As Matilda will shortly be getting its very own Broadway play led by Emma Thompson, it’s hard to believe that the classic movie, along with many others, is now a quarter of a century old.
With the 1990s in full swing, 1996 was filled with the usual suspects: comedy actors who were becoming the biggest movie stars ever, filmmaking wunderkinds at the top of their game, and the fruition of some of the longest running franchises. A lot of greatness came out of 1996, and even the movies that weren’t positively received at the time have gotten much better with age.
10 Happy Gilmore
While Adam Sandler is all but the face of Netflix at this point, there was a time when the comedy actor was also a huge box office draw and one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood. Happy Gilmore is one of the best of his movies from that era.
As the movie sees Happy (Sandler) apply his hockey skills to golf, the narrative is expectedly ridiculous, but it features the actor at the top of his game and it’s one of the best golf movies ever made, as much of an accolade as that can be.
9 Matilda
Matilda is one of the most exciting movies about kids with powers, and it features some of the most iconic characters in a children’s movie.
Trunchbull (Pam Ferris) remains to this day one of the most frightening antagonists of the past 30 years, and Mr. Wormwood (Danny DeVito) see the actor at the top of his game, as always. In the years since its release, there have been very few children’s movies as creative as this.
8 Jack
It may come as a surprise that Jack was directed by none other than Francis Ford Coppola, the man behind The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, some of the most violent and breathtaking movies ever made.
To say that Jack was a departure from his style is putting it lightly, as the movie follows the titular character (Robin Williams), who has a disease that makes him age four times as fast as anyone else. The movie gets a lot of hate, but it’s surprisingly emotional and it has been given an unfair trial.
7 From Dusk Till Dawn
From Dusk Till Dawn is two movies in one, as the first half is a road trip movie about two brothers with an odd relationship, and then it suddenly switches into survival horror, as the characters have to defend themselves from vampires trapped inside a club.
It's a unique movie, and coming from the mind of Robert Rodriguez, there are so many creative set pieces and incomprehensible shots, making for one of the best fight scenes of the 90s.
6 Fargo
Before the just as great TV series came along, Fargo was originally a phenomenal crime thriller helmed by the Coen brothers. The movie is best known for a few things, most notably its running gag about Minnesotan accents.
All of the characters have extremely exaggerated accents and it makes the thriller all the stranger, as there’s a weird comedic undertone, which has become a common trademark of the directors. It’s also best known for that wood-chipper scene, a clip so brutal that it’s no wonder that Fargo is one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite movies of the 1990s.
5 D3: The Mighty Ducks
It might just be seen as a cheap family comedy, but being the movie that wraps up the series, the franchise has become one of the most underrated trilogies ever. The Mighty Ducks has always been a fun, switch-off-your-brain kind of series, as it simply follows a team of teenage ice hockey players through their trials and tribulations before inevitably winning an important game.
But there’s so much heart to the series too, especially the third one, which sees the team go to college, and it has some of Charlie’s best moments, one of the characters fans want to see return in the upcoming Disney+ series
4 Jingle All The Way
Jingle All The Way has a strange place in the canon of classic holiday movies, as it’s one of the worst received movies of the genre, but it’s also the most quotable. “Put the cookie down!” has been memed to death, and the many other bizarre lines of dialogue uttered by Howard (Arnold Schwarzenegger) are embroidered on Christmas jumpers to this day, 25 years later.
As the character spends his entire Christmas Eve trying to get his hands on a sold-out toy for his son, it leads to an outright war with a lunatic mailman, making it just one of the holiday movies that could just as easily be a thriller.
3 Scream
Wes Craven having studied psychology is what has helped give his inventive horror movies, such as The Nightmare On Elm Street and The Hills Have Eyes, so much depth. But in 1996, the celebrated director set his sights on something more satirical in the movie industry than the stability of the human psyche.
Scream was the first of its kind, as it was a satire on horror but still remained firmly horrifying, and it began an incredible run of movies and a solid TV show too.
2 Hard Eight
Director Paul Thomas Anderson has gone on to have an incredible career, as he has collaborated with Daniel Day-Lewis on both There Will Be Blood and The Phantom Thread. He also directed Adam’s Sandler in one of his best dramatic roles in Punch Drunk Love. But before all of that, it was Hard Eight that kicked off his career, and it’s a movie that many people have unfairly forgotten.
It clearly comes before the director established his style, as it doesn’t feature any of the director’s trademarks, such as the multi-strand narrative and the doomed family relationships. However, it’s a great small stakes crime movie about a retired hitman, and it remains one of Anderson’s best movies.
1 Mission: Impossible
With the first movie being released in 1996, the Mission: Impossible series is one of the longest-running movie franchises ever. Mission: Impossible is the movie that started it all, as it went from a hiding-in-the-shadows spy movie to a vehicle for Tom Cruise to attempt to fulfill the death wish he seemingly has.
The franchise is now full of crazy stunts, but the first one was full of expertly crafted action scenes, even if they were more grounded than the recent movies.
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January 20, 2021 at 04:30AM
