304 items
A witty modernization of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew transplanted to a Seattle-area high school, starring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger. A modest hit in theaters, it grew into a generational classic and launched the breakout careers of its three young leads.
A 13-year-old wishes herself "thirty and flirty and thriving" in 1987 and wakes up in 2004 as a magazine editor with no memory of the years between. Jennifer Garner's charm — and one glorious "Thriller" dance — turned it into a millennial comfort classic.
Cillian Murphy wakes from a coma to an emptied Britain: the Rage virus, grainy DV cameras, and infected that sprint. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's $8 million nightmare reinvented the zombie movie's speed limit — even though, as every pedant will happily tell you, they're infected, not zombies. For a generation this was the scariest thing a friend's older brother ever put on.
![Video thumbnail — 300 - Official Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UrIbxk7idYA/maxresdefault.jpg)
Zack Snyder's 2007 comic adaptation: 300 Spartans against the Persian king Xerxes, rendered bronze-and-crimson with slow-motion everything. It broke the March box-office record, launched a thousand ab jokes, and gave the internet "This is Sparta!"
A romantic comedy built on a very 2002 premise: a heartbroken San Francisco web designer swears off all sexual contact for the 40 days of Lent — right as he meets the perfect woman. Josh Hartnett at the peak of his heartthrob moment, opposite Shannyn Sossamon.
Steve Carell gets his chest waxed for real, screams "Kelly Clarkson!", and a whole era of comedy begins. Judd Apatow's 2005 directing debut turned a sweet-natured premise — a middle-aged guy who never quite got around to it — into the decade's comedy blueprint.
Every morning is Sunday, October 13, and every morning Henry has to make Lucy fall in love with him again. Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore's Hawaiian reunion gave 2004 the Good Morning Lucy tape, Ten-Second Tom, a walrus named Jocko and 311's reggae-tinged cover of The Cure, and left a trail of remakes from Telugu to Japanese.
Eminem's semi-autobiographical 2002 drama, following a broke Detroit kid chasing rap glory from a trailer park to the battle stage. Its climactic freestyle showdown and the Oscar-winning anthem "Lose Yourself" made it far more than a vanity project.
Hilary Duff waits tables at her wicked stepmother's San Fernando Valley diner while trading anonymous messages with a soulmate — who turns out to be Chad Michael Murray, the most popular boy in school. Critics hated it; an entire generation of sleepovers overruled them.
The father-son road trip Disney barely believed in — a fishing trip to Lake Destiny that was really about a teenage kid terrified of turning into his dad. Max lip-synced Powerline, pined for Roxanne, and inherited the laugh anyway. A modest theatrical performer in 1995, A Goofy Movie built its legend on home video and became a generation's comfort watch.
A Little Leaguer falls through an earthquake crack at home plate and lands in King Arthur's Camelot, where a backpack of 90s stuff makes him look like a prophesied savior. Critics hated it; 90s kids wore out the VHS. And look closely: that's a pre-Titanic Kate Winslet and a pre-Bond Daniel Craig.
The 2001 jousting movie that made Heath Ledger a star and opened with a medieval crowd stomping and clapping along to Queen's "We Will Rock You." A period adventure that gleefully refused to act its age.
"All girls are princesses." Alfonso Cuarón's 1995 version of the Burnett classic moved Sara Crewe to a New York boarding school in wartime, lost money in theaters, and then sold two million tapes. The attic, the locket, Miss Minchin: a sleeper that became a childhood staple on video.
Two silk-shirted brothers, one synchronized head-bob, and "What Is Love" on infinite loop: SNL's Roxbury Guys stretched to feature length. Critics gave it an 11% and the real Roxbury nightclub had already closed — but the head-bob became immortal anyway.
The one sweater, the wish list, the telescope on the balcony. Mandy Moore's first starring role turned Nicholas Sparks's 1999 novel into the sleepover weeper of 2002, got torn apart by critics, earned an A from audiences and was still being called one of the most romantic films ever made years later.
Alrighty then. A pet detective in a Hawaiian shirt talks out of his own rear end, rescues the Miami Dolphins' kidnapped mascot, and turns a $15 million comedy into the launchpad of Jim Carrey's insane 1994. Critics hated it; recess quoted it for years.
Wednesday at Camp Chippewa, baby Pubert, and Joan Cusack as the nanny who marries Fester to murder him. The 1993 sequel was darker and funnier than the first Addams Family, made far less money, and is the one everybody quotes now.
A golden retriever who could sink jump shots, a lonely kid in a new town, and a state final decided by a check of the rulebook: nothing in it says a dog can't play. Air Bud was a $3 million Disney release that made $29 million and launched a direct-to-video dynasty that long outlived its star.
Disney's Aladdin cracked the code on rescuing the studio's animated empire: a magic carpet ride of a film with a Genie voiced by Robin Williams improvising his way through a hundred impressions in a single scene. It became the highest-grossing animated film ever made.
Don Bluth's tale of a scoundrel dog who cons his way out of heaven and back to the streets, voiced by Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise. It got flattened at the box office by opening the same day as The Little Mermaid — then found its real life on VHS, playing in living rooms all through the '90s.
The teen comedy that launched a thousand locker-room chants and made 'MILF' a dinner-table word—whether your parents were ready or not. A crew of high schoolers make a pact, and the resulting chaos defined the 2000s comedy formula. You either rented this VHS or pretended you didn't watch it on cable.
Don Bluth's lost-princess musical that a whole generation is sure was Disney. Meg Ryan's amnesiac Anya, a music box, Rasputin as an undead villain with an albino bat, and "Once Upon a December" — made in Phoenix by Fox, and released a week after Disney re-issued The Little Mermaid — a scheduling war Fox called deliberate.
"Stay classy, San Diego." Will Ferrell's mustachioed 1970s news anchor Ron Burgundy and his idiot news team gave the 2000s an endlessly quotable comedy — "I love lamp," "60% of the time, it works every time."
A foster kid prays for the last-place California Angels to win the pennant — because his dad said that's when they'd be a family again — and real angels start nudging fly balls. When the angels sit out the championship, an entire stadium flaps its arms instead. Christopher Lloyd, Danny Glover, and a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
A tech-industry thriller starring Ryan Phillippe as a young programmer recruited by a charming but sinister software CEO (Tim Robbins) who steals code and eliminates threats. Released with Microsoft's real antitrust battle still in the headlines, it became a cult artifact of the dot-com era despite critical and commercial failure.
"Houston, we have a problem," a line NASA never quite said, sold Ron Howard's retelling of the 1970 flight that failed to reach the Moon and got everyone home. Tom Hanks in a real zero-g airplane, Ed Harris in a white vest, and the biggest opening a Hanks film had yet had.
Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer strap a nuke to an asteroid movie: Bruce Willis leads a crew of blue-collar oil drillers shot into space to save Earth. It was the single highest-grossing film of 1998 worldwide, powered by an Aerosmith ballad you could not escape all summer.
The middle prequel arrived May 16, 2002 with Hayden Christensen's brooding Anakin, the clone army, and the moment every 2002 audience cheered: Yoda finally drawing a lightsaber against Christopher Lee. It was also a landmark under the hood — one of the first major films shot entirely on digital cameras.
Mike Myers as the swinging spy, the bald nemesis, and eventually half the cast — a three-film Bond parody whose catchphrases colonized every schoolyard in 1999. The humor ran racy for its era; the craft underneath is what stuck.
Beyoncé as Foxxy Cleopatra, Michael Caine as Austin's dad, a Dutch villain with a gold-plated problem, and an opening sequence in which Tom Cruise, Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito and Gwyneth Paltrow play the cast. The 2002 threequel had the biggest July opening ever at the time and a title the Bond people tried to take away.
The blue-people movie that broke the all-time box-office record and put 3D glasses on the entire planet. James Cameron waited a decade for the technology to match his vision — then spent a quarter-billion dollars proving it was worth the wait.
A nine-month-old crawls across Chicago following the pictures in his storybook while the three kidnappers chasing him absorb every injury a John Hughes script can invent. John Hughes wrote it, America ignored it, and it ran for months in Kolkata.
The buddy-cop formula that minted a movie star. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as Miami narcotics detectives, propelled by Michael Bay's visual maximalism and the Simpson/Bruckheimer sheen. It started as a vehicle for Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz; recast with two sitcom leads, it became something no one expected—a $141 million global hit built on pure chemistry.
Half wolf, half dog, all underdog: Amblin's 1995 cartoon about the sled dog who carried the diphtheria serum into Nome. It opened a month after Toy Story and sank, then lived forever on VHS. The real Balto's statue still stands in Central Park, and the real story is messier than the movie.
![Video thumbnail — Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996) Theatrical Trailer [4K] [5.1] [FTD-1015]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RzYWKWtRmzQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
MTV's cackling couch potatoes trade their couch for a cross-country road trip when their TV gets stolen. It's chaotic, it's vulgar, and it opened #1 with the biggest December weekend any film had ever managed at the time. Mike Judge's feature debut turned a controversial TV phenomenon into a theatrical event that felt impossibly big.
![Video thumbnail — Bee Movie - Official Trailer 2007 [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VONRQMx78YI/maxresdefault.jpg)
Jerry Seinfeld's bee sues the human race over honey. That premise, voiced by Seinfeld himself, cost DreamWorks $150 million in 2007 and got a B+ shrug, then came back nearly a decade later as one of the internet's favorite copypastas: "According to all known laws of aviation...", "ya like jazz?", and the whole film sped up every time somebody says "bee."
An international drinking competition disguised as a sports movie. Two brothers spread their grandfather's ashes at Oktoberfest and accidentally stumble into Beerfest—a secret underground tournament where nations compete in beer games—then return home to assemble an American dream team. Like Super Troopers before it, its cult life was lived on DVD, in dorm rooms and at beer-soaked parties.
The 1992 comedy about a St. Bernard puppy who sneaks into a suburban family's house, grows into a huge, slobbering dog, and slowly wins over the dad who never wanted him. John Hughes wrote it under a pseudonym, critics shrugged, and audiences gave it an A.
A sweetly dead young couple, stuck haunting their own house, hire a raunchy "bio-exorcist" to scare off the living — say his name three times and chaos answers. It's a 1988 film, but between the VHS shelf, October cable reruns, and the Saturday-morning cartoon, Beetlejuice belonged to 90s kids too.
