90s All Over Me takes inspiration from 80s All Over, the Drew McWeeny/Scott Weinberg podcast that attempted to review every major film release of the 80s one month at a time; that podcast ended circa early 1985 and McWeeny has continued the project on his Substack. The aims of this series are somewhat more modest; rather than covering every month and release in said month, each entry will cover a year of the 1990s, focusing solely on what I’ve seen from that year. The first half of each instalment spotlights what I saw theatrically at the time, contextualising those works in my own moviegoing journey from ages seven to 17 as well as their wider cultural import. The second half covers every other release I’ve seen of that year across physical media, television, and streaming.
Read the previous instalment, a prequel entry on 1989.
- 1990 Total films seen: 113
- Total seen theatrically: 6
- VHS/TV/DVD/Streaming: 107
Theatrical
Surprisingly, I saw only six 1990 titles in theatres, though I recall seeing three of them multiple times. While I’m curating films in this series according to their official year of release, it’s worth noting that—due to differences between overseas and Australian release dates—not all titles were necessarily seen within their official calendar year. That’s especially the case with late year, Oscar-focused releases such as Dances with Wolves, which I know I saw in 1991 following the recommendation of a schoolteacher. Good teacher.
Dances with Wolves
Director: Kevin Costner; Cast: Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell, Graham Greene, Rodney A. Grant, Floyd 'Red Crow' Westerman; Writer: Michael Blake, (based on his novel)
Like Driving Miss Daisy in my 1989 entry, those looking for a damning critique of this lengthy revisionist Western that triumphed with the Academy over Scorsese’s mob classic need look elsewhere. I loved Dances with Wolves when I first saw it, still love the film, and routinely revisit it every few years.
Last entry I talked about Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, and Dan Aykroyd as my most recognisable movie stars at the time; I’d also add Bill Murray, Rick Moranis, and Bob Hoskins to that list, but all were familiar from family-friendly properties. While I knew Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson were major stars because they were the subject of books sold in Target, I knew Costner was a movie star because of Dances with Wolves, and he became the first contemporary star of movies made specifically for adults (no, not those ones) that I followed. My affection for his work remains strong to this day, and it’ll be interesting to chronicle his wild 1990s from Oscar-minted Prince of Tinseltown to pariah to something in between. The movie also showcases some of the very best work of composer John Barry and Australian cinematographer Dean Semler, the latter on the cusp of a similarly wild 90s working on some of Hollywood’s craziest productions.
Mermaids
Director: Richard Benjamin; Cast: Cher, Bob Hoskins, Winona Ryder, Christina Ricci; Writer: June Roberts, (based on the novel by Patty Dann)
Not a sequel to 1989’s The Little Mermaid, but an oddball, charming little film from Richard Benjamin featuring Cher, Winona Ryder, Christina Ricci, and the abovementioned Bob Hoskins. I of course knew Hoskins from Who Framed Roger Rabbit and—through digging into the back catalogues of the stars of Batman—knew Cher from The Witches of Eastwick and Winona Ryder from Beetlejuice, which no doubt helped sell 8-year-old me to sit still through this domestic comedy drama. I’m sure the Winona crush was already percolating.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Director: Steve Barron; Cast: Judith Hoag, Josh Pais, David Forman, Brian Tochi, Leif Tilden, Michelan Sisti, Robbie Rist, Corey Feldman, Elias Koteas; Writers: Todd W. Langen, Bobby Herbeck, (story by Bobby Herbeck, based on characters by Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird)
On the one hand, you had to be there to understand the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phenomenon; on the other hand, those fightin’ reptiles have never really left, existing ever since in one or more mediums. Music video director Steve Barron’s live-action adaptation of the comic book and cartoon property, while perhaps not objectively good, is very watchable, with some authentic New York sweat and grime, some authentic Golden Harvest-adjacent martial arts—to the extent that the bulky Jim Henson turtle suits allow—and a great supporting turn from Elias Koteas.
