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Twisters? Longlegs? Deadpool? The ’90s are back, baby!

Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, and Glen Powell stare offscreen at a tornado, probably, in a still from the movie Twisters.
Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, and Glen Powell in Twisters Universal Pictures

Boeing malfunctions, Olympic games, two white guys competing for the White House — have we all plummeted backward in time to 1996? The déjà vu is deafening at the multiplex, too. There, Americans have made like their ancestors and flocked in great numbers to a new blockbuster about flirtatiously mismatched storm chasers racing across a wind-ravaged heartland. Twisters, a belated, standalone sequel to the Jan de Bont disaster flick of yore, is the latest evidence that the ’90s are back in a big way, especially on movie screens.

Just look at the other major Hollywood production opening later this month. Deadpool & Wolverine may be mired in the multiversal nonsense of contemporary superhero cinema, but its roots extend further back — namely to, you guessed it, the 1990s, when Rob Liefeld introduced the Merc with a Mouth, a sardonic quipster assassin who spoofed the whole “extreme” jacked-up spirit of then-contemporary comics, while also embodying the post-modern sarcastic remove of that era’s pop-culture in general. Seeing Hugh Jackman done up in Wolverine’s iconic yellow uniform for the first time could also cause some major flashbacks — the same provoked by this year’s hit throwback X-Men ’97.

The X-Men pose in X-Men '97.
Marvel/Disney+

The movies of 2024 aren’t simply drawing inspiration from the ’90s. A growing number of them this year are actually set during that bygone decade. Longlegs, the horror sensation of the moment, takes place in 1993 — a timeframe most obviously signposted via the hilariously oversized portrait of Bill Clinton that hangs in one FBI office. There’s Janet Planet, the feature film debut of playwright Annie Baker, which quietly looks back on a childhood spent in the Massachusetts of ’91. Even more uncannily reflective of that period is Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, whose haunted suburban dreamland is built on the TV touchstones of SNICK and The WB. And though Ethan Coen is reaching for a more generally retro pastiche of slapstick/screwball fun with Drive-Away Dolls, the film’s plot unfurls sometime in the waning months of last century, on the cusp of Y2K.

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All of these movies suggest a shift in the nostalgia industrial complex that powers so much modern entertainment. For ages, it felt like no one in Hollywood could see past the retro appeal of the 1980s. That decade was only eight years in the rearview mirror when Adam Sandler’s The Wedding Singer waxed nostalgic for its music, fashion, and technology. The ’80s flashback party never really ended. Twenty whole years later, Ready Player One proved that our culture was still deeply hung up on the hits of the big-haired, neon-lit, synth-scored yesterday. Call it an advanced case of cultural arrested development. Or, if you want to go deeper still, a reminder of what a long shadow the Reagan administration cast over the country and the world.

Lana Del Rey - Doin' Time

Are the eternal 1980s finally coming to a close? Twisters, Longlegs, and their ilk suggest a shift toward slightly later 20th-century obsessions. The ’90s revival train is certainly powered in part by a Gen Z fascination with the decade. Baggy jeans and bucket hats are in again. So, too, are the super sounds of the alt-rock renaissance: The Batman helped put Nirvana back on the radio, Lana Del Rey boosted Sublime with a hit cover, and TikTok has created an unlikely new fanbase for Pavement.

If movies are getting in on this ’90s flashback boom, that may be a reflection of their authors as much as their audience. After all, the people who grew up then are now making movies of their own. Baker and Schoenbrun were both children of the ’90s, and that upbringing is reflected in the cultural specificity of their respective movies, very different but equally personal visions of coming of age across the same decade. The washed colors and wood-paneled drabness of Janet Planet, the chintzy show-within-the-movie aesthetics of I Saw the TV Glow — these are analog visions plucked from the elder millennial memory bank. We’re sure to see more like them as the AOL generation continues to revisit its childhood on movie screens. 

Geraldine Viswanathan and Margaret Qualley hold a briefcase and each other in a still from Drive-Away Dolls
Focus Features

The ’90s are also, of course, the most recent time a movie can be set without wading into the ways the world has been totally reshaped by the internet. Or by smartphones, for that matter: Just as plenty of horror movies would completely fall apart if the characters had decent cell reception or Wi-Fi, the mistaken-identity hijinks of Drive-Away Dolls are scaled to the technological limitations of 1999, a time of landlines and before social media. Set your movie at least 25 years ago and you get around the plot-complicating matter of everyone having a computer in their pocket. (Speaking of which, Hit Man is not among this ’90s time-capsule wave, despite being based on a true story from the time period. You can tell because the film’s best scene involves an iPhone app.)

