Great movies. Hidden gems. Better recommendations for what to watch next.
There’s nothing particularly flashy about Murphy’s Romance. Far from it.
That’s a large part of why it works.
Sally Field plays Emma, a recently divorced mother trying to start over in a small Arizona town. James Garner is Murphy, an older local pharmacist who gradually becomes part of her life.
And gradually is the important word.
This isn’t a movie built around some giant romantic contrivance. The relationship develops through conversations, small favors, irritation, friendship and time. Garner is effortlessly likable without playing Murphy as some perfect fantasy, and Field gives Emma enough stubbornness and independence that the movie never feels like she’s simply waiting for someone to rescue her.
It’s funny, warm and remarkably comfortable with being about adults behaving more or less like adults.
If you’ve never seen Murphy’s Romance, it’s exactly the kind of older movie worth digging back up.
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A quiet little movie with more charm than most films twice its size.
A warm, funny, unusually grown-up romance with Sally Field and James Garner — and exactly the kind of movie that seems to have slipped out of the conversation.
Michael Keaton has had one of the strangest and most interesting careers in Hollywood.
He was Batman before superhero movies became a factory. He was Beetlejuice. He disappeared for stretches, came back, and eventually reminded everyone just how good he was.
Keaton plays Bob Jones, a successful man who learns he has terminal cancer just as his wife is expecting their first child. Knowing he may never get the chance to know his son, he begins recording videos so the child can someday know who his father was.
That premise could have become manipulative very quickly.
It didn’t.
Instead, My Life works because Keaton keeps Bob incredibly human. He is scared, angry, funny, stubborn, and not always especially graceful about what is happening to him.
Bob starts looking backward at his family, his choices, the things he has avoided, and the people he has kept at a distance. The recordings begin as a practical project for his unborn son, but they become something more — an attempt to make sense of his own life while there is still time.
And when the movie finally lands emotionally, it does so because you have spent enough time with Bob to feel what he is losing.
My Life is not subtle. It wants something from you. It is designed to hurt.
But it earns that emotion.
For all the larger and more famous movies in Keaton’s career, this may be the one that shows the most of what he can do as an actor.
Michael Keaton has played Batman, Beetlejuice, and plenty of memorable oddballs. But *My Life* may be the most moving performance of his career.
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Somehow, it’s both a great movie and hard to watch.
Leaving Las Vegas is not the kind of movie you throw on because you want to relax.
It is bleak, uncomfortable, emotionally exhausting, and populated by two people whose lives are already badly damaged when they find each other.
And somehow, it is also tender.
Nicolas Cage plays Ben Sanderson, a screenwriter who has come to Las Vegas to drink himself to death (literally). There he meets Sera, played by Elisabeth Shue. Her life is a mess too, though in a different way, and the two of them form a connection that neither seems to expect.
That sounds like a rough two hours. It is.
Why it works
The movie never pretends that Ben and Sera can fix each other. Ben isn’t suddenly going to stop drinking because he met the right person, and Sera has problems that a new relationship won’t solve either.
What they can do is give each other a little comfort. That may not sound like much, but it’s what makes the movie work.
Cage won the Academy Award for this role, and absolutely deserved it. Most actors are terrible at playing drunk. Cage is brilliant at it. He can be funny and charming one moment, then make you remember exactly where Ben is headed the next.
Shue is just as good. I’m a big fan of Elisabeth Shue and, without her, this could have become two hours of watching Nicolas Cage fall apart.
Should you watch it?
Yes, if you’re up for something heavy. I wouldn’t recommend putting it on after a long day when all you want is to unwind. It’s painful to watch, and it doesn’t let you off easy.
A devastating, unforgettable drama anchored by one of Nicolas Cage’s best performances — and the kind of great movie you may only want to watch once.
The ’90s gave us plenty of movies everybody still talks about.
These aren’t those.
None of these are obscure exactly, but they’ve slipped far enough out of the conversation that a lot of people either haven’t seen them in years or never got around to them in the first place.
That should probably change.
1. Breakdown (1997)
Kurt Russell’s wife disappears after their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere.
That’s really all you need.
Breakdown is one of those movies that wastes almost no time getting to the problem and then spends the rest of the movie making that problem worse.
Russell plays an ordinary guy who suddenly has to figure out who took his wife, where she went, and why nobody seems particularly interested in helping him.
If you like tight thrillers that don’t need two and a half hours to make their point, this one is absolutely worth going back to.
2. The Negotiator (1998)
Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey spend much of The Negotiator trying to outthink each other.
That’s enough to make the movie work.
Jackson plays a police negotiator who is framed for a crime and takes hostages in an attempt to prove what really happened. Spacey plays the negotiator brought in to talk him out.
So now you have one professional negotiator trying to negotiate with another professional negotiator.
Good setup.
The movie gives both actors plenty of room to work, and the back-and-forth between them is much more interesting than another generic police standoff.
It’s smart, tense and very ’90s in the best way.
3. Executive Decision (1996)
There was a stretch in the ’90s when Hollywood was very good at making movies and Kurt Russell seemed to be in half of them.
He’s already shown up once on this list with Breakdown. Here he is again.
In Executive Decision, Russell leads a team trying to secretly board a hijacked passenger jet in midair before terrorists can use it as a weapon.
Yes, the premise is ridiculous.
And that’s part of the fun.
The movie takes itself seriously enough to create real tension without becoming so serious that you start asking too many questions about how any of this is actually possible.
And it has one of the better early surprises in a ’90s action movie.
If you’ve forgotten this one, it’s worth remembering.
4. October Sky (1999)
This is probably the quietest movie on the list and it may also be the easiest to recommend.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Homer Hickam, a kid growing up in a West Virginia coal town who becomes obsessed with rockets after seeing Sputnik cross the sky.
His father expects him to work in the mine. Homer has other ideas.
Homer wants to build rockets. He fails. A lot. Rockets explode. People doubt him. He keeps going.
That’s the movie.
Chris Cooper is excellent as his father, and the relationship between the two gives the movie most of its weight.
It’s sincere without becoming syrupy.
5. A River Runs Through It (1992)
A River Runs Through It is a movie about family, Montana, fly fishing and the fact that loving somebody doesn’t necessarily mean you can save them.
Brad Pitt and Craig Sheffer play brothers who grow up under a strict but loving father, played by Tom Skerritt.
One brother is steady.
The other is not.
You can probably guess which one Pitt plays.
This is a slower movie than the others on the list, but that’s exactly what it should be. The scenery is beautiful, the performances are strong, and the story has the kind of sadness that sneaks up on you instead of announcing itself.
It’s the sort of movie people remember liking but don’t necessarily think about watching again.
They should.
These five didn’t disappear.
They just got buried under thirty years of newer movies.
