13 Forgotten 90s Movies You’ll Wish You’d Seen Sooner

Taking Care of Business

1990 · Comedy · 1h 48m

A car thief breaks out of prison for World Series tickets, then borrows a stranger's life.

Escape for the Cubs

A car thief doing time wins World Series tickets by calling a radio contest from prison. The team playing is the Chicago Cubs, which back then was the least believable part of the plot. His release date is days away, but the game isn't going to wait, so he breaks out. Jim Belushi is the convict. On the way to the game he finds a lost Filofax, the leather organizer every businessman carried back then, belonging to an uptight advertising executive played by Charles Grodin. Inside is everything: the man's schedule, his credit cards, the keys to a borrowed Malibu mansion. Belushi uses it to step straight into his life, and the more he gets away with, the further he pushes it.

Grodin falls apart beautifully

Grodin gets the funnier half. Stranded without his organizer, he falls apart one step at a time, and slow-burning panic was always his specialty. Loryn Locklin turns up as Jewel in one of her very few film roles. The film was released in the UK as Filofax, which tells you how much of the plot hangs on that little leather book. Belushi never got a better showcase, and Grodin losing his mind over a missing day planner still gets bigger laughs than most comedies from that decade.

Where to watch (US)

Checked 23 Oct 2026

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Fishing with John

1991 · Documentary, Comedy, Sport · 2h 32m

Tom Waits, Willem Dafoe and Dennis Hopper go fishing, and almost nothing gets caught.

Not a film, but impossible to leave out

Fishing with John isn't a film. It's a six-episode TV series, but it's too strange and too good to leave out. The host, musician and actor John Lurie, knows nothing about fishing, and that doesn't stop him taking his famous friends along. Tom Waits joins him in Jamaica, gets seasick, then stuffs a live red snapper down his pants. Willem Dafoe goes ice fishing in Maine, where the two of them run out of food, and the narrator announces, in a deadly serious nature documentary voice, that they've died of starvation. Dennis Hopper spends two episodes hunting a giant squid off Thailand. Matt Dillon goes to Costa Rica and sulks.

A nature show where nothing happens

Real fish are rare. The joke is how seriously the show treats itself while almost nothing happens, with long silences, dramatic music and a narrator who seems to be watching a completely different program. It barely aired at the time and found its audience years later through word of mouth. Six half-hour episodes, and the Dafoe trip is the standout. It gets extraordinary comedy out of watching famous men suffer while Lurie carries on as though everything is perfectly normal.

Where to watch (US)

Checked 23 Oct 2026

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Gotti

1996 · Biography, Crime, Drama · 1h 57m

Armand Assante's Emmy-winning John Gotti, and the mob film that went straight to HBO.

The Gotti movie worth watching

Mention a Gotti movie today and plenty of people picture the Hollywood version critics tore apart. The better one went straight to HBO in 1996. Armand Assante plays John Gotti, the Gambino crew captain who talks and shoots his way to the top of the crime family. His opening monologue sets the tone right away: it's about the rules, you take the beating for a friend, you don't run and you don't betray who you are. By the end of the film, you've watched him break every one of them.

Assante's best work

Assante won the Emmy for the role, and it's the best work of his career. He gets the swagger, the expensive suits and the temper of a man who can't stand being anywhere but the center of the room. Anthony Quinn plays Aniello Dellacroce, the old-school mobster who takes Gotti under his wing, and their scenes together are the strongest thing in the film. When it first aired, the real Gotti was already serving life in federal prison. Assante plays him as a man who's bought every word of his own legend, and that makes him scarier than most movie mobsters. This is the best gangster film you've probably never seen.

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Living in Oblivion

1995 · Comedy, Drama · 1h 30m

Every disaster on every film set, squeezed into one terrible day.

One simple scene, nothing goes right

Anyone who's ever worked on a film set will recognize every disaster in Living in Oblivion. Steve Buscemi plays a director trying to shoot one simple scene on a tiny budget, and nothing goes right. The boom mic drops into the shot. His lead actress, played by Catherine Keener, finally nails her big emotional moment, and the cameraman misses it. Then a vain Hollywood pretty boy shows up to do the indie crowd a favor, and the set turns into a war.

