Terry Gilliam‘s 1995 Twelve Monkeys went largely unnoticed by most of the cinema-going public, but contains one of the best performances of Brad Pitt‘s career and one of the best and most original performances in, at that time, Bruce Willis‘ career.  Also starring Madeleine Stowe, Twelve Monkeys is the story of a man named James Cole (Willis), a convict in the future who is drafted as a volunteer to go back in time to help restore his present-time.  Forgive me if this gets confusing, but it’s confusing to watch too, in a rewarding way.

Lucky Number Slevin can be seen almost as an adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest from a more modern perspective with the clever, witty rapid speech of very early films.  The director Paul McGuigan seems to have made this adaptation work, and work very well at that.

Let me begin by saying that yes, there are many additional indie movies which were great in the 1990s. This is a list of what I consider to be the best ten of the decade, ranked according to their greatness. You’re welcome to disagree with titles on this list, omissions, rankings, or anything else, but choices and rankings had to be made and I made them. That said, here they are….

In Live Free or Die Hard, John McLane (Bruce Willis) is back for another installment in the Die Hard series. This time McLane is drawn into a global scheme by a disaffected computer infrastructure consultant from the Department of Defense who is now terrorizing the United States in particular in order to steal great sums of money; he is sent to transport an individual computer programmer Matt Farrell (Justin Long) as part of the FBI’s investigation, from New Jersey to Washington, D.C.