Pretty Woman
Director: Garry Marshall; Cast: Julia Roberts, Richard Gere, Ralph Bellamy, Jason Alexander, Laura San Giacomo; Writer: J.F. Lawton
I mentioned in my 1989 piece seeing films in theatres that skewed a bit more adult. This one, of course, skews very adult, and as an 8-year-old who didn’t understand the profession of prostitution, I took at face value that rich men pay women $3,000 for their company. In fairness, director Garry Marshall, the actors, Disney, and the global audience that made this a humongous hit collectively agreed to look the other way regarding the story’s murkier implications, buying into a fantasy of Los Angeles prostitutes as autonomous, pimpless independent contractors who occasionally have fairytale endings.
This is just one of many films of the 1980s and 90s where money—abundance of it or lack thereof—is the fetishistic catalyst for drama: see Wall Street, The Firm, Indecent Proposal, Shallow Grave, Jurassic Park, among others.
Duck Tales: The Movie
Inoffensive theatrical filler for Disney between The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, coming 1991.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch
A quite brilliant sequel and deconstruction/parody of the bigger-is-better mentality of sequels, with director Joe Dante given free rein to take things to the zaniest ends.
The Rest: Comic Books, Blank Cheques, and Action Film: The Sequel
It’s intriguing to trace the ripple effects of 1989 into 1990 and beyond. The most obvious one is the long tail of Batman’s mammoth success. While superhero movies did not become the coin of the realm until the 2000s, Hollywood stared at Batman in much the same way Richard Dreyfuss stared at his mash potato mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, saying “This means something!”
Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy and Sam Raimi’s Darkman, both in development prior to Batman’s release, clearly took pages from its playbook: the former in its advertising, casting of a big name villain (Al Pacino), and use of a major pop star (Madonna); the latter taking a chance on a Young Turk filmmaker (Sam Raimi); and both in hiring Danny Elfman to score. My affection for both films is well-documented.
Albert Pyun’s threadbare Captain America and Troma’s slightly-less-obscene-than-usual superhero stab Sergeant Kabukiman NYPD also profiteered on Batman’s success—albeit not to particularly lucrative ends—with the latter parodying Batman at one point (as does Gremlins 2). Telemovie Archie: To Riverdale and Back Again, while drawn from a comic book, played to a different demographic, though not the much-loved comic book’s readership, who weren’t interested in seeing adorable teenagers become middle-aged losers.
Key players from Batman can also be seen cashing blank cheques—to borrow from another podcast—in the wake of the film’s success: Burton helmed the sweeter, more personal Edward Scissorhands; Keaton played against type as the villain of John Schlesinger’s effective thriller Pacific Heights; Nicholson starred in and directed the long-awaited—and sadly average—Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes; and Prince delivered Purple Rain sequel Graffiti Bridge, with a title banger nowhere near as memorable.
Other 1989 blank cheques cashed in 1990 included Driving Miss Daisy director Bruce Beresford’s follow-up Mister Johnston, described by the filmmaker as “the best reviewed film I ever made by far, and seen by no-one”. As I’ve previously written, the film is exquisite and something of a tonal miracle. Digging further back into the 1980s, Adrian Lyne cashed his Fatal Attraction blank cheque with Jacob’s Ladder, though his biggest blank check would come a few years later adapting Nabakov to the screen. Fellow British visual stylist Tony Scott, meanwhile, cashed his Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II blank cheques with Revenge, a dark and melancholic thriller, released alongside the more commercial Days of Thunder, which is arguably producer Don Simpson’s blank cheque.
Acting-wise, Harrison Ford cashed his Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade blank cheque with the impressive Presumed Innocent, the first of two 1990s collaborations with Alan J. Pakula before the filmmaker’s untimely death. Mel Gibson cashed his Lethal Weapon 2 blank cheque with no less than Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet—one of two major adaptations of the play in the 1990s—whilst hedging with the more commercially-minded Air America and Goldie Hawn pairing Bird on a Wire: all three, Hamlet included, are fun romps.
It goes without saying that many now-cancelled or quasi-cancelled figures will be touched on throughout these 90s recaps, which I understand will be to the chagrin of some readers, but it would be erasure and revisionism to recap the decade without them, and Gibson is a huge and integral player. Like Gibson, Clint Eastwood hedged in 1990, coupling the serious and quite terrific White Hunter, Black Heart—about a John Huston-esque filmmaker embarking on an African-set production in order to hunt an elephant—with the trashier buddy cop movie The Rookie; Charlie Sheen, hedging for nobody, appeared in The Rookie, Navy Seals, and Men at Work in 1990, all entertaining trash. Bill Murray cashed his Ghostbusters II blank cheque with Quick Change, an interesting but not wholly successful black comedy co-directed with Howard Franklin, and Robin Williams built on his Dead Poets Society prestige with Awakenings, but also headlined the lighter, largely forgotten Cadillac Man.
