Film fans often argue about the greatest year in screen history, with many plumping for 1939. But 1990 always features prominently in the debate. So, Cinema Paradiso harks back three decades to recall the motion pictures that made this a year to remember.
It might not have produced many masterpieces, but 1990 was a remarkable year for crowdpleasers. Indeed, so many enduring favourites were released during these 12 months that it's almost impossible to compile a Top 10 that will please everyone. So, we're going to cheat and resist the temptation to offer you the Cinema Paradiso selection in asking you to get in touch with your own 1990 rundown. Log on to our Facebook or Twitter page and give us your hot picks.
Alongside the odd undisputable, there are numerous mainstream, independent and arthouse titles worthy of consideration. Yet, while box-office takings soared, production in Hollywood actually dropped. As a result, it wasn't a vintage year for animation or kidpix, while, sadly, in a year that saw the passing of Greta Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, Paulette Goddard, Joan Bennett, Ava Gardner, Margaret Lockwood and Delphine Seyrig, quality roles for women were also thin on the ground.
Among the other stars to take their final bow in 1990 were Joel McCrea, Sammy Davis, Jr., Rex Harrison and the inimitable Terry-Thomas. Several innovators behind the camera also took their leave, including Michael Powell, Jacques Demy, Sergei Paradjanov and Jim Henson. But a clutch of future stars were born, among them Kristen Stewart, Emma Watson, Margot Robbie, Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Dev Patel and Jack O'Connell. These are familiar faces today, but who were the pin-ups of 30 years ago?
On These Mean Streets
In a bumper year for crime classics, Martin Scorsese excelled in adapting Nicholas Pileggi's factual bestseller, Wiseguy, as GoodFellas (which is also available on 4K Blu-ray in all of its glory). Telling the story of New York mob associate Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and his 1970s dealings with lynchpin Jimmy Conway (Robert DeNiro) and his short-fused sidekick, Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), this visually dynamic and verbally crackling saga earned Pesci the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, while Scorsese took the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice Film Festival. Intriguingly, there's a family connection with Herbert Ross's My Blue Heaven, as screenwriter Nora Ephron was married to Pileggi and Henry Hill also provided the inspiration for her comedy about the headaches that agent Barney Coopersmith (Rick Moranis) endures when mob informant and inveterate trouble-seeker Vinnie Antonelli (Steve Martin) finds it tricky to settle into the witness protection programme.
Scorsese also produced Stephen Frears's The Grifters, a Donald E. Westlake adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1963 novel about the conning rivalry between Lilly Dixon (Anjelica Huston) and Myra Langtry (Annette Bening) over who gets to manipulate and exploit the former's luckless, but useful son, Roy (John Cusack). The performances are outstanding across the board and Christopher Walken is on equally imperious form as Frankie Lloyd, who is released from Sing Sing and reunites with gang members Jimmy Jump (Laurence Fishburne) and Test Tube (Steve Buscemi) to clean up his old stomping ground as part of a bid to run for mayor in Abel Ferrara's King of New York.
Boasting a score by the much-lamented Ennio Morricone, Phil Joannou's neo-noir, State of Grace, follows Terry Noonan (Sean Penn) back to his Hell's Kitchen home, where he hooks up with his old muckers, Jackie (Gary Oldman), Kathleen (Robin Wright) and Frankie (Ed Harris), who are part of the Irish-American crime family Noonan's undercover cop has been ordered to infiltrate. Maverick NYPD lieutenant Mike Brennan (Nick Nolte) bullies witnesses into claiming he shot a Puerto Rican hood in self-defence in Sidney Lumet's typically hard-hitting crime drama, Q&A. However, Assistant District Attorney Al Reilly (Timothy Hutton) hopes that mob boss Roberto Texador (Armand Assante) has the guts to take the stand and put Brennan behind bars.
Nolte's Jack Cates and Eddie Murphy's Reggie Hammond are back in action in Walter Hill's Another 48 Hrs., as the latter comes out of prison with a price on his head to help the former track down the San Francisco drug dealer who has framed him for third-degree manslaughter. There's plenty more buddy banter in Richard Benjamin's Downtown, as gruff Philadelphia cop Forest Whitaker finds himself babysitting rookie Anthony Edwards after he's transferred from the cushy Bryn Mawr beat to the worst precinct in the City of Brotherly Love.