Tim Burton's warmest film: a dying father who has always told his life as a series of tall tales — a giant, a witch who shows your death in her eye, a perfect hidden town called Spectre — and the grown son trying to sort truth from myth before it's too late. Ewan McGregor plays the young father in the fables, Albert Finney the old man telling them.
Martin Lawrence as an FBI agent who goes undercover as a gun-toting Southern grandmother, prosthetics and fat suit and all. Critics groaned, but the one-joke premise turned into a $170-million summer smash and launched a franchise.
Two slackers wander into what they think is a mall looking for a bathroom and get hermetically sealed into a year-long ecological experiment. Critics handed it a 1/100 on Metacritic — tied for the lowest score in the site's history; kids with cable memorized every line anyway. Bio-Dome is the purest specimen of the gap between what the industry decided and what actually lived on late-night rotation.
The 2001 Martin Lawrence comedy where a modern theme-park worker falls in a moat and wakes up in medieval England, fish-out-of-water antics ensuing. A critical flop that a whole generation still somehow watched on cable a dozen times.
Chris Farley and David Spade's follow-up to Tommy Boy, rushed into theaters by Paramount in February 1996. Farley is the bumbling brother of a candidate for governor of Washington and Spade the aide assigned to hide him in a cabin that a boulder knocks off its foundation. Critics savaged it, it grossed almost exactly what Tommy Boy had, and it was the last time the two shared a screen.
Will Ferrell's leather-clad, lone-wolf skating stallion and Jon Heder's golden-boy prodigy — banned from men's singles for life, reborn through a loophole as figure skating's first all-male pair. Sequined costumes, forbidden moves, and the most quotable ice ever skated.
An 11-year-old writes a blank check for a million dollars and actually cashes it—a premise every kid dreamed of but only this movie let them live out. Critics hated it; CinemaScore gave it an A−; and every child of the 90s rented it anyway, because fantasy was the whole point.
Sacha Baron Cohen's mockumentary phenomenon: his clueless Kazakh TV journalist Borat rampages across America interviewing real, unsuspecting people, exposing what they'll say to a "foreigner." Spun off from Da Ali G Show, it was a critical smash, a quoting machine ("Very nice!"), and a diplomatic incident all at once.
Mel Gibson in blue face paint screaming "FREEDOM!" — the 1995 Scottish-rebellion epic that won five Oscars, launched a thousand sleepover viewings, and rewrote medieval history with total confidence.
Disney sold you a Narnia fantasy, and you got your heart broken instead. Bridge to Terabithia arrived in theaters February 2007 with trailers promising whimsy, woods adventures, and an imaginary kingdom. The film lied—or rather, Hollywood lied for it—and a generation of kids learned that sometimes the magical ending is grief.
A new cheer captain inherits her high school's trophy-winning squad — then discovers the entire championship legacy is built on stolen routines, and the team that had them first is coming to take back what's theirs. A cheerleader movie that turned out to be a conversation about who gets credit.
Erik von Detten as Andy "Brink" Brinker, a Southern California inline skater who secretly joins the sponsored Team X-Bladz for $200 a week when his dad's disability pay runs thin, betraying the "Soul-Skaters" who skate for fun, not money. Disney Channel premiered it on August 29, 1998, as only its third Original Movie, and it has anchored best-DCOM lists ever since.
A Buffalo TV reporter yells at God, and God hands him the job for a week. Jim Carrey's 2003 hit opened on a Memorial Day weekend that beat The Matrix Reloaded, and the pager number on screen was real enough that strangers in two countries fielded hundreds of calls meant for the Almighty.
The ultimate '90s-kid fantasy on film: a group of kids fake an entire summer camp with no parents, no rules, and no adults — except a broke ex-drama teacher paid to answer the phone and pretend to be in charge.
Demi Lovato's big break, the Jonas Brothers as a fictional band called Connect 3, and a summer camp where every problem gets solved at Final Jam. Disney Channel's 2008 answer to its own High School Musical phenomenon.
A hook-handed killer summoned by his own name in a bathroom mirror — Candyman is the horror film that made a real sleepover ritual out of a movie moment. Bernard Rose's 1992 adaptation of Clive Barker's short story moved an urban legend from Liverpool to Chicago's Cabrini-Green, grounding its scares in real inequality and marginalization. The dare echoed perfectly into 1990s playgrounds and sleepovers, where a generation of kids tested their nerve against Virginia Madsen's grad student and Tony Todd's unforgettable menace.
One high-school graduation night, one undelivered letter, and four years of bottled feelings ready to spill. Preston Meyers has spent his high-school career invisibly loving Amanda Beckett, and in the chaos of a packed house party, he's got one last shot to tell her before everyone scatters for good. An ensemble of misfits, jocks, goofballs, and dreamers—each chasing their own moment—makes it the whole 90s teen-movie yearbook in one house.
Pixar stranded a hotshot race car in a faded Route 66 town and somehow produced one of the biggest toy machines of the decade — nearly $10 billion in merchandise inside five years. Lightning McQueen, Mater, Doc Hudson: every family of the era had a bin of them.
The friendly ghost who just wanted a friend. Casper made history as the first feature film with a fully CGI lead character, and the 1995 merchandising blitz — Pizza Hut hand puppets, packed toy aisles — put him everywhere that summer. A Halloween cable staple ever since.
Tom Hanks, a desert island, and a volleyball named Wilson. Robert Zemeckis stranded America's most trusted movie star alone on screen for the better part of two hours — and made one of the biggest hits of 2000 out of silence, sunburn, and a volleyball with a face.
Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's uncanny riff on Roald Dahl arrived in 2005 as the alternative to Gene Wilder's 1971 warmth — pale, lush, and polarizing in the way only Burton films manage. The Dahl estate approved wholeheartedly; audiences argued about it all summer.
Steve Martin versus twelve kids, one frog, and a dog with a taste for Ashton Kutcher. The Christmas 2003 family comedy that became a basic-cable perennial — and a time capsule of an absurdly stacked early-2000s cast.
"I'm not even supposed to be here today." Kevin Smith's 1994 black-and-white debut, shot at night in the New Jersey Quick Stop where he worked days, for $27,575 on maxed-out credit cards. Dante, Randal, roof hockey, and the first appearance of Jay and Silent Bob.
The last great movie mystery born from a teaser with no title, just a date: 1-18-08. Message boards dissected every frame for months before anyone knew what it was.
"As if!" Amy Heckerling's 1995 teen comedy turned a Beverly Hills high schooler's makeover schemes into a fashion bible and a quotable phrasebook — yellow plaid, knee socks, and a computer that picked your outfit.
Four Jamaican sprinters show up to the Winter Olympics with a borrowed bobsled and pure determination, and John Candy coaches them there. "Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme, get on up, it's bobsled time" — the underdog sports comedy of a generation.
Piper Perabo dancing on a Manhattan bar, Jerry Bruckheimer lighting it like a music video, and LeAnn Rimes secretly singing the songs. Critics gave it 23% — opening-weekend audiences graded it A− and memorized the soundtrack. The Y2K fantasy of moving to New York and being discovered lives here.
A sharp, seductive update of Laclos' 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses transplanted to Manhattan's prep-school elite, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe. Written and directed by Roger Kumble, it became a defining late-90s teen drama with genuine cultural impact.
Pierce Brosnan versus a volcano, Linda Hamilton as the mayor of the town in its path — and Grandma Ruth in the acid lake, scarring a generation. The winner of 1997's bizarre dueling-volcano-movie race, and somehow also a science-class staple.
The last day of school in 1976: freshman hazing with paddles and ketchup, a keg party at the moon tower, Aerosmith tickets, and Matthew McConaughey's Wooderson leaning on a car. Richard Linklater's 1993 hangout movie bombed, then became the film 90s teenagers claimed as their own.
The other 1998 asteroid movie — and the one that got there first. Mimi Leder's somber take on a comet headed for Earth traded oil-rig heroics for grief and dread, with Morgan Freeman as the president everyone remembers delivering the bad news.
A cop and a criminal wake up in 2032, and the future has become a joke they don't get. Demolition Man arrived in October 1993 as a Stallone action vehicle disguised as satire — a gleaming, pacified future where everything fun is outlawed. But the real legacy is Taco Bell and three seashells. And it helped launch Sandra Bullock.
Mason Gamble as the five-year-old with the slingshot, Walter Matthau as the Mr. Wilson whose dentures, orchid and peace of mind he destroys, and Christopher Lloyd as Switchblade Sam, the drifter who turns the last act into Home Alone. John Hughes wrote it straight off the Home Alone films, Warner Bros. released it on June 25, 1993, critics shrugged, and it made $117 million anyway.
![Video thumbnail — Die Hard - Official® Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2TQ-pOvI6Xo/maxresdefault.jpg)
The film that made 'yippee-ki-yay' a holiday tradition and launched an endless argument: is it a Christmas movie? Spoiler: yes, and also no—but watching it in December became genuinely ingrained.
Vince Vaughn owns a scrappy neighborhood gym, Ben Stiller owns a corporate monstrosity, and the only way to save Average Joe's is to win a Vegas dodgeball tournament against all odds. Rip Torn shouts training mantras. The "if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball" line became instantly quotable. A $20 million gamble that returned $168 million at the global box office.
The film that nearly died at the box office six weeks after 9/11, then rose from the dead through midnight screenings and DVD to become the 2000s' defining cult artifact. A nightmarish fever dream about time loops and a rabbit suit that you'd lend to friends with just 'watch it' and argue about until 3 a.m.
Christina Applegate as a 17-year-old who fakes her way into a fashion-industry job when the elderly babysitter dies and mom's away in Australia. It opened quietly in 1991, then VHS and cable turned it into a cult classic. "I'm right on top of that, Rose" — a catchphrase that never died.
Rik Mayall in a green-and-yellow striped suit, taped inside a jack-in-the-box, back to wreck Phoebe Cates's life for her own good. Gene Siskel called it one of the worst films he had ever seen. A generation of kids rented it until the tape wore out.
The Farrelly brothers' breakout comedy starred Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels as two hopelessly incompetent best friends on a cross-country road trip. Dumb and Dumber capped Carrey's historically unprecedented 1994—the year he also starred in Ace Ventura and The Mask—and grossed nearly $250 million worldwide on a modest budget.
A jewel-thief's escaped orangutan runs wild through a stuffy five-star hotel while a frazzled manager — Jason Alexander, moonlighting from Seinfeld — tries to keep the chaos from his boss. A critical dud in 1996 that a lot of kids wore out on video anyway.