One of the best forgotten 90s movies, made almost as broke as the film inside it

The real shoot was nearly as broke as the one on screen. It was made in about 15 days, several of the cast put their own money in, and investors could earn a part. Peter Dinklage, years before anyone knew his name, plays an actor hired for a dream sequence, and he has some sharp thoughts about how dream sequences use people like him. His rant is the funniest scene in the film. It won the screenplay award at Sundance. Three decades later, few films have captured the chaos of making a movie with this much humor and honesty.

Where to watch (US)

Checked 23 Oct 2026

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Lawn Dogs

1997 · Drama · 1h 41m

Sam Rockwell's best film, and it earned barely $16,000 in America.

The guy who mows the lawns

The guy who mows the lawns in Lawn Dogs has to be gone by five o'clock. He works in a gated Kentucky suburb called Camelot Gardens and lives in a trailer in the woods outside it. Sam Rockwell plays him long before most people knew his name. A lonely 10-year-old girl, played by Mischa Barton, sneaks out through the gate, and the two become friends. It turns into a dark fairy tale, with their friendship exposing the prejudice and cruelty hiding under the suburb's picture-perfect image.

Twelve cinemas and almost no audience

Trevor Jones's haunting score gives it an eerie beauty that lingers long after the story takes its darker turns. Rockwell is loose and funny, with a sadness underneath he never explains, and Barton keeps up with him at 10 years old. Made for around $7 million, it played in just 12 American cinemas and earned barely $16,000. Rockwell won festival acting awards, and the film still passed almost unnoticed. It's the most underrated film he's made, and everything people love about him now is already here.

Where to watch (US)

Checked 23 Oct 2026

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The Boxer

1997 · Drama, Romance, Sport · 1h 53m

Daniel Day-Lewis trained for years until his coach said he could fight for real.

Years in the ring before the cameras rolled

Before making The Boxer, Daniel Day-Lewis trained for years under former world champion Barry McGuigan. He sparred hundreds of rounds, took black eyes and a bloodied nose, and McGuigan said he could have fought professionally. He plays Danny Flynn, a former IRA man walking out of a Belfast prison after 14 years. All he wants is to box again and stay out of the war. He reopens his old gym and lets Catholics and Protestants train side by side, which in that city is close to a provocation.

Buried by Titanic

The woman he left behind, played by Emily Watson, is now married to an IRA prisoner, and in that neighborhood a prisoner's wife is watched by everyone. Her father, played by Brian Cox, runs the local IRA and is trying to steer it toward peace while hardliners around him want blood. Cox plays him as a tired man holding a lit fuse. It reached American cinemas a few months before the Good Friday Agreement and got lost in Titanic's shadow. It's one of Day-Lewis's least talked about films, and one of the finest boxing films of the 90s.

Where to watch (US)

Checked 23 Oct 2026

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A Little Princess

1995 · Drama, Family, Fantasy · 1h 37m

A family film shot almost entirely in shades of green, and two Oscar nominations.

Everything is green

Nearly everything in A Little Princess is green. The cinematographer chose it because green can be lit warm or cold, so the same room can feel like home in one scene and a prison in the next. A girl raised in India is sent to a strict boarding school in New York while her father goes off to the First World War. She arrives as the richest girl in the school until bad news turns her into its servant overnight.

A future Oscar winner's first Hollywood film

The sets were built on soundstages and stretched out of proportion, so the world looks as big as it feels when you're 10. It was Alfonso Cuarón's first Hollywood film, years before Children of Men and Gravity, and it picked up two Oscar nominations, then made barely $10 million. Kids get the fairy tale. Adults get a girl who loses everything and refuses to give in. It's one of the most beautiful family films of the 90s.

Where to watch (US)

Checked 23 Oct 2026

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Until the End of the World

1991 · Action, Drama, Sci-Fi · 2h 38m

A five-hour road movie that predicted our screen addiction.

Fifteen cities, four continents

Until the End of the World is set at the very end of the millennium, with a nuclear satellite tumbling out of orbit and nobody sure where it'll come down. Against that, a restless young woman chases a mysterious stranger around the planet. William Hurt is the stranger, carrying a camera that can record images for the blind. Sam Neill is the writer who loves her and follows them both. It was shot in 15 cities on four continents for $23 million, and it made back a sliver of that.

