The ’90s called…

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This article was published 13/05/2025 (448 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We are so back.

Or that’s what the kids keep saying online.

And one of the things that’s back is gen X culture, at least in a selective way.

We’re told that fashion is cyclical, which partially means that kids make a show of rebelling against their parents while also dusting off and throwing on their records and threads.

At the moment, millennial culture — being neither vintage nor au courant — is the casualty of this circle of life. Getting caught wearing jeans too skinny or making content too “Jim Carrey-coded” means “you’re never coming back.” You’re “cooked” and the online trolls will tell you so.

Meanwhile, ’90s fashions and textures — from baggy jeans and tiny sunglasses to VHS static and Windows ‘98 esthetics — seem to be everywhere. Gen Z are more their parents than they’ll admit.

But gen X culture is filled with many forgotten gems below the surface of this wave. One collection of such gems is the slow-burn dramas and thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s.

It’s a shame that the era’s wham-bam thrillers — think The Matrix and Fight Club — have been canonized and endlessly memed while often superior, slower films are all but forgotten.

We revisit a few of these cerebral antidotes to bite-sized, brain-rotting reels and TikToks.

Witness (1985)

Rent via Apple, Amazon or Cineplex

The ’80s and ’90s were lousy with erotic thrillers. There are the good ones like The Last Seduction and Bound, the borderlines like 9½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction, and then a lot of gleeful trash like Basic Instinct and Sliver.

Femme fatales, noir plots and racy sex conspired in this era to create the sort of stylized smut that would have made the auteurs of the crime pulp genre blush.

Witness is a strange addition to this genre in being totally erotic and (almost) totally chaste.

An Amish boy becomes a target after he witnesses a murder in a Philadelphia train station. Harrison Ford is the cop protecting the boy and his mom (Top Gun’s Kelly McGillis).

They take refuge together in her Amish community after learning the murder implicates dirty cops in high places aiming to silence everyone in the know.

The film’s strongest part is Ford and McGillis’s relationship and chemistry. Forbidden love between an Amish woman and outsider — sounds like a recipe for softcore exploitation, a sturdy man in uniform “liberating” a widowed trad-wife.

But the theme is handled with a restraint that only turns up the romantic tension. A rare Hollywood depiction of the Amish that doesn’t satirize or condescend, and a taut little thriller too.

Presumed Innocent (1990)

Streaming on Hollywood on Demand and Hollywood Suite; rent via Apple TV, Amazon and Cineplex

Presumed Innocent is The Fugitive’s quieter, more mature older sibling. It too stars Harrison Ford as a man accused of murdering the woman he loves. The angle here is that Ford is a crown prosecutor tasked with investigating his mistress’s death, only to find that all clues to point to his guilt.

The Fugitive was a famously chaotic production, much improvised or rewritten on the fly. Presumed Innocent, on the other hand, feels like a masterclass in controlled intensity, courtesy of auteur Alan Pakula (Sophie’s Choice, All the President’s Men). He elevates the tightly scripted genre material to art.

A sensitive performance from Ford has none of his usual swagger. He’s a man restraining a storm of fear and secret guilt — mostly, we believe, over his indiscretions. But while his innocence may technically be presumed by the jury, the audience doesn’t necessarily buy it.

The plot (based on Scott Turow’s novel) meanders because of its intricacy and the time it gives to fleshing out its interesting characters, including Ford’s long-suffering wife. The patient will be rewarded.

The film contains one of the most spoiled twists of the early ’90s, before Presumed Innocent faded from the conversation. There’s a Kids in the Hall character, the arch-villain Hecubus, who loves to torment people by revealing the movie’s ending. “Evil! I haven’t seen the movie yet!” declares his partner in crime.

Luckily, Hecubus got to this reviewer too late.

Citizen X (1995)

Streaming on Crave

This true-crime film about a Soviet policeman (Stephen Rea) and his years-long pursuit of a serial killer is compared to another celebrated HBO outing, the more recent Chernobyl (2019).

Both involve a common trope of anti-Soviet drama: an intrepid investigator waging facts and reason against a deadly and irrational Soviet bureaucracy in its twilight years.

In Chornobyl, the inconvenient truth is a nuclear power plant’s catastrophic failure, in Citizen X it’s the mere existence of serial killers. Realities threatening the Soviet Union’s self-promoted image as a nuclear-powered utopia where social deviancy was no more.

But in other ways, Citizen X is more like David Fincher’s excellent Mindhunters series on Netflix about the FBI’s early serial killer psychological studies in the 1970s. That show reminds us that American state bureaucracy had its own ideological reasons for thwarting this new field.

And like Mindhunters, Citizen X is a rare serial killer procedural that thrills without titillating. Don’t expect Silence of the Lambs bombast, but something deeper.

Dark City (1998)

Rent via Apple TV, Microsoft

By the late ’90s, thrillers had stopped being as sexy and instead became postmodern, self-referential.

Movies like ExistenZ, Thirteenth Floor, Dark City and — dwarfing our memory of the others — The Matrix had their heroes discover they were stuck in worlds within worlds and try to find the escape hatch.

In Dark City, that hero is John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who wakes up in a city perpetually shrouded in darkness to discover he’s the chief suspect in a series of grisly murders. It gets very weird from there, with everyone around him suddenly falling asleep from time to time as pale, insect-like humanoids leap from the shadows to hunt him.

Things make sense eventually, but many audiences were likely alienated by the sustained assault on coherence. (While a critical success, Dark City was a box-office bomb.)

But Dark City’s surrealism, rendered with amazing art design, is sort of the point. Director-writer Alex Proyas (The Crow) seems only partially interested in making fashionable sci-fi.

Noir is his other interest, and he’s reaching back to its source material — the expressionist German films of the ’30s and ‘40s, like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and M.

These films channelled the modernist revolution in the visual arts by exploring things like urban alienation and an irrational subconscious. Hollywood’s film noirs absorbed their shadowy visual style but wouldn’t allow their manly hardboiled detectives to play around with such effete intellectual themes. (Imagine Humphrey Bogart seeing a shrink because the Big Apple made him neurotic.)

In any case, we get a satisfying reveal in Dark City’s third act, finally rearranging this surreal puzzle into an ordered whole, with visual feasts aplenty.

Conspiracy (2001)

Streaming on Crave

Conspiracy is, at its bare bones, a play. The year is 1942, the setting a stately neoclassical villa in Berlin’s Wannsee suburb. Fifteen men are gathered for briefings on a new secret state policy: the systematic destruction of Europe’s Jewish people.

One hesitates to include this masterpiece because, while being among HBO’s most gripping productions, Conspiracy’s thrust isn’t entertainment. Its drama, supported by top performances, gives an unusually deep rendering to the usual observations about “the banality of evil.”

The Wannsee Conference is led by Eichmann (Stanley Tucci), after whom that famous expression was coined, and Heydrich (Kenneth Branagh). As they politely unveil the new policy, bureaucratic euphemisms that crescendo into an image of unparalleled horror, others divide into two camps.

There are those who immediately embrace the plan, made up mostly of senior party officials and SS-men, and those who hesitate. Wilhelm Stuckart (Colin Firth), author of the Nuremberg Laws which first codified the Third Reich’s antisemitism, is depicted as the most indignantly opposed.

“But none of this is legal!” he sputters, in essence.

The dissenters, of course, are not heroes. They too fall in line, submitting to the apocalyptic momentum they themselves helped set in motion years earlier as influential Nazis.

A breathtaking, haunting piece of made-for-TV cinema.

conrad.sweatman@winnipegfreepress.com