13 Awesome '90s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember

These awesome '90s movies only cool kids remember helped define that era of teen spirit and relative prosperity.
We saw almost all of them in theaters. Of course these things are subjective, so please let us know if you think we missed something.
And now, onto the '90s movies.
It's hard to oversell how worked up some people were about Kids in 1995, because of how bluntly the film portrayed sex and drugs.
It's a rarity among coming-of-age '90s movies in that it isn't focused on a high school — because its characters spend all their time on the street, in parks, in bodegas, in houses where parents aren't home, doing things they shouldn't be doing.
Directed by Larry Clark, and written by Harmony Korine when he was barely older than his teenage subjects, Kids helped launch the career of two of the most iconic Gen X actresses, Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson (above). It also has one of the most excellent soundtracks ever, anchored by Folk Implosion's "Natural One."
By the way, that thing Chloe Sevigny is using in the photo? That's a public phone. People used to scrounge for change for the privilege of sharing a dirty phone. Whenever people tell you everything was better in the '90s, consider that this was a common method of contacting your friends.
Christian Slater plays a pre-internet edgelord who uses a pirate radio station to vent his teen angst and play some cool rebellious music.
LIving in a Phoenix suburb, he's known by day as Mark, a bookish high school student who struggles to make friends. But at night, he becomes Hard Harry, a kind of Gen X shock jock who rails against parental hypocrisy and unleashes the full fury of... Leonard Cohen?
That musical selection is one of many tip-offs that Harry is secretly a sensitive soul, driven more by sadness than rage. Pump Up the Volume is one of the most fascinating '90s movies because it felt almost instantly dated once the internet came into wide use — no one needed a pirate radio signal anymore to share their uncensored thoughts.
But it's hard not to see a blueprint for our modern lives, in which we sometimes behave one way in the real world, and another online.
Also Read: 12 Shameless '90s Comedies That Just Don't Care If You're Offended
If you think of Reese Witherspoon mostly as a producer-star of inoffensive rom-coms family dramas, go see Freeway, and buckle in. A very dark, very '90s retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, it's one of our favorite mostly forgotten '90s dark comedies — and the '90s was maybe the best decade for dark comedies.
Witherspoon plays an illiterate runaway, fleeing from the authorities after the arrest of her sex worker mom and abusive stepdad, who somehow lands in an even worse situation when she accepts a ride on her way to her grandmother's house. She's been targeted, it turns out, by Big Bad Wolf, aka Bob Wolverton, a creep played by a vanity-free Kiefer Sutherland.
Their loaded supporting cast includes Den Hedaya, Amanda Plummer, Brooke Shields, Bokeem Woodbine and Brittany Murphy. Wow.
It was produced by Oliver Stone, because of course it was.
Is Can't Hardly Wait a Gen X movie, or millennial movie? It's stacked with Gen X rising or soon-to-be stars, including Ethan Embry, Lauren Ambrose, Seth Green, Melissa Joan Hart and of course Jennifer Love Hewitt (above), who anchors the whole thing.
And while the soundtrack is very Gen X — it's named for a Replacements song, and features showstopping needle drops by Run-DMC and Guns N Roses — the characters are right on the blurry line between two generations, at the end of a relatively carefree decades for suburban teens. They don't know it, but they're about to enter a much scarier decade and world.
It's one of the most breezy and fun '90s movies, taking its cues from '80s teen movies. But it's also fascinating. We think about Can't Hardly Wait all the time when we think about the years when you're relatively free of responsibility, and all the problems you make for yourself as you set out into the world.
Its writers-directors, Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, also made a terrific Gen X satire that's on our list of Smart Movies Disguised as Dumb Movies.
A similar question: Is Dazed and Confused a Baby Boomer movie? Or a Gen X movie? It's stacked with Gen X actors, from Ben Affleck to Parker Posey to Matthew McConaughey, but is set on the last day of school in 1976, arguably Baby Boomer territory.
Richard Linklater, who wrote and directed the film, was inspired by his own Texas youth. Born in 1960, and a Gen X icon since the news media seized on his 1990 film Slacker to help define a generation, he isn't sure what generation he falls into.
"We called oursvelves Busters," Linklater told MovieMaker in 2022. "We were the end of the boom, beginning of Gen X."
Whatever the case, he took the wisdom of the past and the energy of the future to make a timeless movie that resonates across decades. McConaughey's reprehensible but hilarious line about high school students perfectly captures the paradox of movies: We get older, the movies that raised us stay the same.
A lot of '90s movies present an America that is mostly white, suburban, and affluent. The main characters of Hangin' With the Homeboys are well outside that demo, and the film provided a fun, smart, endearing look at a quartet of four young men from the Bronx, two Black and two Puerto Rican, who go looking for a night of fun and end up confronting their futures.
Directed by Joseph Vasquez, it has a light touch and a stellar cast including Mario Joyner, Doug E. Doug, Nestor Serrano and John Leguizamo. Critically acclaimed, it missed with audiences but later got plenty of VHS play.