Elf (2003) is the Christmas comedy directed by Jon Favreau starring Will Ferrell as Buddy, a human raised by elves at the North Pole who travels to New York City to find his real father. Buddy's childlike wonder and confusion about human culture—from his syrup-on-spaghetti diet to iconic lines like "Buddy the Elf, what's your favorite color?"—made it an instant, endlessly-rewatched holiday classic.
A spoiled Incan emperor gets turned into a llama by his scheming ex-advisor and her dim, kind-hearted henchman — and has to trek home with the village leader whose home he planned to bulldoze. A box-office underperformer that became one of Disney's most beloved cult comedies.
One chaotic day at an indie record store, a crew of lovable misfits, and a washed-up '80s pop star named Rex Manning. It bombed in theaters — then home video made it a cult classic, and fans still celebrate Rex Manning Day every April 8. Damn the Man. Save the Empire.
Two teenagers dig up a frozen caveman while excavating a backyard pool, thaw him out, and enroll him in high school. Brendan Fraser as Link, Sean Astin, and peak "weasel"-era Pauly Shore — critics gave it thumbs down, audiences gave it an A, and every '90s sleepover gave it another run.
A post-graduation beer-fueled romp across Europe in search of a German pen pal who turns out to be a girl. The premise is thin and the plot is chaos, but it left behind "Scotty Doesn't Know"—a breakup anthem so infectious it outgrew the movie—and earned itself a permanent slot in the dorm-room DVD rotation.
The Australia–US eco-fable where a logger gets shrunk to fairy size — with Robin Williams improvising as Batty Koda months before Aladdin, and Tim Curry oozing menace as the toxic sludge Hexxus. Modest in theaters, immortal on classroom VHS carts.
![Video thumbnail — The Fifth Element - Official® Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/199EvXTKucc/maxresdefault.jpg)
Luc Besson's gloriously maximalist 1997 sci-fi spectacle: Bruce Willis as flying-cab driver Korben Dallas, Milla Jovovich as the orange-haired Leeloo, Gary Oldman chewing scenery as Zorg, and Chris Tucker's motor-mouthed Ruby Rhod. Jean Paul Gaultier costumes, a blue alien diva, and a plot to save Earth with four stones and one perfect being.
David Fincher's anti-consumerist fever dream — Edward Norton's insomniac narrator, Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, and a basement club with rules you weren't supposed to talk about. It bombed with critics split down the middle and underwhelmed in theaters, then the DVD turned it into the defining cult movie of its generation.
A teenager's premonition gets a handful of classmates off Flight 180 before it explodes, and then Death comes back for them, one elaborate accident at a time. Final Destination (March 2000) turned an unused X-Files spec script into a $113 million hit and a franchise whose Rube Goldberg death scenes made a generation nervous about every loose screw and dangling wire.
![Video thumbnail — Finding Nemo - Official® Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bMtzgW-FVLY/maxresdefault.jpg)
A clownfish searches an ocean for his kidnapped son, guided by a forgetful blue tang with the most memorable catchphrase of the decade. Pixar's Finding Nemo won instant hearts with its vibrant coral-reef world, stellar voice acting, and emotional stakes that proved animated films could make you cry.
![Video thumbnail — Disney | Flubber (1997) Movie Trailer [VHS]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MP-meilHKyw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Robin Williams as an absent-minded professor whose lab cooks up a bouncing green goo with a mind of its own, named flubber for "flying rubber." Critics hated it; audiences made it the number one movie of Thanksgiving 1997 anyway.
A grieving girl raises orphaned Canada goslings on her father's Ontario farm — and when the geese need a migration route, father and daughter lead the flock south themselves in ultralight aircraft. Inspired by a real 1993 goose-led migration, and shot so beautifully it earned an Oscar nomination for cinematography.
Tom Hanks' Forrest Gump stumbles through history itself, unintentionally shaping 1960s and 70s America with innocent determination. Robert Zemeckis' 1994 phenomenon grossed $678 million worldwide, won 6 Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor, and made 'Life is like a box of chocolates' part of the language.
Mother and daughter wake up in each other's bodies, and a Disney remake becomes a generational classic. Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan spar, swap, and shred — the finale hands Lohan's garage band Pink Slip the stage — and somehow a fortune cookie made everyone cry.
The 1993 tearjerker about a troubled boy who bonds with a captive orca and sets him free — capped by the iconic image of Willy leaping over a breakwater to Michael Jackson's "Will You Be There." Its most astonishing legacy, though, played out in the real ocean.
For an hour it's a Tarantino crime movie: two outlaw brothers, a hostage family, a run for the Mexican border. Then Salma Hayek finishes her dance, the bar staff show their real teeth, and it becomes something else entirely. Nobody who rented it blind ever forgot the whiplash.
The washed-up cast of a canceled space show gets abducted by aliens who watched the reruns and thought they were documentaries. "Never give up, never surrender!" The Star Trek parody so good that actual Trek fans voted it one of the best Star Trek films — and it isn't one.
A numbed-out actor comes home to New Jersey for his mother's funeral, meets a girl who lies compulsively and feels everything, and slowly wakes up. Zach Braff wrote, directed, and starred in his 2004 indie debut while playing J.D. on Scrubs — and its Grammy-winning Shins-and-Coldplay soundtrack became the mixtape of the mid-2000s.
![Video thumbnail — GATTACA [1997] – Official Trailer (HD) | Now on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and Digital](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NIIZ2P-fiyI/maxresdefault.jpg)
A 1997 cerebral sci-fi thriller written and directed by Andrew Niccol, starring Ethan Hawke as a genetically inferior man who assumes another person's DNA identity to pursue his dream of space travel. Set in a near-future where genetic engineering has created a rigid caste system of "valids" and "in-valids," the film is a stylish, retro-futurist meditation on human potential, discrimination, and ambition. Modest at the box office but a lasting cult favorite that anticipated the ethics debates around genetic engineering.
"Watch out for that treeeee!" Disney's live-action take on the Jay Ward cartoon put Brendan Fraser in a loincloth, slammed him into every tree on the vine route, and let a wisecracking narrator boss the whole movie around. The goofiest hit of summer 1997.
Ridley Scott's Roman revenge epic — the general who became a slave, the slave who became a gladiator, and the movie every dad quoted for a decade. Five Oscars, including Best Picture, and a Hans Zimmer score that turned every commute into a chariot ride.
"Size Does Matter." TriStar spent a year hiding its new Godzilla behind teasers of a foot crushing a T. rex skeleton and Taco Bell chihuahua ads, then opened it over Memorial Day weekend 1998 to $44 million and a collective shrug. The monster ran from missiles, nested in Madison Square Garden, and was eventually renamed "Zilla" by its own Japanese owners.
The Nickelodeon sketch that became a movie: two fast-food workers square off against an evil corporate chain, armed with dimwitted charm and a catchphrase that burned itself into the 90s brain forever. "Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger — can I take your order?"
A janitor at MIT solves the blackboard problem, and two unknown actors from Cambridge win an Oscar for writing it. Robin Williams on a park bench, Elliott Smith on the soundtrack, and "It's not your fault."
"Funny how? Do I amuse you?" Martin Scorsese's 1990 life of mob associate Henry Hill: the Copacabana tracking shot, Joe Pesci's Oscar, and the fastest two and a half hours in gangster movies. The film that taught a generation how wiseguys talked, and the one that inspired The Sopranos.
A 36-year-old video-game tester gets evicted and moves in with his grandma and her roommates, where he's surrounded by pajama-wearing grandmothers, a dealer named Dante with a pet chimp, and the crushing weight of being a grown man living with his grandma. Critics absolutely eviscerated it. Then the DVD turned it into a canonical stoner comedy.
Bill Murray as a smug TV weatherman waking up to "I Got You Babe" on the same February 2nd in Punxsutawney, over and over, until he gets it right. Harold Ramis's 1993 comedy gave the language a phrase and every later time-loop story a template.
A young Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller rollerblade through a neon-drenched, absurdly rendered version of hacking where code is visualized as 3D graphics and 'Hack the planet!' became an unironic battle cry. Iain Softley's 1995 box-office flop became a beloved cult classic on the strength of its aesthetic audacity and a landmark electronic soundtrack.
Dave Chappelle's stoner comedy about selling lab weed to bail out a friend who accidentally killed a police horse. Critics buried it in January 1998 — then VHS, cable, and every college dorm in America dug it back up. It's also the first thing Chappelle and Neal Brennan ever built together, five years before Chappelle's Show.
The Disney Channel movie that turned every October into a ritual. Halloweentown premiered in 1998, but its real reign was the 2000s — three sequels, endless reruns, and a generation's gateway to comfort-food spookiness with Debbie Reynolds as the world's best witch grandma.
A fuzzy emperor penguin who can't sing a note but can tap-dance like his life depends on it — because it does. Happy Feet was 2006's inescapable penguin musical, the movie that put Savion Glover's feet on an animated bird and walked away with the Oscar that everyone assumed belonged to Pixar.
Adam Sandler as a failed hockey player with a 400-yard running drive and a grandmother in trouble with the IRS — somehow this became a 1996 classic. Christopher McDonald's smug Shooter McGavin, Carl Weathers' one-handed mentor Chubbs, and a Bob Barker brawl that won MTV's Best Fight. You've attempted the Happy Gilmore swing at least once.
Two best friends, one impossible late-night craving, and an obstacle course of absurdity standing between them and White Castle sliders. A modest $9 million theatrical release that became a genuine DVD phenomenon — and a quietly groundbreaking one: a mainstream studio comedy carried by two Asian-American leads, at a time when the industry insisted that couldn't work.
Michelle Trachtenberg with a composition notebook, Rosie O'Donnell as Ole Golly, and a sixth-grade class that finds the notebook and reads what she wrote about them. Nickelodeon's first movie, with the Hey Arnold! pilot playing before it.
The Disney summer-camp comedy where a fat camp gets bought by a manic infomercial fitness guru — Ben Stiller as Tony Perkis, one of the great over-the-top '90s comedy villains. A modest release that became a genuine cult classic on cable and video.
Disney's Greek myth as a gospel number: five Muses narrating, Danny DeVito's satyr training a gangly demigod, and James Woods' fast-talking Hades stealing the whole picture. Hercules was the mid-90s Disney musical that didn't quite hit at the box office — and the one whose songs, "Zero to Hero" and "Go the Distance," everyone still knows.
