As always, my defintiion of underrated might differ from yours…
Fresh (1994)
Death and violence anger a twelve-year-old drug courier, who sets his employers against each other.
Fresh is a film that sadly I wish more people had watched, because it’s a smart, tough little film with a real edge to it, but it’s also not trying to be miserable for the sake of being miserable - oh, and it has a great performance from Sean Nelson thrown in for good measure too.
Samuel L. Jackson is also excellent in a supporting role, and it’s just an incredibly confident movie that’s tense, intelligent and emotional without becoming overly sentimental.
Definitely one that deserves to be dragged back into the conversation.
Deep Cover (1992)
A uniformed police officer is recruited by the DEA to infiltrate a drug smuggling ring looking to expand its operation.
Deep Cover is one of those movies where the whole thing just has an attitude - Laurence Fishburne is fantastic here, and Jeff Goldblum is having the kind of weird, unpredictable fun that Jeff Goldblum was particularly good at in this period.
Bill Duke directs it with plenty of style, but thankfully it isn’t all style, as there’s real substance underneath the cool soundtrack and atmosphere - the result is a crime thriller that feels much more cynical and uncomfortable than its reputation suggests.
And the soundtrack absolutely deserves a mention too, which includes Dr. Dre, so if you’re into 1990s crime movies and somehow haven’t seen Deep Cover, fix that.
Safe (1995)
An affluent and unexceptional homemaker in the suburbs develops multiple chemical sensitivity.
Safe is a strange one because it doesn’t really fit neatly into the usual categories people use when talking about great 1990s movies, because it’s very controlled, restrained and deliberately uncomfortable without resorting to the usual tricks you might be familiar with.
All the discomfort you will feel from this one comes from watching the world around the central character slowly become more difficult to understand, and I also love how committed it is to its tone - it’s one of those films that seems to get rediscovered every few years by people who can’t believe more people aren’t talking about it.
The Last Seduction (1994)
A strong-willed telemarketing manager steals her husband's drug money and hides out in a small town, where she meets the perfect dupe for her next scheme.
The Last Seduction is ridiculously entertaining.
Linda Fiorentino is absolutely brilliant, with a lead performance with enough confidence and attitude that simply carries practically every scene.
It also has that great mid-90s crime/noir look without feeling like a dusty remake of something from decades earlier - it’s sharp, funny in places, dark when it needs to be and extremely comfortable with morally questionable characters.
Fiorentino should have become a much bigger star after this, but questionable decisions and her apparent on set persona put a stop to that.
The Music of Chance (1993)
A thrill seeker agrees to help a shady professional gambler win a high stakes poker game. However, they lose and become captives of two eccentric rich men who decide to forcibly keep them on their remote gated ranch as indentured servants.
The Music of Chance is exactly the kind of strange little 90s movie I love recommending, where James Spader, Mandy Patinkin and M. Emmet Walsh make for a pretty damn good combination, and the whole thing has this bizarre, slightly uncomfortable personality that you don’t get from many mainstream movies of the period.
The movie also gets increasingly strange…
The Field (1990)
When a field (which has been farmed by the McCabe family for generations) goes up for auction, the patriarch of the McCabe family will stop at nothing to prevent a rich American from buying it.
Richard Harris, Richard Harris, Richard Harris - what more can I say?
Well, Jim Sheridan directs it with a lot of patience, and the Irish setting is wonderful, but Harris is the big reason to watch it, though, as he gives the movie a forceful central performance without turning it into scenery-chewing nonsense.
It’s also one of those 1990 movies that feels like it belongs to a different era - a seriously overlooked film.
Map of the Human Heart (1992)
Arctic, 1965: Avik tells his story starting in 1931. A mapmaker flies Avik, then a preteen Eskimo boy with TB, to a hospital in Montreal where he meets Albertine. They meet again when Avik joins World War II in the UK.
Map of the Human Heart is a beautiful and stunning looking movie, that has a huge visual scale that looks so much better than it really should.
It also has that slightly old-fashioned quality that a lot of modern movies have completely lost I think - it’s romantic, dramatic and visually impressive without becoming completely ridiculous about any of it.
This one deserves a much bigger second life.
The Long Day Closes (1992)
A lyrical reverie about a young Liverpool boy coming of age in the 1950s among his loving family and the austere Catholic Church as he enters the rigors of school, nurtures a bedazzled love of the movies and longs for companionship.
If you want something completely different, The Long Day Closes is worth a look.
Terence Davies made a very personal, beautifully photographed film that feels more like stepping into somebody else’s memories, and that’s probably also why it has been overlooked.
The filmmaking is gorgeous without looking like somebody has gone mad with a color grading computer, featuring those little moments of everyday life that Davies turns into something much more memorable simply through the way he photographs and edits them - it’s also one of those movies where the atmosphere is far more important than traditional plot mechanics.
Clean, Shaven (1993)
After a man suffering from schizophrenia is released from a mental institution, he attempts to get his daughter back from her adoptive family.
Clean, Shaven is probably the most difficult movie here, but it’s also one of the most interesting - Peter Greene gives an incredibly intense performance, and Lodge Kerrigan’s filmmaking puts you inside an increasingly fractured state of mind.
It’s rough around the edges in a way that actually benefits the movie, featuring low-key production, grimy locations and unsettling sound design - this isn’t a movie I’d describe as an easy recommendation for a casual movie night though.
Clean, Shaven feels like the kind of movie that could, and should, have become a cult classic.
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Watched Deep Cover on Encore in my teen years. Loved the atmosphere in that movie and Fishburn was effortlessly cool.
I'm with you on so many of these. I practically lived in movie theaters through most of the 1990s, and saw just about anything of even remote interest to me, no matter how obscure. Love, love, love The Last Seduction and Deep Cover.
I saw Map of the Human Heart three times in the theater, and I'm still waiting for a decent home video copy of it. Never released on Blu-ray. I had an old, crappy DVD of it, and I recently discovered that the disc has rotted out and is unplayable.