New York University film student Matthew Broderick finds himself being drawn into the orbit of mobster Marlon Brando in Andrew Bergman's The Freshman, which is strewn with jokey references to Brando's Oscar-winning turn as Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972). Coincidentally, The Godfather Part III, the final part of the trilogy inspired by Mario Puzo's bestseller, was also released in 1990, with the critics laying into the performance of Sofia Coppola as Mary, the daughter of the ageing Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), who dabbles in Vatican finances while pondering whether to entrust the family firm to his nephew, Vincent (Andy Garcia).
Pacino was barely recognisable, as Chester Gould's comic-strip characters were vividly brought to life in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. The director takes the title role in pursuit of Alphone 'Big Boy' Caprice (Pacino) in a feast for the eyes that should have seen costumier Milena Canonero and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro win Academy Awards alongside production designer Richard Sylbert, prosthetics specialists John Caglione, Jr. and Doug Drexler, and Stephen Sondheim, whose 'Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man) ' was sung by Madonna in the role of Breathless Mahoney.
Joel and Ethan Coen show how to make a gripping neo-noir with the lightest touch in Miller's Crossing, which sees Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) plead with Irish-American town boss Leo O'Bannon (Albert Finney) not to protect bookie Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) from Italian crime chief Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) because he has the hots for his sister, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden). A novel by Charles Willeford provides the simmering tone for George Armitage's Miami Blues, which follows crook Junior Frenger (Alec Baldwin) to Florida, where his life of crime attracts the suspicion of both ex-hooker wife Susie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and dogged cope Hoke Moseley (Fred Ward).
It's not always easy to tell whether Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) loves Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern) more than his snakeskin jacket. But, once they have to hightail it out of Cape Fear, North Carolina in David Lynch's Palme d'Or-winning adaptation of Barry Gifford's cult novel, Wild At Heart, the pair cling together in the face of some pursuing mobsters and Lula's domineering mother, Marietta, who was played to Oscar-nominated effect by Diane Ladd (who just happens to be Dern's mother in real life). With its copious references to Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Elvis Presley, the film has a nostalgic vibe that was stronger still in Peter Medak's The Krays, which stars Spandau Ballet siblings Martin and Gary Kemp as mummy's boys Reggie and Ronnie, whose reign of terror over the East End of London in the 1950s and 60s is recreated with stark brutality.
Japanese icon Takeshi Kitano made significant strides as a director with his sophomore outing, Boiling Point, which sees Yurei Yanagi forge an unlikely alliance with Kitano's Okinawa yakuza when he comes to the city to buy guns in order to exact his revenge on the hoodlum who had threatened his baseball coach. A fair amount on contrivance is also required to set up the premise in Gregg Champion's Short Time. But once it's established that soon-to-retire cop Dabney Coleman's insurance policy will only pay out if he is killed in the line of duty, his bid to become a posthumous hero to ensure his son will be well provided for has a quirky kind of logic.
Last, but by no means least in this section, Jean-Claude Van Damme, the Muscles from Brussels, is on pugnacious form as a Mountie who goes undercover to investigate a spate of killings at a Quebecois penitentiary in Deran Serafian's Death Warrant. And more fists fly in Sheldon Lettich's A.W.O.L., as Van Damme deserts from a Foreign Legion unit in North Africa and is drawn into the pitiless world of bare-knuckle boxing.
Thrills and Spills
It's been cruelly said that the story behind the making of Jack Nicholson's The Two Jakes is more entertaining than the case facing private eye JJ Gittes (Nicholson) in a much-maligned sequel to Roman Polanski's much-admired Chinatown (1974). The scene moves to postwar Los Angeles in order to fathom the motives of property developer Julius Berman (Harvey Keitel) for having his young wife, Kitty (Meg Tilly), placed under surveillance. There's more dangerous spousal possessiveness on show in Tony Scott's Revenge, as recently retired naval aviator Kevin Costner comes to stay at crime boss Anthony Quinn's Mexican hideaway. But any hopes of forgetting his problems are dashed when Costner meets his host's alluring wife, Madeleine Stowe.