The Disney Channel musical that launched a thousand hairbrush-microphone performances. When a basketball star and a brainy new student auditioned for the school musical, their chemistry and catchy songs—especially "Breaking Free"—captivated millions of kids and turned Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens into instant teen icons.
Don't panic. Douglas Adams' radio-born comedy about the last man to survive Earth's demolition finally reached theaters in April 2005, after more than two decades of false starts, with Martin Freeman in the dressing gown, Sam Rockwell as a two-headed galactic president, and Alan Rickman as the voice of a very depressed robot.
The Sanderson sisters — Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy — resurrected in Salem on Halloween night, chasing children and belting "I Put a Spell on You." A box-office flop in 1993 that became the ultimate Halloween rewatch tradition.
A puzzle-box novel that shouldn't have worked, a film adaptation that shouldn't have worked, and somehow both did. Louis Sachar's Holes won the 1998 National Book Award and the 1999 Newbery Medal — then became an honest-to-god good movie.
![Video thumbnail — Home Alone - Official® Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Fmih-zWIjGY/maxresdefault.jpg)
Kevin McCallister is accidentally left behind when his family flies out for the holidays — and when two bumbling burglars invade, the eight-year-old's creative defenses (ice, tar, paint cans, and a very hot doorknob) turn the house into a gauntlet of booby traps. It became the defining Christmas movie of a generation, making Macaulay Culkin the most famous kid on the planet.
Kevin boards the wrong plane and lands in New York with his dad's bag and credit card — cue the Plaza Hotel, the pigeon lady, and traps somehow crueler than the first movie's. The rare sequel kids argued was better than the original.
Left at a ranch while their family is away — and convinced they've been abandoned — two dogs and a cat set out across the wilderness to get home. Chance, the reckless young American Bulldog; Sassy, the imperious Himalayan cat; and Shadow, the wise old Golden Retriever, against the Sierras. Disney's remake of its own 1963 classic earns every tear it takes from you.
An inventor's attic shrink ray zaps the kids down to a quarter-inch, and the backyard becomes a jungle — the giant Cheerio, Antie the ant, the LEGO-brick shelter, the sprinkler storm. A 1989 smash whose sequels, TV series, and theme-park attractions made it a fixture of the entire 90s.
![Video thumbnail — HOOK [1991] - Official Trailer (HD)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c-vwgt8cwEM/maxresdefault.jpg)
Steven Spielberg's what-if: Peter Pan grew up, forgot Neverland, and became a joyless corporate lawyer — until Captain Hook kidnaps his kids and drags him back. Robin Williams as the grown Peter, Dustin Hoffman as Hook, Julia Roberts as Tinker Bell, and "Bangarang!" burned into every kid who saw it.
The love fern, the scrapbook of future children, the Knicks game she ruins and the yellow dress. Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey each ran a bet on the other for ten days in the 2003 rom-com that critics shrugged at and audiences graded A-minus.
The prehistoric buddy comedy that put Blue Sky Studios on the map: a woolly mammoth, a sloth, and a saber-toothed tiger reluctantly team up to return a lost human baby to its tribe, while a nut-obsessed squirrel named Scrat wages an eternal, silent war against a single acorn. A surprise blockbuster that launched one of animation's biggest franchises.
Pauly Shore in dog tags: two buddies join the Army Reserves to bankroll their dream electronics store — one weekend a month, two weeks a year, right? — and get shipped to an actual desert war. Nobody's idea of a critical darling, but a mid-90s cable staple a whole generation half-remembers without ever having chosen to watch it.
The White House explodes. Will Smith punches an alien and delivers the one-liner. Jeff Goldblum uploads a virus from a PowerBook. The movie that made July 4th weekend a permanent blockbuster holiday — and the biggest film of 1996 by a mile.
The risky bet that built an empire. Marvel Studios' first self-produced movie hired Robert Downey Jr. — a comeback story playing a comeback story — and let him improvise his way into "I am Iron Man." Then Samuel L. Jackson showed up after the credits, and sitting through credits became a national habit.
A mullet-wearing janitor drifts across America searching for the parents who lost him at the Grand Canyon. Panned by critics but reborn as a cable classic, Joe Dirt proved that weird comedies find their people eventually—they just needed TBS and a Saturday night.
Denzel Washington as a working father who takes an emergency room hostage when his insurance won't cover his young son's life-saving heart transplant. A blunt, angry drama that critics panned and audiences turned into a hit — and that landed as a lightning rod in America's healthcare debate.
The 1999 Disney Channel movie about a 13-year-old Hawaiian surfer whose family moves to Vermont, where the mountain is split between rich private-school skiers and public-school snowboarders. He picks the snowboarders. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa plays his grandfather, the surf legend of the title.
Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson as a struggling local band signed overnight by a label that hides subliminal messages in pop songs. It flopped in April 2001, with brand logos in nearly every scene and none of them paid for, and has since been reappraised as a cult satire.
Stallone in a Versace-designed uniform, a real hydraulic robot, and the streets of Mega-City One built at Shepperton. The 1995 adaptation of the 2000 AD comic took Dredd's helmet off, set its director against its star, and flopped in America; the sets and robots found their admirers later.
Robin Williams as an adult sprung from a magical jungle game — stampeding rhinos, vine-swinging chaos, and a board game that destroys your house from the inside out. Joe Johnston's December 1995 film combined state-of-the-art CGI and animatronics to bring a children's book to vivid, dangerous life, grossing over $260 million worldwide and proving games were no longer safe fantasy.
Elliot Page's whip-smart pregnant teenager, Diablo Cody's Oscar-winning screenplay, a hamburger phone, and a Moldy Peaches soundtrack: Juno was the indie monoculture moment of 2007. Made for about $7 million, it earned $232 million and four Oscar nominations — and for a solid year, everyone you knew talked a little more like Juno MacGuff.
Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel brought dinosaurs to life using groundbreaking CGI and animatronics, forever changing what movies could show. The film made $914 million, unseated E.T. as the highest-grossing film ever, and launched a dinosaur obsession that sold lunchboxes, toys, and taught a generation how to pronounce 'velociraptor.'
Shaquille O'Neal as a 5,000-year-old rapping genie who bursts out of a boombox to grant a kid three wishes — a legendary flop at the height of Shaq's do-everything mid-'90s fame. It's now most famous for a movie that doesn't exist: the "Shazaam" Mandela Effect.
A woman in a yellow tracksuit walks out of a coma seeking revenge on the people who shot her. Tarantino split one revenge epic across two films, mining 1970s exploitation and martial-arts cinema to create a revenge fantasy that became a dorm-room poster staple.
A one-night stand with immediate, life-rearranging consequences. Judd Apatow's follow-up to The 40-Year-Old Virgin crashed slacker comedy into romantic comedy and somehow made you believe both. Seth Rogen graduated from stoner sidekick to leading man in real time, opposite Katherine Heigl as the career-focused woman suddenly sharing a future with him.
Jack Black's Po — a noodle-shop panda accidentally anointed the legendary Dragon Warrior — turned out to be DreamWorks at its best. 'Skadoosh' entered the vocabulary, the Wuxi Finger Hold entered recess, and there is no charge for awesomeness.
Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods, the pink-clad sorority queen who follows her ex to Harvard Law and out-lawyers everyone. A 2001 sleeper hit that made "bend and snap" a catchphrase and launched a franchise.
A wisecracking, gold-obsessed leprechaun rampages through rural North Dakota, and a pre-Friends Jennifer Aniston is in his way. Mark Jones's 1993 horror-comedy was made for under a million dollars, spawned a franchise that went to space and the hood, and became a video-store rite of passage.
A fast-talking lawyer who lies for a living is magically cursed to tell only the truth for 24 hours after his neglected son blows out his birthday candles with a single wish. Peak rubber-faced Jim Carrey, physically at war with his own mouth. Directed by Tom Shadyac, it was one of 1997's biggest comedies.
An orphan finds a pair of beat-up sneakers initialed 'MJ,' takes a lightning strike while rescuing them from a power line, and wakes up able to dunk on NBA starters. Lil' Bow Wow's 2002 fantasy was every playground daydream with a soundtrack.
A lonely girl named Lilo adopts what she thinks is a small dog in Hawaii — it's actually Experiment 626, an alien on the run — and their chaotic, heartwarming bond redefines what family means. Disney went back to watercolor-painted backgrounds for the first time since the 1940s, Elvis Presley's music soundtracked the tropics, and the core message stuck with a generation: Ohana means family, and family means nobody gets left behind.
Rick Moranis and Ed O'Neill as feuding brothers coaching rival pee-wee football teams in Urbania, Ohio; Icebox, the girl who got cut for being a girl; a bus full of real NFL stars; and a trick play called the Annexation of Puerto Rico. It didn't earn back its budget in theaters, but it never left the kid-sports canon.
Peter Jackson's monumental film trilogy adapting J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003). Filmed entirely in New Zealand, it defined epic fantasy for a generation with breathtaking scale, iconic performances, and midnight premieres that felt like cultural events.
![Video thumbnail — Lost in Space (1998) ORIGINAL TRAILER [HD/60FPS]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GMH1yAo86j8/maxresdefault.jpg)
The big-budget 1998 reboot of Irwin Allen's 1960s space family, with Gary Oldman as the sneering Dr. Smith, Matt LeBlanc, then starring in Friends, and Dick Tufeld back as the voice of the Robot. It knocked Titanic out of first place and then got a 27 on Rotten Tomatoes.
Four spoiled zoo animals, one island, and a lemur king ordering everyone to move it, move it. Madagascar arrived on May 27, 2005, as a DreamWorks bet on pure silliness that landed with kids and never quite left.
Dumped on the same day, Brodie and T.S. spend it at the mall, where Jay and Silent Bob plot to wreck a dating show, a guy stares at a Magic Eye poster all day, and Stan Lee gives romance advice. Kevin Smith's studio follow-up to Clerks flopped in 1995 and found its audience on video.
Tim Burton's $80 million love letter to a gory 1962 trading-card set: cackling bug-eyed Martians vaporizing Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, and half of Hollywood — until Slim Whitman's yodeling makes their heads explode. Five months after Independence Day played it straight, this played it very, very weird.
A brilliant six-year-old book-lover discovers she has telekinetic powers — and a tyrannical principal to use them on. Danny DeVito directed, co-produced, narrated, and played the crooked used-car-salesman dad in this 1996 Roald Dahl adaptation, which stumbled at the box office and then became a VHS staple kids rewatched forever.
