The 1990s were not all that long ago, in the overall scheme of things, but they were also far back enough that the movies that came out that decade can probably be called classics nowadays. The newest film from the 1990s is still more than a quarter of a century old, and the earlier ones are in their mid-30s, so to speak. As a result, plenty of ‘90s movies are generally well-remembered, or appreciated as classics nowadays by younger movie watchers who might not remember the decade themselves.
Yet there were also so many movies released throughout the 1990s that a few genuinely good ones have been mostly forgotten. What follows is a few of those, none of them with more than 10,000 ratings on Letterboxd at the time of writing… like, you don’t want someone telling you that, what, Leon: The Professional is “forgotten” just because it’s sometimes called a cult classic, do you? If you do, sorry. There’s a proper attempt at looking at obscure or mostly forgotten stuff here, and then further, these movies are also really good, and still generally hold up better than you might expect when watched today. The wine is aging fine or whatever, something like that.
10
‘Pushing Hands’ (1991)
Ang Lee became more well-known after the 1990s, largely thanks to movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain. He’s a super accomplished director who, somewhat unusually, has won Best Director at the Oscars on two occasions, but he’s yet to direct a Best Picture winner, at least at the time of writing, though Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did win Best Foreign Language Film.
Anyway, some of his 1990s movies are also really good, with Pushing Hands admittedly not being the very best of them (Eat Drink Man Woman is a genuine all-timer, for one), but it is his most obscure and overlooked movie. It’s a grounded dramedy about a man who moves from Beijing to America to live with relatives there, and finds himself a fish out of water and all that. It’s very good, and also particularly strong by the standards of a directorial debut.
9
‘Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted’ (1990)
You won’t usually see Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted ranked among David Lynch’s feature films, even if it just squeaks by being feature-length (maybe?), with a runtime of 50 minutes. It’s longer than 45 minutes. It’s enough. But also, this one wasn’t released theatrically, so maybe that’s a reason why it’s more obscure. Also, it’s kind of a concert film?
Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted is maybe the strangest David Lynch “movie” that’s not a short film.
But it’s David Lynch doing a concert film. Frequent collaborator and musician Julee Cruise is the closest thing to the central subject here, but Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern are also here, albeit not exactly reprising their roles from Wild at Heart, even if that Lynch-directed movie came out the same year as Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted. Look, it’s maybe the strangest David Lynch “movie” that’s not a short film, and the only reason Inland Empire is less approachable is that it’s more than three times as long. But Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted is neat, dreamy, and entirely unique, so it’s worth checking out if you’re a fan of Lynch’s work but haven’t seen this particular one yet.
8
‘A Fistful of Fingers’ (1995)
Before he made some of the funniest and most iconic British comedies of all time, Edgar Wright directed A Fistful of Fingers, which is absolutely not as good as the likes of Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. That being said, it’s way better than many give it credit for. Might sound like a hot take, but it’s potentially even better (or at least more entertaining) than some of the less comedy-focused films Wright’s been trying his hand at in more recent years.
This is a parody of spaghetti Westerns, which are themselves (often) more over-the-top takes on the Western genre, so A Fistful of Fingers sure is ridiculous. It throws many jokes at you, and plenty don’t land, but it’s got that relentless energy many of the best parody movies have where you don’t really mind the fact that not every gag hits. This isn’t very well-remembered, and probably wouldn’t be remembered at all if Edgar Wright hadn’t gone on to become a well-regarded director, but if you like his 21st-century efforts, it’s worth traveling back to 1995 (accepting that this is more or less a feature-length student film) to give A Fistful of Fingers a chance.
7
‘Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story’ (1993)
1993 was a good year for dinosaur movies because Jurassic Park (the original; the one everyone agrees is great) came out that year. Oh, and there was also Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story, which was a very different sort of dinosaur movie, and actually a pretty good one, too. Further, the similarly titled We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story also came out in 1993. Dinosaurs everywhere.
With Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story, it’s a family movie about a young girl befriending a dinosaur, and it’s got more in common with another Steven Spielberg movie that’s not Jurassic Park: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It’s weird at times, and also not the most technically proficient of movies out there, but Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story is offbeat in a good way, and it proves surprisingly charming at times if you’re willing to give yourself over to something knowingly silly and sappy. It’s got a good heart and stuff.
6
‘Wing Chun’ (1994)
Any movie from 1994 stands an unfortunately good chance of getting overshadowed, since there were so many amazing movies released that year. Maybe Wing Chun is one of them, because it feels pretty underrated as far as martial arts movies go… though those who have seen it don’t tend to underappreciate it. It just needs a few more eyeballs on it.
The fact it stars both Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen is a good selling point, as is the fact that it was directed by Yuen Woo-Ping, who’s work you’ve likely seen even if you don’t watch martial arts movies from Hong Kong, since he was credited with doing fight choreography for the first three The Matrix movies and both volumes of Kill Bill. Wing Chun has great martial arts actors and a great martial arts director, so it’s a great martial arts movie. Lots of fun, really well-executed action, and very little downtime overall. 93 minutes fly by pretty quickly.
