The decade independent cinema broke through

The 1990s are usually described as the decade independent cinema broke through, and that is accurate but incomplete. What actually happened is that the boundary between studio and independent film stopped meaning anything, and a generation of directors who had grown up on video stores and film schools made work that was formally ambitious and commercially viable at the same time.

The result is a decade with unusual range. A non-linear crime film that changed how audiences read chronology. A prison drama that flopped and built its reputation entirely on home video. A science fiction film that told the audience their reality might be a cage, at the exact moment the internet stopped being a novelty. A mob film that covered thirty years without a wasted scene and refused to explain its own morality. It is the strongest decade in our collection.