The Best Movies of the 1990s, According to Top Critical Sources

Steven Spielberg's black-and-white drama tells the true story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a German businessman and Nazi Party member who saved more than a thousand Jewish workers from the Holocaust by keeping them employed in his factories. Ralph Fiennes is chilling as the camp commandant Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley plays Schindler's accountant, Itzhak Stern.

It won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Spielberg's first for Best Director. No 1990s film ranks higher overall, and it's the decade's top film on both AFI's list (#8) and Rotten Tomatoes' (#10).

Martin Scorsese's mob epic follows Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) from teenage errand boy for the local mob to FBI informant, based on Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy. Its energy is still startling: freeze frames, two narrators, a wall-to-wall pop soundtrack and the famous unbroken shot that follows Henry and Karen through the back corridors of the Copacabana.

Joe Pesci won an Oscar for playing the volatile Tommy DeVito. Along with Toy Story, Goodfellas appears on five of the seven lists, more than any other film here.

It struggled at the box office in 1994, then found its audience on home video and cable TV and never let go. Frank Darabont's adaptation of a Stephen King novella follows Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a banker sentenced to life for murders he insists he didn't commit, and his friendship with fellow inmate Red (Morgan Freeman) over two decades.

It earned seven Oscar nominations and didn't win any. Audiences have made up for it since: it sits at #1 on IMDb's Top 250, the spot IMDb users have given it for years.

The opening recreation of the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach, nearly half an hour of handheld chaos, changed how war looks on screen. Tom Hanks leads a squad sent behind enemy lines to find one paratrooper, James Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers have been killed in action.

Spielberg won his second Best Director Oscar for it, though Best Picture went to Shakespeare in Love in one of the Academy's most debated results. Variety's critics rank it #10 among the greatest films ever made.

Quentin Tarantino's second film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and rewired 1990s independent cinema. Its interlocking stories of hitmen, a boxer and a gangster's wife play out of order, held together by dialogue people still quote. John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman and Bruce Willis lead the cast.

Tarantino and Roger Avary won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Variety ranks it #5 on its list of the greatest films, higher than any other 1990s film there.

Jonathan Demme's thriller is one of only three films to win all five major Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay. The other two are It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Jodie Foster plays Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee who turns to the imprisoned Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) for help catching a serial killer. Hopkins is on screen for only about 16 minutes, and it's enough. It remains a rare horror film to win Best Picture at all.

The last film of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy, named for the French flag, takes fraternity as its theme. A young model in Geneva (Irène Jacob) hits a dog with her car and, returning it, meets its owner: a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who listens in on his neighbors' phone calls. Their unlikely bond is the heart of a film about chance and connection.

It was Kieślowski's final film; he retired after making it and died in 1996. Metacritic ranks it #10, the highest of any 1990s film on its list.

The first feature film made entirely with computer animation, and still one of the best. Pixar's debut, directed by John Lasseter, pits Woody, a pull-string cowboy doll (Tom Hanks), against Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), a space-ranger action figure who doesn't know he's a toy.

What made it last was the writing as much as the technology: it was the first animated film nominated for a screenplay Oscar. Like Goodfellas, it appears on five of the seven lists, the most of any film here.

The least-known film on this list may be the most inventive. A man named Hossain Sabzian was arrested in Tehran for passing himself off as the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf to a well-off family. Abbas Kiarostami filmed his real trial and had everyone involved, Sabzian and the family included, reenact what happened as themselves.

The result blurs documentary and fiction in a way filmmakers still study. The critics in the BFI Sight & Sound poll rank it #17 among the greatest films ever made.

1994 was a remarkable year, and Forrest Gump beat both Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption for Best Picture, a result people still argue about. Robert Zemeckis's film follows a kind-hearted man from Alabama (Tom Hanks) who drifts through decades of American history, from the civil rights era to Vietnam to Watergate.

Hanks won Best Actor for the second year in a row, after Philadelphia, and the film won six Oscars in all. IMDb users rank it #12.