The Last Decade of Cinema

25 Films from the Nineties

By: Scott Ryan

Narrated by: Scott Ryan, Emily Marinelli

Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

Ah, the nineties. Movies were something in those days. We're talking about a decade that began with GoodFellas and ended with Magnolia, with such films as Malcolm X, Before Sunrise, and Clueless arriving somewhere in between. Stories, characters, and writing were king; IP, franchise movies, and supersaturated superhero flicks were still years away. Or so says Scott Ryan, the iconoclastic author of The Last Days of Letterman and Moonlighting: An Oral History, who here turns his attention to The Last Decade of Cinema— the prolific 1990s.

Ryan, who watched just about every film released during the decade when he was a video store clerk in a small town in Ohio, identifies twenty-five unique and varied films from the decade, including Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction, Menace II Society, and The Shawshank Redemption, focusing with his trademark humor and insight on what made them classics and why they could never be produced in today's film culture. The book also includes interviews with writers, directors, and actors from the era.

Go back to the time of VCRs, DVD rentals, and movies that mattered. Turn off your streaming services, put down your phones, delete your Twitter account, and take a look back at the nineties with your Eyes Wide Shut, a White Russian in your hand, and yell “Hasta la vista, baby” to today's meaningless entertainment. Revel in the risk-taking brilliance of Quentin Tarantino, Amy Heckerling, Spike Lee, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, and others in Scott Ryan's magnum opus, The Last Decade of Cinema.

Films covered: Goodfellas, Pretty Woman, Terminator 2, The Prince of Tides, Unforgiven, Malcolm X, Short Cuts, Menace ll Society, Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Reality Bites, Before Sunrise, To Die For, Clueless, Swingers, Citizen Ruth, The Birdcage, Two Girls and a Guy, The Ice Storm, The Big Lebowski, Pleasantville, The Cider House Rules, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

©2024 Scott Ryan (P)2024 Fayetteville Mafia Press

Entertaining, informative, and facilitating!

I just loved this book! I found it fascinating from beginning to end and I learned so much, even about movies that I have seen countless times and I thought I knew everything about. The author’s fresh perspective and insight was not only intelligent and enlightening but validating as well. I found myself excitedly agreeing with much, if not all, of his impassioned opinions. I highly recommend this book for not just fans of the films of the 90s, but fans of all cinema.