5
‘The Baby of Mâcon’ (1993)
Since The Baby of Mâcon is a Peter Greenaway film, it gets pretty gross and unpleasant at times. His most popular or well-known movie is The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, after all, and that’s by no means one you can recommend to just anyone. And yet it’s more approachable than most of his other stuff, which gets more experimental or more confronting. Or both.
With The Baby of Mâcon, it’s not really more experimental than The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and they’re stylistically/visually comparable in some regards. Instead, The Baby of Mâcon leans more toward being particularly confronting. It is remarkably horrifying and beyond heavy, so much so that it’s hard to even talk about what it covers narratively without lunging abruptly out of PG-rated territory. Watch it if you can handle something very intense, or if you have doubts, stay clear. It’s good, but emotionally scarring in almost every way a movie can be.
4
‘Minbo, or The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion’ (1992)
Minbo, or The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion was directed by Jūzō Itami, whose best-known film remains Tampopo, which came out in the 1980s. He’s done some other films that are pretty underrated overall, including this 1992 film, even if the story behind it is the thing that Itami is second most well-known for, because Minbo, or The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion proved extremely dangerous for the filmmaker.
The movie is a comedic one about the Yakuza, and it’s also critical about the organization, which led to Jūzō Itami getting attacked not long after the film’s release. Five years later, he died under suspicious circumstances, so whether the Yakuza had anything to do with that is also theorized. Minbo, or The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion is even gutsier, then, in hindsight, for poking fun at such an organization, though that legacy does also make the movie harder to watch, and if that’s a turn-off for some people (making the movie, overall, a bit less viewed), then maybe that’s understandable, to some extent.
3
‘Drive’ (1997)
Not the one with Ryan Gosling (though that 2011 film is also very good), Drive (1997) is a bit wilder when it comes to genre. It’s a crime movie with a sci-fi spin, there’s lots of martial arts action, and it’s also a buddy comedy/road trip kind of film. It’s pretty gonzo and also a little scrappy in terms of its production and budget, but there’s definitely an offbeat charm here.
Also, all that’s to say that trying to describe the plot here will make Drive seem stupid in a bad way, but if you really need the basics, it’s about a cybernetically-enhanced man who teams up with another random person (without cybernetic enhancements) and they go on the run from people who want the cybernetically-enhanced guy for their own nefarious purposes. It’s stop and start, just being chased, just running, all silly, maybe a little repetitive, yet there’s also a lot of fun to be had here, and the fight choreography is genuinely really good, so the problems start to feel more like nitpicks, in the end.
Drive
- Release Date
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August 6, 1997
- Runtime
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100 minutes
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Kadeem Hardison
Malik Brody
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Brittany Murphy
Deliverance Bodine
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John Pyper-Ferguson
Vic Madison
2
‘Beyond the Mind’s Eye’ (1992)
No narrative? No problems! Beyond the Mind’s Eye is just wild and psychedelic animation and music for almost an hour, and it’s awesome. Specifically, the animation here is very early computer animation, and some might say that would qualify Beyond the Mind’s Eye for being the opposite of a movie that’s aged like fine wine, but enough time has passed so that there’s something genuinely absorbing about how it all looks and feels.
It would’ve been genuinely impressive in 1992, and then nightmare fuel for maybe the 2000s and part of the 2010s, but it’s like a nostalgia or fashion cycle, and so 30+ years later, it’s great again, just not necessarily in a “Wow, this is groundbreaking” kind of way. Just zone out to this and look at all the weird and wonderful stuff. And good news if you’re one of the people fortunate enough to be wired to like strange stuff like this: there are three other entries in the Mind’s Eye series, and they’re all unbelievably trippy.
1
‘Tora-san to the Rescue’ (1995)
It’s understandable why Tora-san to the Rescue is more than a little obscure, at least outside Japan, because it’s the 48th (yes, really) movie in a very long-running series known as Tora-san, or Otoko wa Tsurai yo. Each movie is about a man named Tora, and he seems doomed to be an eternal bachelor, falling in love with a different woman in each film most of the time, with a few of his love interests ultimately being recurring characters.
A woman named Lily was in the most, and she’s in this 48th film, which is bittersweet, as Tora-san to the Rescue was the last movie the series’ star, Kiyoshi Atsumi, appeared in before passing away. One movie was re-released in a re-edited form post 1995, and then in 2019, there was a “50th” Tora-san movie about the character’s legacy, made 50 years on from the first movie, with the surviving cast members returning, all (naturally) so much older. Director Yoji Yamada is also one of the oldest active filmmakers of all time, helming all but two of the Tora-san movies, and releasing his 91st movie overall in 2025, at the age of 94. Anyway, it’s almost impossible to get people interested in a series that’s this much of a time commitment, but it is genuinely worth it, and this 1995 film is one of the best (and most emotionally resonant) of the bunch.