The teen comedy that defined 2000s school social hierarchies — cliques, calculation, and the crushing realization that you might be the problem. Mean Girls premiered in April 2004, written by SNL's Tina Fey, and immediately became the movie every middle and high school student quoted obsessively for the next decade.
Male nurse Greg Focker spends one weekend trying to impress his girlfriend's ex-CIA father and destroys everything he touches — the polygraph, the altar, the septic tank, the cat. Ben Stiller squirming under Robert De Niro's stare gave the 2000s its shorthand for meeting-the-in-laws dread, and put the "circle of trust" into the vocabulary.
A 12-year-old orphan inventor gets yanked into the future by a fast-talking kid named Wilbur, meets a gloriously weird family, and is hunted by a villain in a sentient bowler hat. Meet the Robinsons underperformed in 2007 and got lost in Disney's awkward mid-2000s stretch — but its three-word motto, "Keep Moving Forward," stuck with the kids who saw it.
Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in black suits and shades, policing the aliens already living in Manhattan. The neuralyzer flash, the talking pug, and a theme song you could not escape made this one of the defining blockbusters of summer 1997.
The youth-hockey underdog trilogy that gave a generation the "Flying V," the knuckle-puck, and arenas full of kids chanting "Quack, quack, quack." Emilio Estevez coached the ragtag Ducks — and the movies were so popular Disney went out and founded a real NHL team.
A 2,000-pound gorilla with a heart of gold, a young Charlize Theron who'd known him since childhood, and Bill Paxton along for the ride. Disney's 1998 remake of the 1949 classic bombed in theaters against a $90 million budget — then did what 90s family creature-features do: became a cable and VHS staple every kid somehow saw.
Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks, molding college kids into the team that beat the unbeatable Soviets in 1980. Disney's Miracle on Ice movie — the one that made every gym teacher yell a little more meaningfully for a few years.
Your closet door really was a portal to a monster city — and the scariest part was that the monsters were just doing their jobs. Pixar's Monsters, Inc. imagined a metropolis powered by children's screams, then let one giggling toddler named Boo dismantle the whole economy.
"MORTAL KOMBAT!" — the scream, the techno drop, and suddenly it's the best night at the movies a 12-year-old had in 1995. Cheesy? Completely. Three straight weeks at #1? Also yes.
The 2001 Disney Channel movie that turned Shakespeare's Twelfth Night into a dirt-bike race. When her twin brother gets hurt, Andi Carson secretly races in his place under his name, with her mother in on it and her father off in Europe looking for a replacement rider.
Nathan Lane and Lee Evans as the Smuntz brothers, inheriting a string factory and a mansion worth a fortune, and losing the war to the one mouse living inside it. Gore Verbinski's first feature was DreamWorks' Christmas 1997 slapstick, with Christopher Walken as the exterminator who fares no better.
Robin Williams, four hours in the makeup chair every morning, running through a restaurant quick-change like his life depended on it. The film that proved you could make a comedy about a family falling apart and still have it be genuinely touching—a rare balance the 90s got right, and a comfort object ever since.
A young woman cuts her hair, binds her chest, and marches off to war disguised as a man — and Disney somehow made it soar. Mulan arrived in 1998 with stirring action, a wisecracking dragon, and a credits song that launched a pop star's career.
![Video thumbnail — MY GIRL [1991] - Official Trailer (HD)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KSyKO0Lklmo/maxresdefault.jpg)
A coming-of-age story set in a funeral home, anchored by Anna Chlumsky's Vada and Macaulay Culkin fresh off Home Alone — and then the bee scene happened. For a generation of kids, this was the sleepover movie that taught them movies could break your heart.
Ben Stiller's Mr. Furious, Hank Azaria's cutlery-flinging Blue Raja and William H. Macy's Shoveler: a team of third-rate superheroes with dubious powers, out to save Champion City. It bombed in the summer of 1999 and left behind a cult and the Smash Mouth "All Star" video.
Jack Black in stretchy pants: a monastery cook who moonlights as a luchador to buy the orphans better food. Jared Hess's Napoleon Dynamite follow-up gave the 2000s an entire dialect of quotes delivered in one gloriously unplaceable accent.
A deadpan indie comedy about an awkward teenager in small-town Idaho navigating high school, family chaos, and his own social ineptitude. Released in 2004, the low-budget film became a quotable phenomenon with unforgettable moments — "Gosh!", "Vote for Pedro", tetherball showdowns — and spawned endless merchandise and T-shirt catchphrases.
Nicolas Cage as a history-nerd treasure hunter who decides to steal the Declaration of Independence — because the treasure map is on the back. Bruckheimer gloss, a premise played completely straight, and one of the 2000s' great cable-rerun perennials.
Ben Stiller takes the night-guard job at the American Museum of Natural History and discovers the exhibits come alive after dark — Robin Williams as a chatty Teddy Roosevelt, a tiny cowboy named Jedediah, and a premise so charming the real museum's holiday attendance jumped by about 50,000 visitors.
John Hughes High, the slow clap, the makeover that takes off her glasses and ponytail, and conjoined twins for prom queen. The 2001 spoof put two decades of teen movies in a blender, cast Chris Evans as the jock, and led its soundtrack with Marilyn Manson's "Tainted Love."
Four girls, one summer in 1970, a treehouse fund and a cemetery séance: the 1995 sleepover staple with Christina Ricci, Thora Birch, Gaby Hoffmann and Ashleigh Aston Moore, and Demi Moore, Melanie Griffith, Rosie O'Donnell and Rita Wilson as who they grew into. Critics shrugged; cable and VHS made it a classic anyway.
Tim Blake Nelson's modern Othello, relocated to an elite Southern prep school where basketball replaces Venice's wars. Mekhi Phifer as the only Black student and star athlete, Josh Hartnett as the jealous rival, Julia Stiles as Desdemona. It was made to be released in 1999—but held from the world for two years after Columbine.
Eleven thieves, three casinos, $160 million in one underground vault. Steven Soderbergh's 2001 remake of the Rat Pack classic put George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Julia Roberts in the coolest movie of the decade — a heist so smooth it made crime look like a hangout.
TPS reports, the printer that says PC LOAD LETTER, the red Swingline stapler, and Lumbergh leaning into the cubicle to ask if you could come in on Saturday. Mike Judge's 1999 comedy died in theaters and then became the movie every office worker quotes.
Three depressed guys in their thirties start a fraternity, and Will Ferrell's Frank the Tank goes streaking through the quad. Todd Phillips' 2003 comedy turned a midlife crisis into a toga party and helped define the decade of R-rated comedy that followed.
A camera on a tripod, a bedroom door, and whatever it is that moves while they sleep. The $15,000 haunted-house movie that terrified test audiences into walking out — and rode a 'Demand It' campaign to nearly $200 million in the fall of 2009.
Robin Williams as the real Dr. Hunter "Patch" Adams — a medical student who prescribes laughter, wears a clown nose on the children's ward, and dreams of a free hospital. Audiences packed theaters and cried; critics savaged it; the real Patch Adams hated it. A defining late-90s Robin Williams memory either way.
Disney's wild ride-to-film franchise that nobody saw coming. The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) launched a trilogy that turned a theme-park attraction into one of the 2000s' biggest blockbusters, powered by Johnny Depp's Oscar-nominated performance as the eccentric Captain Jack Sparrow.
Disney's follow-up to The Lion King premiered to 100,000 people in Central Park and gave the '90s one of its defining songs in "Colors of the Wind." Critics were divided; audiences wore out the VHS anyway. Two Oscars, $346 million worldwide, and a legacy history has complicated ever since.
The strange outsider parable about a hairless, pale savant with electromagnetic powers — lightning-struck before birth, raised in a cellar, thrust into a small town that doesn't understand him. It split critics but became exactly the kind of weird 90s rental-store fixture that stays lodged in memory.
Junior, the seven-year-old in the red bow tie adopted by John Ritter's hapless Ben Healy, is pen pals with a serial killer and a one-boy demolition crew. Critics loathed it, 70 percent of a test audience walked out, and by its writers' account it became Universal's most profitable film of 1990.
Quentin Tarantino's nonlinear crime epic rewrote the rules of what indie films could be. Released October 1994 with a Palme d'Or win at Cannes, a $200 million global gross, and career resurrections for John Travolta and a breakthrough for Samuel L. Jackson, Pulp Fiction became the defining film of a generation hungry for something different.
Pixar's rat-in-a-toque masterpiece: Remy, a rodent with a chef's palate, secretly cooking in a Paris kitchen by puppeteering a hapless garbage boy by the hair. It ends with a single bite of vegetables sending a feared critic hurtling back to his childhood — the most devastating flashback in animation.
Denzel Washington as Coach Herman Boone, a newly consolidated Virginia high school, and a 1971 season that ended 13–0. Remember the Titans opened at number one in September 2000, earned a rare A+ CinemaScore, and its theme has closed NBC's Olympic broadcasts since 2002, even though the real Titans won most of their games by shutout.
The prequel trilogy's dark landing, May 19, 2005: Order 66, the Mustafar duel, and the Vader suit sealed shut — the first Star Wars film ever rated PG-13. It was the year's #1 movie in North America, and it has aged into the one the prequel generation defends.
Macaulay Culkin as the richest kid in the world in a mansion with a working McDonald's inside it—a fantasy of 90s excess that hit a little different for a generation of latchkey kids. The film was panned and underperformed at the box office, and yet Richie Rich became a cultural touchstone for a very specific kind of 90s wish fulfillment.
A college kid's one-night mistake gets caught on tape—and the tape gets mailed to his long-distance girlfriend. Cue an 1,800-mile scramble to intercept it, with Tom Green's unhinged campus tour guide narrating the whole saga as local legend. Depraved and stupid exactly as intended, it rode the post-American Pie wave into dorm-room immortality.
Two best friends, one Tucson reunion, and the lie that they invented Post-its. Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow in 1997, with a dance number Roger Ebert called "the weirdest choreography I have seen outside a 1960s revival." A modest hit in theaters that became a sleepover classic on tape and cable.
![Video thumbnail — Rookie of the Year (1993) Theatrical Trailer [4K] [FTD-1393]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gUAoirkeaVE/maxresdefault.jpg)
Henry Rowengartner breaks his arm, it heals with the tendons a little too tight, and suddenly a 12-year-old is throwing 100 mph for the Chicago Cubs. Daniel Stern directs — and steals scenes as loopy pitching coach Phil Brickma. When the arm gives out mid-game, Henry wins with playground tricks. A cable staple of 90s childhoods.