Quentin Tarantino has said one of the best things about Dazed and Confused is that you feel like you're hanging out with the characters, and that's very true of Hangin' With the Homeboys, too.
There was something incredibly funny and profound about seeing Ferris Bueller himself, Matthew Broderick, turn into one of those teachers Ferris tormented. Adding to the joys of Election is that he isn't bedeviled by a slacker or rebel, but by the most type A of achievers, Tracy Flick, played to perfection by Reese Witherspoon.
Election is one of those high school movies we're almost everyone is smarter than they let on and no one is as nice, or naive, as they seem. Is it possible to make a movie that feels as dark as actual high school? Director Alexander Payne, working off the novel by Tom Perrotta, proved it was very possible.
We're also very excited for the adaptation of Perrotta's 2022 election sequel, Tracy Flick Can't Win, a novel that found the now-adult Flick in the unenviable position of high school administrator.
"You can do that?" was the frequent reaction to Baz Luhrmann's brazenly 90s — but surprisingly faithful — adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Dispensing with old costumes and settings to put his star-crossed lovers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes) in hyper-modern (for the time) Verona Beach, he made the bold and daring decision to barely touch The Bard's dialogue. Or, even more daringly, to go for long stretches without it.
Thanks to the music of Des'ree, The Cardigans, and many more, this is an utterly intoxicating movie, especially if you happened to be a 90s teenager in love. Not every song still works, but the ones that do — most notably Des'ree's "Kissing You" — really do.
The story of a record store perhaps on the brink of sale to a corporate chain, Empire Records is a time capsule of a time when "selling out" was recognized as a bad thing. It boasted an irresistible cast, including Ethan Embry, Debi Mazar, Rory Cochrane, Renée Zellweger, and Liv Tyler, as well as an even more irresistible song in Edwyn Collin's '60s/'90s mashup "A Girl Like You."
It failed miserably at the box office — Variety brutally called it "a soundtrack in search of a movie" — but has since become a cult classic. Sometimes a soundtrack (and a bevy of future stars) is enough. Is it a '90s movie that was too true to itself? Or one of those '90s movies that felt too in the zeitgeist?
Also, for people who weren't around in the 90s: "Selling out" was the concept of abandoning the things that made you or your art cool in order to make money. It's what we're doing at this very moment by writing photo galleries instead of making four-track demos in our bedroom.
At a time when 18-year-olds are routinely infantilized, this movie feels like all kinds of wrong — but we love it. What sick genius thought of remaking Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses with a bunch of high schoolers?
The credit goes to Gen X writer-director Roger Kumble, who gave a clearinghouse of Gen X actors – notably Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe and Selma Blair — their first shot at darker, more grown-up roles. (Reese Witherspoon was already an old hand at this thing, having broken out with the aforementioned Freeway.)
The movie artfully manages to be extremely dirty without being explicit, a smart line-trading given that it was targeted at people the same age as the characters.
And it inspired a 2024 revamp, because of course it did.
Speaking of lines: Todd Solondz seems to live for laying down challenges some audiences will just refuse to cross, and his indie classic Welcome to the Dollhouse was one of the first to make that clear. (At one point the movies title was F-----s and R-----s, two words everyone who was every on an elementary-school playground in the 1980s heard an awful lot.)
Another product of the '90s movies indie boom, Welcome to the Dollhouse was the breakout for Heather Matarazzo, who plays the unpopular Dawn "Wiener Dog" Wiener, a girl so desperate for contact she agrees to meet up with another kid who threatens to assault her. Things only get darker from there.
But Solondz's next film, the stunning Happiness, went even further.
Teeming with style and a don't-talk-about-it-just-do-it brand of girl power, The Craft became a surprise 1996 hit, even if it paled in cultural impact to the other big 1996 Neve Campbell high school horror movie, Scream.
A sequel to The Craft came and went in 2020, which wasn't, let's be honest, the best year to release a movie. But the original still holds up spectacularly, especially its blunt, ahead-of-its time take on bullying.
The cast, meanwhile, is spectacular, including Fairuza Balk, Robin Tunney, Rachel True, Christine Taylor and Campbell's Scream castmate, Skeet Ulrich. Just watch it. It's one of the teen '90s movies that holds up the best.
A delightfully twisty high school noir with as many dark surprises as a swamp, the Florida-set Wild Things features Denise Richards and Neve Campbell as very different high school students who get involved in a very complex situation we don't want to reveal too much about here.
It flirts with being exactly the right kind of exploitive trash, but it's equal opportunity exploitive thanks to a wonderfully gratuitous scene involving Kevin Bacon.
The stellar cast also includes Matt Dillon and Bill Murray. Some people may clutch your pearls throughout Wild Things, but no one will be able to deny being shockingly entertained.
If you like '90s movies, perhaps we can also interest you in this list of 80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember or the video version of Awesome '90s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.
Main image: Photo illustration from Can't Hardly Wait. Sony Pictures Releasing.
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