Evoking the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, Alan J. Pakula brings some twisting density to an adaptation of Scott Turow's bestseller, Presumed Innocent, which sees prosecutor Rusty Sabich (Harrison Ford) investigate the murder of Caroline Polhemus (Greta Scacchi) against the backdrop of a bitterly fought election for district attorney. Drifter Don Johnson forgets which side his bread is buttered in Dennis Hopper's steamy thriller, The Hot Spot, as his crush on Jennifer Connelly succeeds in upsetting Virginia Madsen, the femme fatale who had provided him with an alibi for a daring daylight bank robbery.
Curtis Hanson's psychological thriller Bad Influence sees buttoned-up financial analyst James Spader being led astray into a world of yuppie excess by smooth-talking, risk-taking free spirit Rob Lowe. Adopting a more visceral approach, Adrian Lyne produced one of cinema's most disturbing insights into post-traumatic combat disorder in Jacob's Ladder, which reveals how New York postal worker Tim Robbins is haunted by what he saw in action in Vietnam in the early 1970s. Similarly basing their action on true-life events, Ken Loach and writer Jim Allen expose dark deeds in high places in Hidden Agenda, as British cop Brian Cox joins American activist Frances McDormand in seeking to prove that murdered human rights campaigner Brad Dourif was not an IRA accomplice, as the authorities insist.
Richard Fleischer's exemplary 1952 film noir, The Narrow Margin, gets a respectful makeover from Peter Hyams in Narrow Margin, as Gene Hackman's district attorney had 20 hours on a cross-Canadian express to keep star witness Anne Archer away from the mobsters seeking to prevent her testifying in court. LAPD patrolmen Dennis Peck (Richard Gere) and Van Stretch (William Baldwin) know how to enforce the law to their own advantage in Mike Figgis's Internal Affairs. But, when they plant evidence to help fellow officer Heather Peck (Annabella Sciorra) after she shoots an unarmed man, they find themselves under investigation by the incorruptible Raymond Avila (Andy Garcia).
Alec Baldwin became the first actor to play troubleshooter Jack Ryan in John McTiernan's adaptation of Tom Clancy's bestseller, The Hunt For Red October (also available on 4K Blu-ray), as the CIA analyst is convinced that Soviet submariner Marko Ramius (Sean Connery) is planning to defect in his state-of-the-art nuclear craft rather than launch an attack on the American mainland. The familiar Scottish burr could also be heard, as Fred Schepisi became the first Australian director to make a Hollywood picture in the Soviet Union when he adapted John Le Carré's The Russia House, which sees British publisher Barley Scott-Blair (Connery) stumble across some nuclear secrets after a mystery man named Dante (Klaus Maria Brandaeur) smuggles some documents into a book manuscript mailed by unsuspecting Moscow editor Katya Orlova (Michelle Pfeiffer).
Outraged by the fact that bestselling author Paul Sheldon has killed off her favourite character, Annie Wilkes (the Oscar-winning Kathy Bates) takes advantage of the fact that she has pulled him from the wreckage of a snowy car crash outside Silver Creek, Colorado in Rob Reiner's take on Stephen King's gleefully cruel melodrama, Misery. A witty wraparound segment sees paperboy Matthew Lawrence delay becoming witch Deborah Harry's supper by telling her some spooky stories in Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, a portmanteau that gathers vignettes from the pens of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Stephen King and Lafcadio Hearn.
Horror writer-turned-director Clive Barker draws on his own novella, Cabal, for Nightbreed, which sees Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) discover that psychiatrist Dr Phillip Decker (David Cronenberg) is trying to frame him for a series of murders and retreat into Midian, a subterranean haven for monsters. Blending Surrealism and bleak satire, British director Philip Ridley puts a new spin on the horror genre in The Reflecting Skin, as eight year-old Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) fears that Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan), the prairie neighbour on whom big brother Cameron (Viggo Mortensen) has developed a crush, is really a vampire.