Matt Damon as a reformed card shark pulled back to the table, Edward Norton as the friend who keeps dragging him there, and John Malkovich chewing Oreos as a Russian mobster named Teddy KGB. A modest 1998 release that a generation of poker players later adopted as their sacred text.
The buddy-cop smash that paired Hong Kong action legend Jackie Chan with motormouth comedian Chris Tucker as mismatched cops forced to team up on a kidnapping case in Los Angeles. Chan's stunt-comedy and Tucker's nonstop riffing turned culture-clash friction into one of 1998's biggest hits — and launched a franchise.
Two strangers wake up chained in a grimy bathroom, caught in a game set by a killer called Jigsaw. The micro-budget 2004 shocker with one of horror's most famous twist endings turned October into Saw season for the rest of the decade — and put Billy the puppet's spiral cheeks on Halloween costumes everywhere.
A shameless parody of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Matrix, and half of Hollywood, powered by Wayans-family comedy and the breakout of Anna Faris. It opened to $42.3 million — the biggest R-rated opening weekend ever at the time — and taught the 2000s that no movie was safe from a spoof.
Jack Black fakes his way into a prep-school substitute-teaching job and turns a class of fifth-graders into a rock band. The trick that makes School of Rock immortal: the kids were real musicians playing live, so every scene of them discovering rock and roll is actually happening.
Mystery Inc. went live-action with a CGI Great Dane, a tropical haunted resort, and one performance nobody has ever stopped praising: Matthew Lillard simply became Shaggy. Critics shrugged, kids showed up in droves, and "like, zoinks" had its biggest summer ever.
Ghostface's taunting phone calls — "What's your favorite scary movie?" — and a cast of teens who knew all the horror rules and died anyway. Wes Craven's self-aware slasher reinvented the genre for the Blockbuster generation.
Two detectives, a nameless city where it never stops raining, and a killer working his way through the seven deadly sins. David Fincher's 1995 thriller ends with a box, and with an ending the studio fought to change and lost.
Jack Black gets hypnotized by Tony Robbins (yes, really, playing himself) to see only inner beauty, and falls for the woman of his dreams—who happens to be wearing a 25-pound fat suit. It's a broad comedy that made a lot of money and aged like milk left in the sun. Modern rewatching is complicated by the fact that the actors who wore that suit lived through genuine hurt.
A lonely kid's imaginary superheroes turn out to be real, and off he goes to Planet Drool in smeary red-and-blue 3-D. Nobody who was a child in 2005 forgot the dream song, the Land of Milk and Cookies, or a pre-Twilight Taylor Lautner scowling in a shark suit.
A London sales advisor stuck in a rut and his slacker best mate face the zombie apocalypse armed with household objects, a vinyl collection, and a plan that begins and ends at the pub. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's "rom-zom-com" is the parody so precise and so affectionate it stands as a great zombie film in its own right — Romero himself phoned to say so.
A modern Pygmalion: class president bets he can turn an art-nerd girl into prom queen in six weeks. Released January 29, 1999, directed by Robert Iscove, it became the surprise smash that crowned the entire late-90s teen-movie wave. A staircase reveal, a perfect song, and one of the era's most-rewatched moments.
The grumpy ogre who just wanted to be left alone, dragged into a quest to rescue a princess and discover his own capacity for love. Shrek arrived in May 2001 as a subversive fairy-tale comedy from DreamWorks, won the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and spawned a franchise that defined early-2000s family cinema.
Crop circles in a Pennsylvania cornfield, a baby monitor hissing in the dark, and grainy birthday-party footage from Brazil that made a whole theater hold its breath in August 2002. M. Night Shyamalan's follow-up to Unbreakable starred Mel Gibson as a widowed ex-priest and Joaquin Phoenix as his baseball-bat-swinging brother, and it was the summer's biggest haunted house.
Whoopi Goldberg as a Reno lounge singer hiding from the mob in a San Francisco convent, where she turns a hopeless choir into a gospel-and-oldies act that packs the pews. It made $231 million and was America's top video rental of 1993.
Disney's superhero high school movie, where freshmen get sorted into Heroes and 'Hero Support.' Will Stronghold — powerless son of the world's two greatest supers — starts ninth grade at a school that floats above the clouds, and Kurt Russell plays super-dad with total sincerity.
Tom Hanks is a widowed architect whose eight-year-old son calls a radio show on Christmas Eve; Meg Ryan is the Baltimore reporter who hears it and can't let go. Nora Ephron's 1993 romantic comedy sent a generation to the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day, with a standards soundtrack that hit number one.
Joe Dante's 1998 movie about toys that come alive and go to war: a defense contractor puts a munitions-guidance chip in a line of action figures, and the Commando Elite decide the gentle Gorgonites must be destroyed, along with anyone who gets in the way. Empire's verdict: "It's Gremlins with toy soldiers, except not quite as dark or funny."
The 1999 Disney Channel movie where a kid wins a computerized house and teaches it to be his mom from old sitcoms, until PAT the house becomes a 1950s-housewife hologram and locks the family in. Entertainment Weekly has twice ranked it the best Disney Channel Original Movie ever made.
Samuel L. Jackson took the job because of the title, the internet spent a year turning the title into a running joke, and New Line reshot the movie to add the line the fans had already written for him. Snakes on a Plane (August 2006) was called perhaps the most internet-hyped film of all time, then opened to $15 million, a gap analysts still call the Snakes on a Plane effect.
Michael Jordan teams with Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes to beat a squad of talent-stealing aliens, the Monstars. A live-action/animation hybrid with a monster soundtrack, it made the Tune Squad jersey a playground staple.
Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man was the superhero film that launched a thousand blockbusters — a scarlet-and-blue origin story with real stunts, genuine emotion, and Tobey Maguire's earnest Peter Parker. The upside-down rain kiss, Willem Dafoe's scenery-chewing Green Goblin, and 'with great power comes great responsibility' became templates for how to do superhero cinema.
The movie where your boring parents turned out to be retired spies — and when they got kidnapped, you and your sibling became the heroes. Robert Rodriguez wrote, directed, and edited his 2001 gadget caper himself, packing it with jetpacks, a surreal TV-host villain, and henchmen made entirely of thumbs.
The Borg Queen haunted the multiplex in Jonathan Frakes's feature directorial debut, with James Cromwell as the boozy, reluctant legend who invents warp drive. It became the highest-grossing and best-reviewed of the TNG-era films — the moment 90s Trek proved it could do full Hollywood scale.
Jonathan Frakes's second Trek film is the cozy one — Picard defying Starfleet to defend a peaceful people and their rejuvenating planet. Critics shrugged that it played like a long TV episode; for a lot of fans, that was exactly the appeal.
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's 1994 hit: a metal ring dug up at Giza in 1928 turns out to be a wormhole, and Kurt Russell's grieving colonel and James Spader's dismissed Egyptologist walk through it to a desert planet where a body-snatching alien is worshipped as Ra. Critics shrugged, it opened to an October record, and it spawned three live-action television series.
![Video thumbnail — STARSHIP TROOPERS [1997]– Official Trailer (HD)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zPYuV_jGk7M/maxresdefault.jpg)
Paul Verhoeven's militaristic sci-fi satire based on Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel, starring Casper Van Dien as a young soldier fighting giant bugs in a fascistic future society. A visual spectacle that was widely misunderstood upon release but has become a celebrated cult classic.
Two middle-aged men still living with their parents accidentally become stepbrothers when their single parents get married. The bunk-bed disaster, the friendship declaration, the Catalina Wine Mixer — a movie so quotable it became a cult classic through cable reruns and endless friend-group recitations.
Street dancer meets ballet school, sparks and choreography ensue. The 2006 Baltimore dance romance that launched Channing Tatum, a five-film franchise — and, off-screen, the era's most beloved dance-movie couple.
What if Mario's Mushroom Kingdom wasn't cheerful, but a dystopian nightmare? Super Mario Bros. (1993) boldly attempted that reimagining, transforming the game's world into Dinohattan—a grimy parallel dimension where dinosaurs had evolved into humanoids. Bob Hoskins played Mario, John Leguizamo his brother Luigi, and the brothers traveled there to rescue Princess Daisy from King Koopa. The film flopped at the box office and earned scathing reviews, but it eventually developed a loyal cult following who celebrate its ambitious practical effects and creature design.
A low-budget indie that became a word-of-mouth empire. Five Vermont state troopers prank their way through a dead stretch of highway—the all-'meow' traffic stop, the maple-syrup chug, Farva's immortal 'liter of cola'—while feuding with the local cops. Theaters shrugged; the DVD made it a generation's comedy bible.
A last-week-of-high-school panic attack disguised as a party movie. Two best friends on a doomed one-night quest to buy alcohol, and a fake ID bearing a single name — McLovin — that instantly became the decade's most famous prop. This was the R-rated teen comedy that felt like watching your own friends instead of a movie.
Two Los Angeles surfer kids find out they're the crown princes of Patusan, with Rob Schneider as the tagalong, Leslie Nielsen as the villain, and a Sega Game Gear whose game mirrors the plot. The 1993 New Line flop that Sega helped pay for.
Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver raised on one piece of fatherly wisdom: "If you ain't first, you're last." The summer 2006 comedy opened at #1 with $47 million and gave the world "shake and bake" — a catchphrase real drivers still quote.
Lori Petty as a punk rebel with a tank in a drought-ravaged 2033, fighting the corporation that owns the water. The studio recut it, the comic's creators disowned it, and it bombed — then became a cult classic anyway on pure riot-grrrl attitude.
The turtles weren't cartoons anymore — they were full-scale animatronic suits in a 1990 film that upended what kids thought they knew. New Line Cinema's take was grittier and darker, pulling from the early comics rather than the toy-aisle sweetness of the animated series. Shot for $13.5 million, it became a sleeper phenomenon, earning over $202 million worldwide. The turtle suits were built by Jim Henson's Creature Shop — one of Henson's last projects before his death just weeks after the premiere.
Leonardo DiCaprio's post-Titanic swing: Danny Boyle's adaptation of Alex Garland's backpacker novel, shot at a real Thai bay that Fox literally bulldozed to make prettier. It opens dazzling and gradually loses the plot — which is exactly how the critics called it in 2000, and exactly how everyone who saw it at fifteen still remembers it. The soundtrack ("Pure Shores," "Porcelain") outlived the movie; Maya Bay paid the price for the fame.
