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"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.
"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.
The serious young actor of the late-90s multiplex: a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for his 1996 debut in Primal Fear, a Best Actor nomination as the reformed skinhead of American History X, and then the nameless narrator of Fight Club. For a few years every ambitious drama seemed to have Edward Norton in it.
The child actor once credited as Leaf Phoenix became the decade's most intense leading man: the sneering emperor Commodus in Gladiator (2000), the brother with the baseball bat in Signs (2002), and a Johnny Cash in Walk the Line (2005) who did all his own singing. Then he announced he was quitting movies to rap, and the joke ran for two years.