Writer-director Sam Raimi paid tribute to the Universal horror movies of the 1930s in Darkman, which sees Dr Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) vacillate between patching things up with lawyer Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand) and seeking revenge on Robert G. Durant (Larry Drake), the sadistic crime boss who caused the laboratory fire that left Westlake hideously scarred. After Raimi dropped out to make this picture, William Friedkin opted to return to horror with The Guardian, an adaptation of Dan Greenburg's novel, The Nanny, which sees Jenny Seagrove play a Hamadryad whose bark is every bit as bad as her bite when she is hired by new parents Carey Lowell and Dwier Brown to help rear their infant son.
Author William Peter Blatty assumed directorial responsibility for The Exorcist III, which sees Lieutenant William F. Kinderman (George C. Scott), the best friend of Fr Damien Karas (Jason Miller), stumble across an amnesiac lookalike while investigating a spate of murders resembling the Gemini killings committed by James Venamun (Brad Dourif), who had been executed 15 years earlier on the very night that Regan McNeil had been exorcised. Meanwhile, Linda Blair gleefully bites the hand that had fed her as the troubled Nancy Aglett requiring the exorcising skills of Father Jebediah Mayii (Leslie Nielsen) in Bob Logan's spoof, Repossessed.
Who you gonna call when your 850cc Norton Commando won't start in the daylight and keeps gorging on Hell's Angels and traffic wardens? For Brummie courier Neil Morrissey in Dirk Campbell's I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle, the answer is priest Anthony Davies and cop Michael Elphick. Having been left for dead at the end of the 1988 original, Matthew Cordell (Robert Z'Dar) is bent on revenge against former NYPD colleagues Jack Forrest (Bruce Campbell) and Susan Riley (Claudia Christian) in Maniac Cop 2, which, like its predecessor was directed by William Lustig and scripted by the gleefully outlandish exploitation specialist, Larry Cohen.
If neo-horror is more to your taste, try Robert Resnikoff's The First Power, which sees LAPD detective Lou Diamond Phillips team up with psychic Tracy Griffith after Pentagram Killer Jeff Kober attains immortality after cutting a deal with Satan. There's also a demonic air to John Lafia's Child's Play 2, which sees Brad Dourif return as the voice of Chucky, the killer doll bent on possessing the soul of Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent), who is now in foster care with Phil (Gerrit Graham) and Joanne Simpson (Jenny Agutter).
Having accidentally killed his fiancée, Elizabeth (Patty Mullen), with a lawnmower, New Jersey nerd Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) tries to rebuild the woman of his dreams with body parts harvested from drug-addicted prostitutes in Frank Henenlotter's grisly and knowingly misogynist schlock romp, Frankenhooker. And there's more power tool mayhem in Jeff Burt's Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, which features a young Viggo Mortensen as hitchhiker Tex Sawyer.
Frank Marshall's Arachnophobia forces doctor Jeff Daniels to overcome a childhood fear in order to prevent the small town of Canaima, California from being overrun by deadly Venezuelan spiders. Sticking with creature features, who knew that what was burrowing underground in Ron Underwood's unsettlingly insinuating cult hit, Tremors, were five sequels, a prequel and a TV series? But handymen Val McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Basset (Fred Ward) weren't to know that when they left Perfection, Nevada and bumped into seismology student Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter).
Dialling down the dread several notches, six years after Joe Dante ruined Christmas for everyone with Gremlins (1984), Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates returned as Billy Peltzer and Kate Beringer in Gremlins 2: The New Batch, as Gizmo the mogwai stands too close to a dripping water fountain and unleashes the mayhem controlled by a Brain Gremlin, who is amusingly voiced by Tony Randall. Fine films always find their audience. Sometimes, it takes a while, though, as with the case of Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches, which performed poorly at the box office in 1990, but is now beloved for the duel between eight year-old Luke Eveshim (Jason Fisher) and Miss Ernst (Anjelica Huston), who has plans to turn every child in the world into a mouse.