Happy Madison's 2006 comedy about three grown-up nerds, Rob Schneider, David Spade and Jon Heder, who take on every Little League team in the state for the kids who never got picked. Critics hated it, it opened at #2 anyway, and it has since picked up a cult following.
A mistaken-identity bowling noir built on White Russians, nihilists, and the definitive 90s character: the Dude, a Los Angeles pot-smoking bowling bum who stumbles into a kidnapping plot. Its theatrical run was modest and critics were lukewarm. Then something strange happened: it became THE cult film of its generation, spawning a religion and a traveling film festival dedicated entirely to its worship.
Three film students walk into the Maryland woods to document a local legend; only their footage comes back. The Blair Witch Project cost less to shoot than a used car and grossed nearly $250 million in 1999 — because its marketing convinced a meaningful slice of America that the tape was real and the actors were dead.
A man is pulled from the Mediterranean with two bullets in his back and no memory — but his hands remember everything. Matt Damon's amnesiac assassin made spy movies fast, grounded, and paranoid — and the decade's action cinema followed his lead.
Jim Carrey's dark left turn: an obsessive cable installer who hooks you up and never leaves. Ben Stiller directed, Judd Apatow produced, and Carrey took a then-record $20 million payday to unsettle the exact audience his goofball hits had built. Critics split hard in 1996; the cult came later.
Alexandre Dumas' revenge classic played gloriously straight: betrayal, a hidden fortune, sword fights, and vengeance served exquisitely cold. A January sleeper in 2002 that grew into dad-canon — the cable movie you'd catch on a Sunday afternoon and watch to the end, every single time.
Andrew Fleming's cult sleeper hit about four Catholic-school outcasts who form a coven and discover real magic. Featuring Robin Tunney, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, and Rachel True, The Craft codified the 90s goth aesthetic, kicked off the teen-witch wave, and made "We are the weirdos, mister" a quotable rallying cry.
Brandon Lee in black-and-white face paint, a crow on his shoulder, Detroit on Devil's Night. The 1994 gothic revenge film became a legend for the saddest reason: Lee was killed by a prop gun with days of shooting left, and the movie was finished without him. The soundtrack topped the charts.
Daniel Day-Lewis shouting "Because it is my name!" and Winona Ryder leading the girls in shrieking fits — for a generation, this was the movie the teacher wheeled in after you finished reading the play. Arthur Miller himself adapted his own 1953 classic — and earned an Oscar nomination for it, more than four decades after the play premiered.
Heath Ledger's Joker turned Christopher Nolan's Batman sequel into the event film of 2008 — a then-record $158.4 million opening weekend on the way to a billion dollars worldwide and a posthumous Oscar. "Why so serious?" was everywhere that summer.
Roland Emmerich's 2004 blockbuster trades aliens for air currents — a cascade of extreme weather that flash-freezes New York in a matter of days. Dennis Quaid's climate scientist goes unheeded, Jake Gyllenhaal ends up burning library books to survive, and that frozen Statue of Liberty became the poster image for every "what if the climate does THIS" conversation you had in school.
"Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking." Meryl Streep's whisper-quiet Miranda Priestly, the cerulean sweater speech, the red stiletto with the pitchfork heel. The 2006 film out-earned every previous movie of its three leading women, ran as counter-programming to Superman Returns, and defined what a personal assistant looks like in the public imagination.
When the teachers at a sleepy Ohio high school start acting strange, six student misfits figure out the faculty is being taken over by alien parasites — Invasion of the Body Snatchers relocated to sixth period. The cast is absurdly stacked: Elijah Wood and Josh Hartnett versus a teachers' lounge containing Robert Patrick, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, and, yes, Jon Stewart.
Paul Walker's undercover cop, Vin Diesel's Toretto, NOS buttons, neon underglow, and "I live my life a quarter mile at a time." The $38 million sleeper that made import-tuner street racing the defining car culture of the decade.
A straight-arrow high-school senior, a gorgeous new neighbor with a secret past, and the eternal question: "is the juice worth the squeeze?" It underperformed in theaters — then found its real audience on DVD and late-night cable, where it quietly became one of the 2000s' most rewatched teen comedies.
The 1985 adventure every 90s kid knew by heart from VHS and cable reruns — misfit kids chasing One-Eyed Willy's pirate treasure under Astoria, Oregon, with the Fratellis in pursuit. "Goonies never say die." At a 90s sleepover, someone always owned the tape.
Jim Carrey endured 92 days in Rick Baker's green-fur prosthetics — painful yellow contact lenses, panic attacks, and an offer to hand back his $20 million payday and quit. Ron Howard's Whoville fever dream became 2000's biggest movie at the US box office anyway, and it has owned basic-cable Decembers ever since.
![Video thumbnail — The Hangover - Official Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TZc39afdeXU/maxresdefault.jpg)
Three groomsmen wake up in a trashed Caesars Palace suite with a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, a missing groom — and no memory of how. The 2009 comedy that ate the summer and made Zach Galifianakis a star.
![Video thumbnail — The Incredibles - Official® Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ixKqYNMqcnE/maxresdefault.jpg)
Pixar's 2004 superhero film about a family forced to hide their powers in suburban normalcy — Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl, and their kids Violet, Dash, and baby Jack-Jack. They're drawn out of retirement to battle the villain Syndrome, and the film balances family comedy with genuine action and heart. The Academy Award–winning film proved animation could deliver both laughs and thrills.
The 1995 Frank Oz film in which a boy's birthday cupboard brings a plastic toy to life as a tiny 18th-century Onondaga man. Reviews were mixed to positive and audiences mostly skipped it in theaters, but it found its following on home video.
A fifty-foot robot from space crash-lands in 1957 Maine and befriends a nine-year-old boy, who teaches him he can choose who he wants to be. Brad Bird's feature directorial debut was adored by critics and ignored at the box office — then a second life on home video and cable turned it into the cartoon that makes grown adults cry at one word: "Superman."
![Video thumbnail — The Last of the Mohicans (1992) Original Trailer [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c9TED2yeoRo/maxresdefault.jpg)
Michael Mann's 1992 frontier epic: Daniel Day-Lewis sprinting through the forest, the waterfall vow — "I will find you" — and the theme everyone knows without knowing its name. Two composers, a Scottish folk tune turned orchestral juggernaut, and the only Oscar a film directed by Michael Mann has ever won.
The film that taught you to roar and made you cry at a father's death—all before your tenth birthday. Disney's juggernaut — Hamlet with lions — dominated the box office and pop culture like nothing before it, a phenomenon that didn't fade with the VHS but exploded into merchandise, video games, and eventually Broadway's best-grossing production ever.
The 1989 animated film that revived Disney animation—Ron Clements and John Musker's adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen, with Oscar-winning songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. 'Under the Sea' and 'Kiss the Girl' became instant classics, with Jodi Benson's Ariel and Pat Carroll's Ursula cementing themselves in pop culture forever. For 90s kids, the real experience was the VHS: released May 1990, it became the year's best-selling home video and a household object that defined childhoods.
Spanky's He-Man Womun Haters Club, Alfalfa's cowlick and his forbidden crush on Darla, a go-kart called The Blur, and a clubhouse that burns down: Penelope Spheeris's 1994 update of Hal Roach's Our Gang shorts, produced by Amblin and released by Universal on August 5, 1994. Critics called it a marketing exercise; kids wore out the VHS.
Rome, Paolo, the Trevi Fountain, and "What Dreams Are Made Of" sung at the International Music Video Awards. The 2003 movie was the first theatrical film ever spun from a Disney Channel show, the finale of Lizzie McGuire, and the moment Hilary Duff graduated from cable to the multiplex, opening second only to X2.
The 2001 Disney Channel movie in which a teenage basketball star loses his lucky gold coin and starts shrinking, turning red-haired and growing pointy ears, because his mother's family are secretly leprechauns. Collider called it the strangest DCOM ever. Ryan Coogler says it helped inspire Sinners.
Ssssmokin'! Stanley Ipkiss puts on a cursed green mask and becomes a zoot-suited cartoon come to life — eyes bugging out, heart pounding through his chest. The Mask turned Jim Carrey into a literal living Tex Avery gag and gave the world Cameron Diaz.
The Wachowskis' sci-fi thriller rewired action cinema with bullet-time, philosophical depth, and Keanu Reeves as an accidental messiah in a simulation. Released March 1999, The Matrix became an instant cultural landmark, launching a franchise and spawning endless "red pill" debates in college dorms.
Brendan Fraser with a revolver in each hand, Rachel Weisz waking a 3,000-year-old curse, and a face forming out of a wall of sand. Stephen Sommers turned Universal's 1932 monster into pure swashbuckling summer joy — Indiana Jones for a new generation, and it knew it.
The stop-motion marvel Tim Burton conceived — and Henry Selick directed — where the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town kidnaps Christmas. Danny Elfman wrote the songs and sang Jack himself. Disney thought it too dark for its own label in 1993; a decade later Jack's face was a mall uniform.
Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, and the rain-soaked kiss that calcified into a generation's romantic ideal. Critics split; audiences swooned; the 2000s got its definitive sleepover weeper.
The guy from The Fast and the Furious in a minivan, doing a bedtime routine called the Peter Panda dance with complete tactical seriousness. The Pacifier put Vin Diesel's biceps in charge of five kids and a duck, and every rental shelf and cable afternoon of 2005 made sure you saw it.
Macaulay Culkin, four years after Home Alone, ducks into a library to escape a storm and gets melted into a cartoon, where three talking books and Long John Silver, Moby-Dick and Dr. Jekyll chase him toward the exit sign. It cost a reported $34 million, made $13.7 million, and was the last animated feature 20th Century Fox released with hand-painted cels.
One eleven-year-old, two accents, one very elaborate scheme. Lindsay Lohan's double-role debut as twins separated at birth — reunited at summer camp and determined to swap lives and re-trap their parents — turned a 1961 Disney classic into a 90s comfort-movie institution.
Sixteen years after Return of the Jedi, Star Wars came back on May 19, 1999 — behind maybe the biggest hype wave in movie history. Fans famously camped outside theaters in ticket lines, and people bought tickets to Meet Joe Black just to watch the teaser and walk out. What delivered: Darth Maul, "Duel of the Fates," and the podrace. What didn't: Jar Jar and midi-chlorians.
Robert Zemeckis' 2004 motion-capture Christmas film became the instant classic everyone either loved or found genuinely unsettling — sometimes both. Tom Hanks played six roles in a $165 million fever dream about a boy who boards a magical train on Christmas Eve, backed by an Oscar-nominated Josh Groban ballad. It's now a December rite: the movie every elementary school saves for pajama day.
