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The 25 Greatest Films of the 1990s, Part 8

© Jason O'Brien

The film is really a masterpiece of cinematic technique, mesmerizing us with a style that again serves the message of the film: Violence is sick, and perhaps the media that glorifies the violence is even sicker. THAT, my friends, is the purpose of Natural Born Killers.

#3. Goodfellas
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Starring Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco

Scorsese's 1990 movie stars Ray Liotta in the based-on-fact story of Henry Hill, a mid-level mobster who talked to the feds and disappeared into the witness protection program. The film follows Hill's progress through the mob, from starstruck kid to flashy spender to coke-addled paranoid.

Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco and Paul Sorvino have key roles in a film where the logic of the mob code produces both humor and moments of heart-stopping violence (Pesci's instantaneous recognition of his own inevitable death is a supreme film event).

As the feds' net tightens around Henry Hill, Scorsese subtly increases the tempo, until we seem to be running right along with him. This was Scorsese's finest moment in the 1990s, a mob epic on the level of the Godfather films, and definitely on a par with his greatest films of the late 1970s and early 1980s. We actually feel immersed in the mob life that Henry Hill entered, and Scorsese again shoots the film in a style uniquely his own.

Scorsese uses organized crime as an arena to tell a story about a man who liked material things so much that he sold his own soul to get them - compromising his principles, betraying his friends, abandoning his family, and finally even losing contact with himself. The final horror of the film is that, at the end, Henry Hill's principal regret is that he doesn't have any more soul to sell.

#2. JFK
Directed by Oliver Stone
Starring Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, Sissy Spacek, Gary Oldman

JFK is not a factual film about the Kennedy assassination, but it is truthful and accurate in the way it depicts how millions of Americans feel about his death. We are sure the whole truth has not been told, that dark conspiracies played out, that the guilty remained unidentified.

Oliver Stone's 1991 film plays on that paranoia with its brilliant mixture of styles and tones, starring Kevin Costner as a district attorney who is convinced that he knows the answer to the mystery. Breathtakingly paced, filmed with dead-on period accuracy, capturing the whole hidden world of the Rubys and Shaws and others exposed to the glare of JFK conspiracy hunters.