Fanboy Corner
The task facing Paul Verhoeven in making Total Recall was to turn Philip K. Dick's story, 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale', into 'Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars'. With a little help from the Oscar-winning special effects created by Rob Bottin and his team, the Dutchman was able to succeed triumphantly, as construction worker Arnold Schwarzenegger recovers his memory in time to race to the Red Planet in 2084 and hook up with old flame Sharon Stone in order to prevent evil corporate tycoon Ronny Cox from enacting a diabolical plan. Picking up Verhoeven's gauntlet, Irvin Kershner calls the shots on RoboCop 2, which sees Peter Weller return as Alex Murphy, the Detroit police officer seeking with partner Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen) to eradicate a designer drug called 'Nuke'. However, the Omni Consumer Products company that produced the half-man/machine poses a much more serious threat.
Director Richard Stanley turned to the 2000AD comic strip, SHOK: Walter's Robo Tale, for Hardware, a cult cyberpunk classic that's set in a post-apocalyptic America and shows what happens when ex-soldier Moses Baxter (Dylan McDermott) unwittingly collects parts from a murderous MARK13 android for girlfriend Jill (Stacey Travis) to use in one of her sculptures. Mark L. Lester's Class of 1999 sees Seattle principal Malcolm McDowell commission three 'tactical education units' from robotics pioneer Stacy Keach in a bid to reclaim Kennedy High School from the thuggish students who soon learn not to mess around in android teacher Pam Grier's chemistry class. In a similar vein, cult cinema legends 'Disco Dave' DeCoteau and writer JS Cardone join forces on Charles Band's Crash and Burn, which sees a 'synth' attempt to overturn the Unicorn organisation that has banned computers and robots at a time of global meltdown in order to achieve 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic stability'.
A decade on from the events in John McTiernan's Predator (1987), LAPD officer Danny Glover and DEA agent Gary Busey think the killings in the middle of a heatwave are the work of Jamaican and Colombian drug gangs. But they soon reach a more worrying conclusion in Stephen Hopkins's Predator 2 (it's worth mentioning both of these are available on 4K Blu-ray). If you've ever wondered whether 'today is a good day to die', you might want to see what happens to medical students Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin and Oliver Platt when they experiment with near-death experiences in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners.
Completing a much-loved trilogy, Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future III sends Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and his DeLorean back to the Wild West of the 1880s to rescue Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) before his fixation on school ma'am Clara Clayton (Mary Steenburgen) lands him in deadly trouble. And there's more travelling through time and space, as Jonathan Brandeis reprises the role of Bastian Balthazar Bux in George T. Miller's The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter, in which he is summoned back to Fantasia from an antiquarian bookshop by the Childlike Empress (Alexandra Johnes), who needs help eradicating a plague known as 'Emptiness'.
Box-office records were broken when Steve Barron's martial arts indie introduced audiences to Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie, which featured a score by MC Hammer and costumes by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop. While this felt very contemporary, there was a reassuringly old-fashioned feel to Nils Gaup's Shipwrecked, a Disney-backed adaptation of a popular novel by Norwegian author, Oluf Falck-Ytter, which sees 1850s cabin boy Haakon Haakonsen (Stian Smestad) attempt to rescue his crewmates when they are captured by pirate John Merrick (Gabriel Byrne) after washing up on a desert island.
Hailing from the dawn of the comic-book era, Albert Pyun's Marvel spin-off, Captain America, sees World War II supersoldiers Tadzio de Santis (Ronny Cox) and Steve Rogers (Matt Salinger) face off again as Red Skull and Captain America after the latter is found after four decades of being frozen in a block of Alaskan ice. There's more derring-do on view in Cedric Sundstrom's American Ninja 4: The Annihilation, which reunites Sean Davidson (David Bradley) and Carl Brackston (Dwayne Alexandre) so they can prevent a rogue British colonel and a Muslim militant from detonating a suitcase nuke in New York City.
Commandos Charlie Sheen, Bill Paxton and Michael Biehn are sent to rescue the crew of an American aircraft carrier from some Middle Eastern terrorists in Lewis Teague's Navy SEALs, while Colonel Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris) goes after Colombian druglord Ramon Cota (Billy Drago) in Aaron Norris's no-nonsense actioner, Delta Force 2.
