The film follows the ins-and-outs of a day in the lives of Dante Hicks (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal Graves, who work in the aforementioned retail locales. In 1994, writer-director Kevin Smith captured a crude form of indie lightning in a bottle, the result fo which was 'Clerks,' a crass-but-hilarious comedy set in the Quick Stop convenience store and RST Video location in New Jersey, places where he worked in real life. These are the movies of the '90s that still manage to dazzle, provoke, and entertain us to this day.ĭon't let the black-and-white footage fool you, 'Clerks' was totally made in the '90s it's an aesthetic choice made to simulate security camera footage, we promise. Bold new directors, actors, and designers of all stripes broke through, who have gone on to reshape the medium as a whole. Movies tackled social issues with new fervor, in ways that remain groundbreaking. This decade of cinema pushed narratives to their furthest limits, using new technology in innovative ways that, amazingly, still impress today - even in the harsh light of high definition. 'Stream' was just another word for creek.Īnd yet, the movies of the '90s still hold up. Movies themselves had to be physically owned or borrowed: You needed to be able to hold it in your hands if you wanted to watch it. If you had to do research, there were no laptops, smart phones, or blazing-fast home WiFi - you had to get to the library within working hours and sift through a card catalog to find the information you needed. Back then, stories had to rely on communication through landlines and clunky phone books. As a result, movies of the era have become accidental time capsules of pre-PC life. With the advent of the internet, cell phones, and personal computing, the '90s left the world forever changed.

List of 1990s films