Failure as well as success ripples across the decade, and following 1989’s License to Kill the James Bond films were on hiatus until 1995. However, son of 007 Jason Connery appeared in Ian Fleming biopic Spycatcher, while OG Connery himself appeared in The Hunt for Red October, an intelligent and impeccably-made nautical thriller that completed John McTiernan’s one-two-three punch as a master action movie imagineer (following Predator and Die Hard). Another former Bond, Roger Moore, headlined two definitely-not-all-time-actioners in Fire, Ice and Dynamite and Bullseye, teaming on the latter with Michael Caine, who also appeared in black comedy A Shock to the System. Other action thrillers of 1990 included two women-centred style pieces, Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel and Luc Besson’s excellent French actioner Nikita, along with a new Seagal (Hard to Kill) and new Lundgren (Dark Angel, or I Come in Peace … and leave in pieces). Hong Kong action releases of the year included John Woo’s Bullet to the Head; Clarence Fok’s The Dragon From Russia, drawn from source material mined later in the decade by Christophe Gans; and Jackie Chan vehicle Island of Fire. A Hong Kong release chasing a very different muse and aesthetic was Wong Kar-Wai’s Days of Being Wild; ditto, from Japan, Takashi Kitano’s sophomore film Boiling Point and Kurosawa’s elegiac Dreams, a gentle film pivoting from the director’s large-scale samurai epics of the 1980s.
Along with Pretty Woman and Dances with Wolves, the biggest commercial victors of 1990 were Home Alone and Ghost: both unlikely star-making, entertaining, iconic films—the latter parodied within a year in the second Naked Gun film by the director’s very own brother. The success of both films is a reminder, at the very outset of this series, that in the 1990s movies of all stripes could connect and dominate the box office: surveying the end-of-year box office tallies of this and subsequent years, it’s refreshing to see movies of different genres, tones, and expense—war movies, comedies, romantic comedies, dramas, legal thrillers—and, not to put too fine a point on it, movies about humans, made by humans, bound by physics, cracking those ranks.
Then there’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, at the height of his own singular iconography in 1990: after a fallow 1989, he doubled down with comedy Kindergarten Cop and ultra-violent sci-fi action film Total Recall, directed by provocateur Paul Verhoeven. Of the latter film, Don Cheadle’s baffled assessment of Brendan Gleeson in The Guard springs to mind: “I can't tell if you're really motherfuckin' dumb, or really motherfuckin' smart”. Total Recall is probably the latter, despite its lunkheaded moments, and while it lacks the more discernible smarts of Verhoeven’s Robocop, it boasts a similarly rousing Basil Poledouris score, similarly eye-popping (literally) make-up effects by the resourceful Rob Bottin, and a game cast.
Action rival Sylvester Stallone floundered with the unsuccessful Rocky V, benching the character for fifteen years. That’s a film I have great affection for, while absolutely recognising its weaknesses. Bruce Willis only voiced baby Mikey in Look Who’s Talking in 1989, but tripled down in 1990, returning as Mikey in Look Who’s Talking Too and John McClane in Die Hard 2: Die Harder as well as debuting the less beloved character of alcoholic journalist Peter Fallow in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Of these, Die Hard 2: Die Harder holds up best and remains a well-crafted, underappreciated sequel, even moreso considering revelations in Nick De Semlyen’s book The Last Action Heroes that Willis wanted to play McClane completely straight and had to be coerced by director Renny Harlin into every moment of levity and New Jersey snark, every shred of which ended up on screen. Harlin also directed the amusing Andrew Dice Clay-starring action comedy The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. Un-Believable!
