Frame Rated

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ I love 1990s blockbusters. This is mostly down to being a teenager at the time, an age when you can see more at the cinema without parental supervision. But it was also an especially creative era for the major Hollywood studios. The dawn of CGI piqued mainstream interest with the shape-shifting liquid metal villain of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), before blowing everyone’s minds by bringing prehistory back to life in Jurassic Park (1993).

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ Lars von Trier has made a career out of miserable viewing experiences. Some, such as Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Dogville (2003), are so stomach-turning in their ice-cold brutality and misanthropic outlook that they’ve become enshrined in a minuscule pantheon of cinema: masterpieces you never want to watch again.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ Back in the 1990s, Steven Spielberg was riding high after his one-two punch of Jurassic Park (1993) and Schindler’s List (1993), followed by his other World War II masterpiece, Saving Private Ryan (1998). Any director would be happy to have made just one of these, but to deliver three films of such commercial and critical success in only five years—alongside the solid, if lesser-known, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and Amistad (1997)—is an astounding feat by any standard.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ It’s always a risk to use a word like ‘last’ in a film title, but if the Jackass crew are used to anything, it’s risks. Jackass: Best and Last, the fifth and supposedly final instalment of the beloved series, is as sadistic and scatological as ever. The real surprise, despite all the carnival-barker promises of the extreme and the hysterical, is that it truly does feel like the end this time.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ Reviewing a comedy risks inviting all the hackneyed clichés, such as opening with the declarative statement that it has to be more than simply listing all the good jokes. Roger Ebert, when reviewing this film, mused: “What can usefully be said about this movie, other than the essential information that I laughed?” In the decades since, The Naked Gun (1988-1994) trilogy has endured as one of the funniest laugh-fests of all time.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ There is no shortage of small-town America stories where eccentric communities hide deep secrets beneath picturesque surfaces. Widow’s Bay arrives with many of the ingredients the genre offers, including an island setting, rumours of an ancient curse, and a storyline promising equal parts mystery, horror, and satire. Yet despite its considerable strengths, this series ultimately struggles to transform its intriguing setup into a consistently compelling drama.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ Interest in the superhero genre is past its peak—a cause for alarm if you’re James Gunn and Peter Safran, the duo behind the new DC Universe. Gunn’s own Superman (2025) was a success, but that character is so iconic that audiences will largely turn up anyway. Supergirl is a trickier prospect. Originally conceived in the late 1950s simply to attract young girls to comic books, the character suffered a notorious screen flop with the 1984 movie starring Helen Slater.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ The endless landscapes of the American West are rarely presented in film as actively threatening. They may be unforgiving, certainly, but they exist essentially to be survived or even conquered and fought over by the characters. Australian cinema is different. A vein of something not quite supernatural but not fully comprehensible surfaces repeatedly in cinematic portrayals of the Outback—a sense that the land itself is at best mysterious and at worst monstrous, at least to Europeans.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ There was no shortage of films in the 1990s that portrayed the dehumanising and often grotesque process of making a movie. The inherent exploitation and seduction of the camera (and its operator) fed into the cinematic excess of Boogie Nights (1997), whilst elsewhere, a film like Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) dug into the feverish nightmare of agents and stars who were never in alignment.

☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ Of John Woo’s Hong Kong action films, The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992) have become the undisputed fan favourites, but Bullet in the Head / 喋血街頭 is a tour de force that deserves just as much respect. In terms of cinematic achievement and narrative flair, it stands shoulder to shoulder with the best the heroic bloodshed genre has to offer.