DreamWorks' 1998 animated Exodus, with Val Kilmer as Moses, Ralph Fiennes as Rameses, and a parting of the Red Sea that took three years to animate. Its song "When You Believe" won the Oscar and became a Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey duet.
A shy San Francisco teenager discovers she's a princess and gets the makeover of her life—with life lessons in a tiara. Anne Hathaway's breakout film became the ultimate makeover fantasy, complete with Julie Andrews as her regal grandmother.
Watch a cursed VHS tape, get a phone call, die in seven days. The Ring turned Japanese horror into Hollywood's next obsession, made TV static terrifying, and gave every sleepover a new dare.
A 1938-set superhero film made with practical effects and genuine affection for the adventure serials of an earlier era: a jetpack, an art-deco helmet, and wish-fulfillment so pure it predated the superhero-movie industrial complex by a decade.
The babies hit the big screen: newborn brother Dil arrives, the Reptar wagon careens into the woods, and the Pickles crew has to find its way home. Nickelodeon's first feature-length animated film, released November 1998, became the first non-Disney animated feature to cross $100 million at the US box office.
Roger Avary's savage adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, following three self-destructive Camden College students through a haze of parties, drugs, and cross-wired desire. James Van Der Beek torched his wholesome Dawson's Creek image as the dealer Sean Bateman — younger brother, in Ellis's world, of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. A box-office flop that became a cult object.
David Mickey Evans' 1993 film about a group of kids playing baseball on a sandlot in the 1960s became the quintessential summer movie for 90s childhoods. The Sandlot captured the wonder and terror of childhood adventure — forbidden crushes, a monstrous dog, and a lost ball signed by Babe Ruth — with perfect comedic timing and genuine heart.
Tim Allen becomes Santa Claus because of magical fine print, and a 1994 Disney comedy becomes the Christmas movie families rewatch every December. It's a movie about divorce, suburban anxiety, and magic that somehow makes all three work.
Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter behind the glass, fava beans and a nice Chianti. Jonathan Demme's 1991 thriller opened on Valentine's Day, swept the top five Oscars, and remains the only horror film ever to win Best Picture. Lecter is still the AFI's number-one movie villain.
Four best friends, one pair of jeans that inexplicably fits all of them, and their first summer apart. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was only a modest hit in theaters in 2005, but plenty of people who were the right age remember it as a sleepover staple — the movie you watched with your own group of friends while quietly deciding which of the four you were.
M. Night Shyamalan's breakout thriller about a child psychologist (Bruce Willis) treating a boy (Haley Joel Osment) who whispers the film's immortal line: 'I see dead people.' A cultural phenomenon that made the twist ending a permanent fixture of cinema and grossed over $670 million worldwide.
Goofy Goober Rock, the Patty Wagon, seaweed mustaches and David Hasselhoff as a human speedboat. Stephen Hillenburg meant the 2004 movie to be the end of SpongeBob; it made $140 million, Nickelodeon kept the show going, and 4,700 Burger Kings put an inflatable sponge on the roof.
Odette, Derek, the sorcerer Rothbart, and "Far Longer than Forever." The 1994 princess movie that wasn't Disney, from a director Disney had fired, opened the same week The Lion King came back to theaters and died. Then it sold two and a half million tapes and spawned eleven sequels.
Jim Carrey's first great dramatic turn: Truman Burbank is an ordinary insurance salesman who slowly realizes his entire hometown is a giant TV set and everyone he knows is an actor — his whole life broadcast 24/7 to the world. Directed by Peter Weir from an Andrew Niccol script, it turned a high-concept nightmare into a tender, unsettling fable that only looked more prophetic as reality TV took over.
Bobby Boucher, his Mama, Coach Klein, and the Mud Dogs' forty-game losing streak. Adam Sandler's 1998 Cajun football comedy drew some of the worst reviews of his career, opened to a November record anyway, and as of 2020 was still the highest-grossing sports comedy ever made.
Adam Sandler as Robbie Hart, a 1985 wedding singer dumped at the altar, and Drew Barrymore as the waitress he writes "Grow Old With You" for. The film that proved Sandler could be sweet, and the first pairing of two stars who kept coming back to each other.
The 1992 kids' martial-arts movie where three brothers — Rocky, Colt, and Tum-Tum — spend the summer training with their ninja grandpa and then use their skills to foil bumbling crooks. Home Alone meets karate camp, and catnip to every kid who wanted to be a ninja.
James Cameron's three-hour epic about the Titanic sinking became the movie phenomenon of 1997, driven by the chemistry of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and an unforgettable Celine Dion ballad. It became the highest-grossing film ever and captured 11 Oscars at the 1998 ceremony, making "I'm flying" a phrase heard in every theater lobby and school cafeteria.
Schwarzenegger as a construction worker who may be a secret agent who may be dreaming the whole thing. Paul Verhoeven's Mars mind-bender gave sleepovers 'Get your ass to Mars,' the three-breasted mutant, and an ending arguments were built on.
Pixar's Toy Story was the first fully computer-animated feature film, directed by John Lasseter and starring Tom Hanks and Tim Allen as mismatched toys Woody and Buzz. Released November 1995, it reinvented animation and launched a franchise that still dominates 30 years later.
Giant photoreal robots that turn into cars, Michael Bay explosions, Steven Spielberg's name over the title, and Shia LaBeouf motor-mouthing his way through the end of the world. Bumblebee became a Camaro, Optimus Prime kept his original voice, and summer 2007 belonged to the Autobots.
A monster-comedy film about the residents of a tiny Nevada desert town fighting giant subterranean worm creatures called Graboids. Starring Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward alongside country star Reba McEntire, Tremors balanced scares with humor to become a beloved cult classic that spawned numerous sequels.
Wolfgang Petersen's big-budget take on Homer's Iliad, with Brad Pitt as the near-invincible warrior Achilles and Eric Bana as the doomed Trojan prince Hector. Gods and all, the myth was stripped down to human politics and combat — a sword-and-sandal epic that was a modest performer at home but a giant hit overseas.
The vampire-romance phenomenon that began with Stephenie Meyer's 2005 novel and exploded with the 2008 film starring Kristen Stewart as Bella, Robert Pattinson as vampire Edward, and Taylor Lautner as werewolf Jacob. The love triangle split fans into 'Team Edward' and 'Team Jacob'—complete with merchandise and fierce debate. The five-film saga ran through 2012, defining a generation's romance fantasy.
Two storm-chasing exes and an experimental sensor pod named Dorothy, racing a corporate rival — and the sky itself — across the Plains. It gave the world a CGI flying cow, "We got cows," a near-$500 million gross, and, quietly, one of the first movies ever released on DVD in America.
A K2 rescue thriller where the only way up is with nitroglycerin. Chris O'Donnell carries explosives up a frozen mountain while Bill Paxton schemes below, and it's all kicked off by an opening scene in Monument Valley that burns itself into your brain: a father orders his son to cut the rope. It's December 2000 popcorn cinema in its most visceral form.
"The Coast Is Toast": a volcano erupts out of the La Brea Tar Pits and sends lava rolling down Wilshire Boulevard, with only Tommy Lee Jones and some concrete freeway barriers standing in its way. The other half of 1997's inexplicable dueling-volcano-movie showdown — and the one that lost.
A trash-compacting robot alone on a garbage planet, a cockroach for a pet, a tape of Hello, Dolly! watched on repeat and a sleek white probe named EVE. Pixar's 2008 film barely speaks for its first act, cost a then-record $180 million, won the animated-feature Oscar and was called the best film of the decade by Time's critic.
Kevin Costner's Mad-Max-on-water epic became shorthand for Hollywood excess before anyone even bought a ticket — the most expensive movie ever made at the time, with a sinking set, a runaway budget, and a press corps sharpening knives. Then it quietly made its money back anyway.
Two guys broadcasting a cable-access show from a basement in Aurora, Illinois became a $183 million blockbuster — still the biggest movie ever made from an SNL sketch. "Schwing!", "…NOT!", "We're not worthy!" colonized every hallway in America, and one headbanging scene in an AMC Pacer sent Bohemian Rhapsody back up the charts seventeen years after its release.
Two divorce mediators crash every wedding they can find — until one crash strands them at a Treasury Secretary's family weekend. Wedding Crashers proved R-rated comedies could still pull blockbuster numbers, and the 'rules' of crashing became actual cultural shorthand.
Two Black FBI agents go undercover as a pair of white Hamptons heiresses, and the result became a cult classic anyway. Critics savaged White Chicks in June 2004 (15% on Rotten Tomatoes) and the Razzies nominated it five times, audiences gave it a B+ and $113 million, and Terry Crews belting "A Thousand Miles" outlived every review.
The summer 2000 movie that made superheroes respectable — black leather instead of spandex, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen lending Shakespearean gravity, and an unknown Australian named Hugh Jackman popping the claws. The modern comic-book boom starts here.
![Video thumbnail — YOU GOT SERVED [2004] - Official Trailer (HD)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zs6JKMHDjqM/maxresdefault.jpg)
The dance-battle movie so quotable its title became a nationwide diss. B2K, Marques Houston, a warehouse full of head-spins — critics hated it, audiences made it #1 in America, and every school hallway in 2004 turned into a battle circle.
Two brothers find a mysterious board game in the basement, and it launches their whole house into outer space. From the same picture-book universe as Jumanji, Zathura came out in 2005 with real robots and real miniatures — and a generation of rental-shelf loyalists still swears it's underrated.
Kirsten Storms as Zenon Kar, a 13-year-old exiled from her orbiting space station to boring old Earth in the year 2049, where nobody gets her slang and she has to stop a plot to crash the station for the insurance money. Disney Channel premiered it on January 23, 1999, and "zetus lapetus" entered the vocabulary of every kid watching. It was the first Disney Channel Original Movie to get a sequel.
Rule #1: Cardio. Rule #2: Double tap. The 2009 road-trip comedy that made the zombie apocalypse fun — four survivors named for their hometowns, a nationwide Twinkie hunt, and one legendary celebrity cameo.
Derek Zoolander is a really, really ridiculously good-looking male model who can't turn left — and his movie opened seventeen days after 9/11, to a country not in the mood. It shrugged at the box office in 2001, then cable and DVD turned Blue Steel, Mugatu, and the walk-off into quote-along canon.