Three of the 1970s Movie Brats released major works of varying success in 1980: Brian De Palma with the abovementioned The Bonfire of the Vanities, Francis Ford Coppola with The Godfather Part III, and Martin Scorsese with Goodfellas. Of this trio, only Goodfellas was and remains universally loved. De Palma’s film is fascinating as a misbegotten artefact, and I’d recommend the making-of book and podcast by Julie Salamon, both more entertaining and nourishing than the film itself. The Godfather Part III is rightly overshadowed by its predecessors and is handicapped in several fundamental ways, but I revisited the film during the pandemic and found it substantial and meaty and mostly satisfying.
It’s noteworthy that 1990 saw three sequels to Oscar-winning and highly successful films of the 1970s with Rocky V, The Godfather Part III, and The Exorcist III, helmed by original author William Peter Blatty. The Godfather and The Exorcist were also notably parodied in 1990 in The Freshman—featuring Marlon Brando himself lampooning his revered role—and the junky Repossessed. Coppola and Scorsese’s collaborator on the previous year’s New York Stories, Woody Allen, issued his annual release with Alice.
I’ve already mentioned Gremlins 2, The Two Jakes, Rocky V, Look Who’s Talking Too—produced and released seemingly mere minutes after the original, and it shows—Die Hard 2, The Godfather Part III, and The Exorcist III among 1990 sequels. On top of these were sequels to major 1980s hits that underperformed, either petering out said franchises or pausing them until the 21st century: Predator 2 (pretty good and underrated), Robocop 2 (fairly poor and accurately rated), Another 48 Hours (my memory is fuzzy, but its repute is low), Three Men and a Little Lady (perfectly fine), and Back to the Future 3 (perfectly fine, perfectly fun, but more a footnote than the intended exclamation point for the series). Roger Corman also tapped the Mary Shelley well with Frankenstein Unbound, while solid thrillers Narrow Margin and Desperate Hours and Bette Midler vehicle Stella updated 1950s features.
Memorable Australian releases of 1990 included black comedy Death in Brunswick, scrappy caper movie The Big Steal, and Simon Wincer’s Antipodean Western Quigley; between Beresford’s Her Alibi, Quigley, and Fred Schepisi’s future Mr Baseball, Tom Selleck had a thing for Australian directors during this period. Nadia Tass’s The Big Steal is especially likeable: a teen car comedy romance with a dollop of thriller, only the thinnest veneer of adolescent angst—in contrast to last year’s The Delinquents—and plenty of charm courtesy of leads Claudia Karvan and Ben Mendelsohn.
In my 1989 entry I tipped my hat to miniseries Bangkok Hilton and will do the same here for Come in Spinner, another notable TV production of the era. From Australians working abroad came the abovementioned Mister Johnston, Schepisi’s engaging John Le Carre adaptation The Russia House, Paul Hogan’s amiable but only intermittently amusing Almost an Angel, and Peter Weir’s charming Green Card. That film, along with the wonderful Cyrano de Bergerac, helped Gerard Depardieu transition from European to international star. Russell Crowe debuted in Blood Oath and The Crossing while Kerry Fox debuted in Jane Campion’s Sweetie follow-up An Angel at My Table: both young talents would carve fascinating filmographies across the decade.
Following 1989’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover, Tim Roth—another noteworthy product of the 1990s—began popping up more, with titular co-leads in Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo and in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead alongside another 90s staple, Gary Oldman. Roth’s patron saint Quentin Tarantino was a couple of years from his debut, but other independents—both veteran and emerging—released key works in 1990: Hal Hartley’s poignant but prickly Trust; David Lynch’s Cannes-winning road movie Wild at Heart; the Coen Brothers’ finely-burnished Miller’s Crossing; Richard Linklater’s conversation piece Slacker; Campion’s aforementioned An Angel at My Table; and Abel Ferrara’s King of New York and Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers, both showcasing compelling lead turns from Christopher Walken. The reliably disreputable John Waters continued his drift towards the mainstream with Cry Baby, while Dennis Hopper’s Catch Fire was a fun little noir curiosity co-starring Jodie Foster between her two Oscar-winning roles, not at all indicative of how the rest of her 90s would unfold.
Special shout-out to The Ambulance, a nimble little thriller that benefits from Larry Cohen’s thrifty invention and knack for wringing all the juice from a novel premise, as well as its fun Eric Roberts performance.