Watch the long version

The distributor wanted a normal running time, so cinemas got a road movie with big pieces of the road missing. Wim Wenders's director's cut runs close to five hours and plays like a different film. Its predictions are uncanny: it imagined search engines, portable screens and people becoming addicted to their own images. The soundtrack is stacked with U2, R.E.M., Nick Cave and Depeche Mode. The theatrical cut is a mess. The full version is worth seeking out.

Where to watch (US)

Checked 23 Oct 2026

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The Color of Paradise

1999 · Drama, Family · 1h 30m

A blind boy who notices everything, and a father who notices nothing.

A boy who had never acted before

The boy at the center of The Color of Paradise was born blind and had never acted before. He plays Mohammad, an eight-year-old who leaves his school for the blind in Tehran and heads home to the mountains for the summer. His widowed father wants to remarry, and a blind son doesn't fit the plan. The film slows down to the boy's pace. He reads the world through birdsong and the feel of things under his fingers, and before long you're hearing the forest the way he does.

Ninety minutes that hurt

His performance is about as honest as child acting gets. The film was a big hit in Iran, which almost never happens to an art film there. It's one of the gentlest films on this list and one of the hardest to shake. Its quietest moments leave the deepest marks.

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Sátántangó

1994 · Drama · 7h 19m

Seven and a half hours, black and white, and it opens with eight minutes of cows.

One of the longest films ever made

The first shot of Sátántangó follows a herd of cows across a muddy farm for about eight minutes. The film runs seven and a half hours, all in black and white, making it one of the longest narrative features ever made. It took around two years to shoot. In a dying Hungarian village, the last families on a collapsed collective farm are about to split their money and leave. Then word comes that a smooth talker everyone thought was dead is walking back into town.

It moves like a tango

The story moves like a tango, stepping forward and circling back, so you see the same stretch of time through different people. Some single takes run close to 11 minutes. It's darkly funny too. No film of the decade asks more of its audience. Seven and a half hours sounds like a dare. The strange part is how little of it you'd want to cut.

Where to watch (US)

Checked 23 Oct 2026

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Close-Up

1990 · Biography, Crime, Drama · 1h 38m

A real con man plays himself at his own trial.

Everyone plays themselves

Close-Up tells the story of a real con, and every person in it plays themselves, the con man included. A poor man in Tehran convinces a well-off family that he's one of Iran's most famous film directors, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and that he wants them in his next movie. They believe him. He keeps visiting their home to plan the shoot until a journalist turns up with the police. Director Abbas Kiarostami read about the arrest and dropped the project he was about to start. He got permission to film the trial, then persuaded the con man and the family to recreate the events for the camera.

A love letter to the movies

Some of what you see is real trial footage and some is the real people restaging their own story, and the film never tells you which is which. In court, the con man explains that he loved Makhmalbaf's films so much that pretending to be him was the first time anyone treated him with respect. The real director turns up near the end. No film about loving movies goes deeper, and few remind you so clearly that cinema can give a forgotten person a chance to be seen.

Where to watch (US)

Checked 23 Oct 2026

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What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

1993 · Drama · 1h 58m

Johnny Depp, a 19-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio and a mother who'd never acted.

The flop people found on video

What's Eating Gilbert Grape opened at Christmas, made around $9 million in America and didn't earn back its budget. Most people found it later on TV and video. Johnny Depp is Gilbert, stuck in a tiny Iowa town and holding together a family that can't hold itself together. He's the calm center, and everyone around him is where the film comes alive. His mother is played by Darlene Cates, who had never acted before. The filmmakers spotted her on a daytime talk show about people too heavy to leave the house.

DiCaprio's first Oscar nomination

Then there's Leonardo DiCaprio as Arnie, Gilbert's younger brother. He was 19, spent time with disabled kids to prepare, and said a lot of his performance was improvised. It earned him his first Oscar nomination. Depp got top billing, but the film belongs to the three of them. It's a heartbreaking portrait of a young man trapped by family duty, with performances that deserved far more attention than they got.

Where to watch (US)

Checked 23 Oct 2026

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