Taste of Cinema: The 20 Best Thriller Movies of The 1990s

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If there’s something that every movie buff can agree on, it’s that the 1990s were a pretty fun decade for film. The emergence of a new wave of indie American cinema, spearheaded by the likes of Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson, busted open Hollywood and produced a bounty of stone-cold classics that are still revered to this day. This in turn encouraged big studios to pour money into bold stories and risky releases that could pay off by recouping their budget on the home video.

Combing through likely titles for this round-up of thrillers, strong cases can be made for a plethora of missing films, from cultural touchstones like “The Sixth Sense”, “Misery” or “Face/Off” to subversive neo-noirs like “The Player”, “Carlito’s Way” and “The Game”. Likewise, genre-blending masterpieces like “Jackie Brown”, “Pulp Fiction”, or “Barton Fink” each deserve a big shout out but seem to belong to another subgenre altogether. The list below represents an attempt to gauge the essence of the thriller in the 1990s, from critics’ darlings to underseen gems that fell by the wayside but are worthy of your time.