A side bar on the recently departed Lynch: I was profoundly saddened by the news of his death in January. Lynch was a remarkable filmmaker—and in more recent years offbeat commercial artist in the Warhol mould, albeit worlds apart aesthetically—whose work was formative and a gateway into indie and arthouse cinema for many film nerds like myself. Said work could be dangerous and disturbing, but also funny and satisfying and never pretentious.
Each film was also its own beast, and though there are actors, themes, motifs, and preoccupations he returned to across his career, no two Lynch films are the same, unlike, say, the abovementioned Hal Hartley. His four 1990s films—Wild at Heart and later Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and The Straight Story—reflect this, each revealing something different about the director. Wild at Heart strikes me as the only film where the storytelling and characters are consciously “cool” and “edgy”, albeit it in a very winking and—as repeat viewings elucidate—performative way that begins to burn out as Nicolas Cage’s Sailor and Laura Dern’s Lulu are worn down by their lifestyle and the garish gallery of attractions they encounter.
Alongside the abovementioned auteurs, I have a soft spot for the journeyman directors of the 80s and 90s who helped prop up the industry with mid-range commercial genre entertainment—a skill set and film type that’s been largely muscled out of the industry—represented in 1990 by the likes of Narrow Margin’s Peter Hyams, Cadillac Man’s Roger Donaldson, Bird on a Wire’s John Badham, and Air America’s Roger Spottiswoode.
Occupying a tier above the journeymen but below the rarefied air of Scorsese, Coppola, and Allen were a number of respectable mainstream name directors: Sidney Lumet with the muscular Q&A, Sydney Pollack with old-school Havana, Mike Nichols with the witty Postcards from the Edge, and Lawrence Kasdan with I Love You to Death, a not-wholly-successful comedy that nonetheless affords Kevin Kline opportunity for some first-rate Italian-accented mugging. The latter films also afforded meaty roles and performances for great actresses—Meryl Streep, Shirley MacLaine, Tracey Ulman—as did The Grifters—a well-made but nasty piece of work—for Angelica Huston and Annette Benning and The Handmaid’s Tale for Natasha Richardson. Whoopi Goldberg, while Oscar-minted for Ghost, delivered more measured work in the otherwise by-the-numbers true story The Long Walk Home.
For horror fans, there’s Tommy Lee-Wallace’s It miniseries, Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, Brian Yuzna’s Bride of Re-Animator, Romero and Argento’s Two Evil Eyes, Joel Schumacher’s uninhibited Flatliners, Richard Stanley’s Hardware, Singapore Sling, Frankenhooker, and William Friedkin’s return to the genre, The Guardian, a film he fails to mention in his autobiography. Three monstrous characters in polished studio dramas—Reversal of Fortune’s Klause von Bulow, Misery’s Annie Wilkes, and Goodfellas’ Tommy DeVito—bequeathed acting Oscars to Jeremy Irons, Kathy Bates, and Joe Pesci.
Comedy-wise, 1990 wasn’t strong. Erik Idle and Robbie Coltrane were Nuns on the Run, Dan Aykroyd and Gene Hackman were Loose Cannons, and Bob Hoskins was a slob cop with a Heart Condition partnered with a ghost Denzel Washington. Carl Reiner’s black comedy Sibling Rivalry, while not great, has a stacked and engaged ensemble—Kirsty Alley, Bill Pullman, Carrie Fisher, Sam Elliott et al.—and poses the fantastical premise that Ed O’Neill and Jamie Gertz could be an item.
For the record, some notable films of 1990 that I have not included because I haven’t seen them: State of Grace, Memphis Belle, Texasville, Avalon, Stanley & Iris, Pump up the Volume, The Field, White Palace, Marked for Death, Lionheart, The Never Ending Story 2, The Krays, Arachnophobia, Tremors, and a trio of blue movies in Mo Better Blues, Miami Blues, and My Blue Heaven.
If you’re still here, thanks for enduring. See you back here for 1991, which finds Robert De Niro in ferocious form, Steven Spielberg in indulgent form, duelling Robin Hood movies, a remarkable one-two punch from Oliver Stone, and Jodie Foster becoming one of the all-time greats. To be continued