many others – fellow 90s titans Samuel L Jackson and Chloë Sevigny.
Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998)
Just 80 frantic minutes long, Tom Tykwer’s idiosyncratic German language thriller Run Lola Run follows Franka Potente’s flame haired Lola as she charges around Berlin frantically trying to replace the money her criminal boyfriend has just lost. The film’s hallmark is that she fails … only for the scenario to start again, with Lola seemingly aware of this and able to change her actions. There’s some interesting ideas about chaos theory and free will, but it’s a pure buzz, really, and the biggest box office hit on this list.
After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998)
Gently eccentric and luminously elegiac, this virtually unclassifiable film from Hirokazu Koreeda is set at a ramshackle way station between life and death. Every Monday the souls of the recently deceased arrive, each of them charged with making a lo-fi film about their happiest memory before being allowed to pass on. After Life centres on two of the “social workers” in the station, who assist the other souls but are not yet able to move on for reasons we slowly discover as the film wears on. A strange and lovely film, part magical realist charm, part love letter to the early days of film.
Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)
The late 90s were the beginning of a golden age for Japanese horror, with Hideo Nakata’s Ring famously scoring a big budget US remake. Takashi Miike’s Audition did not get a remake and it’s not hard to see why: teetering along a bizarre, unsettling line between feminist revenge thriller and nauseating misogyny, it’s hard to imagine Audition working in the hands of another film-maker. It follows Shigeharu, a widower who hits upon a wheeze to “audition” for a new wife via a mock TV show. But things spiral sickeningly out of control when he encounters Asami, a young woman whose references all draw blanks.
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