There's also something caperish about John Badham's Bird on a Wire, which has Mel Gibson take to the road with old flame Goldie Hawn after she brings vengeful gangster David Carradine to his door. after recognising him while he's laying low as part of the witness protection programme. Gibson's mission is much weightier in Roger Spottiswoode's Air America, which harks back to the 1960s to show how Robert Downey Jr.'s hopes of getting his flying licence back depend on helping Gibson with a covert flying operation between Laos and Cambodia.
Jailed for killing a cop in a pharmacy robbery, a teenage junkie (Anne Parillaud) is also given a second chance in Luc Besson's action thriller, Nikita. Indeed, she also receives the codename Josephine and is trained to be a government assassin by Amande (Jeanne Moreau) and handler Bob (Tchéky Karyo). In only his second movie, Steven Seagal emerges from a seven-year coma in Bruce Malmuth's Hard to Kill and hooks up with devoted nurse Kelly Le Brock in order to track down William Sadler, the corrupt California politician whose sidekick had tried to gun Seagal down. He was back in action as a former narcotics agent out to prevent Basil Wallace's Jamaican drug gang from corrupting the Lincoln Heights neighbourhood of his native Chicago in Dwight H. Little's Marked For Death.
Yippee ki yay, Bruce Willis returns as Detective Lieutenant John McLane in Renny Harlin's Die Hard 2, a loose adaptation of Walter Wager's novel, 58 Minutes, which takes place on Christmas Eve and sees our hero take on the rogue commandos led by Colonel Stuart (William Sadler) who have foolishly chosen to take over Washington Dulles International Airport while the LAPD's finest is waiting for wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) to fly in from the City of Angels.
Increasingly drawn to narratives about guilt and self-destruction, Clint Eastwood started to focus more on flawed individuals who use maverick means to buck the system and prove his worth to both doubters and himself. The Rookie was designed to reflect Eastwood's new perspective on the big city cop scenario, as it charted the burgeoning relationship between undercover novice David Ackerman (Charlie Sheen) and gnarled LAPD veteran Nick Pulovski (Eastwood), who is prepared to use any means possible to close down a German crook's chop-shop operation. But Eastwood's new persona was probably best embodied in John Wilson in White Hunter Black Heart, a knowing adaptation of Peter Viertel's roman à clef about director John Huston's obsession with bagging an elephant during the location filming of The African Queen (1951).
At the height of the Second World War, William Wyler made a documentary about a B-17 bomber that became the first plane in aviation history to complete its 25th mission and return Stateside in one piece. In 1990, Wyler's producer daughter, Catherine, teamed with David Puttnam to make Memphis Belle, director Michael Caton-Jones's dramatised reconstruction of events from the spring of 1943 that features Matthew Modine, Eric Stoltz and Tate Donovan among the fine ensemble cast.
Honour is on the line, as history beckons for 1850s British officers, Captain Richard Francis Burton (Patrick Bergin) and Lieutenant John Hanning Speke (lain Glen), as they search for the source of the Nile in Bob Rafelson's compelling study of obsession, Mountains of the Moon. Also venturing into pastures new, American sharpshooter Matthew Quigley (Tom Selleck) swaps one dangerous frontier for another in Simon Wincer's Quigley Down Under, when he discovers that rancher Elliot Marston (Alan Rickman) wants him to remove the Aboriginal settlers on his land.
Following the success of Christopher Cain's Young Guns (1988), a sequel was inevitable so that the Brat Pack could play cowboys once more. While Emilio Estevez struts his stuff as Billy the Kid alongside Kiefer Sutherland's Doc Scurlock, Lou Diamond Phillips's José Chavez and Christian Slater's 'Arkansas' Dave Rudabaugh in Geoff Murphy's Young Guns II, don't overlook the knowing turns of William Petersen and James Coburn as lawman Pat Garrett and cattle baron John Chisum. However, the film that did most to revive interest in the flagging Western genre was Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves. Converting seven of its 10 nominations in taking the Oscar for Best Picture, it traces the bond that develops between Civil War hero Lieutenant John J. Dunbar and Sioux medicine man Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) and his interpreter, Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell) in the Dakota territory abutting Fort Sedgwick.
That's it for our Volume 1 of the best 1990 films and look out for Volume 2! Don't forget to visit our social media and let us know what are your favourites.