One might wonder if these portraits of the not-so-distant past are reflecting (or at least capitalizing upon) a rose-colored pining for that past. It would take some serious blinders to confuse a decade defined by AIDS and Oklahoma City for halcyon days. On the other hand, we are talking about a time before 9/11, before COVID, before Sandy Hook. And the apocalyptic dread of today — a shitstorm of converging political, environmental, and technological disasters — can make even the historically informed nostalgic for yesterday. This boomlet of films taking place in the ’90s could be called a comforting transmission from a world not yet choked by information overload. Sure, Longlegs might get you, but you won’t spend your precious remaining minutes alive doom-scrolling or blocking telescammers.  

Ian Foreman watches TV in a still in I Saw the TV Glow.
Ian Foreman in I Saw the TV Glow A24

Maybe the nostalgia is just for a different age of film and pop culture. The ’90s certainly boasted a healthier cinematic ecosystem, where Hollywood was making more mid-budget movies, more movies for adults, more movies period. Longlegs doesn’t just take place in 1993, it also aspires to the thrills of thrillers — like The Silence of the Lambs and Seven — from that approximate moment in genre history. Janet Planet wouldn’t look out of place among the naturalistic, star-free American indies hitting Sundance before the Weinstein-powered spending sprees of a few years later. And I Saw the TV Glow takes its cues from the primetime of the ’90s, evoking Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and — most idiosyncratically — live-action Nickelodeon programming.

Even the special-effects spectacles of the 1990s could be said to possess a human dimension sometimes missing from the event pictures of our here and now. That dimension is definitely part of the appeal of Twisters, a mega-budget sequel that swirls its digital weather patterns around grounded interpersonal drama and solid performances, just like the 1996 original did. The film also echoes a time when special effects still felt special, even if the cyclones of Twisters don’t look as state-of-the-art as the ones in Twister once did. Maybe the whole hook of the new movie is a deeper longing for the rare qualities it’s echoing. It’s a blockbuster for the “they don’t make ’em like they used to” crowd.

Glen Powell holds onto a floating Sasha Lane in Twisters.
Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures

Whether ’90s nostalgia will have the, ahem, long legs that ’80s nostalgia did remains to be seen. The earlier decade had a certain alien extravagance — an obscene, sometimes beautiful gaudiness — more retroactively enticing than the earthy flannel and cargo pants of what came after. In a way, the loudly dated aesthetic of the 1980s feels more timeless, like a past version of the future we’ve never entirely been able to move beyond. Let’s just hope the ’90s comeback lasts a few more years before the ’80s get huge all over again — or before a full, inevitable reconsideration of the naughty aughties. Actually, are the early 2000s already back in full force? Looked at one way, 2024 really belongs to Fred Durst and Madame Web.

For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please visit his Authory page.

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A.A. Dowd
A.A. Dowd, or Alex to his friends, is a writer and editor based in Chicago. He has held staff positions at The A.V. Club and…
40 years later, there’s no forgetting about The Breakfast Club
The cast of The Breakfast Club sits in a line of chairs in a still from the 1985 movie.

Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, and Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club Universal Pictures
The late John Hughes once mulled a sequel to his 1985 ode to adolescence, The Breakfast Club. The idea was that he’d pick up years later with the same characters, five suburban teenagers from different cliques who look past their differences and forge some common ground over a long Saturday in detention. Simple minds race with the questions Hughes could answer by reconvening his party of five. Would neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie Brian become a meathead, just like the actor who played him, Anthony Michael Hall? Would the glam-up makeover that outsider Allison (Ally Sheedy) receives at the end of the film take? Would burnout Bender (Judd Nelson) escape the lifetime in Loserville so many assume awaits him?
It was an intriguing pitch, at least for anyone who’s ever wondered who these fictional Illinois kids might grow up to be. At the same time, maybe it’s a relief that Hughes never got around to pursuing the idea. After all, the enduring appeal of The Breakfast Club rests largely on the narrow parameters it sets for itself: It’s just five kids in one room over a single day. To look beyond this mere snapshot of youth would be to betray its eternal present tense. The movie exists, irresistibly, in the moment, just like the teenagers who flocked to it in initial release and the many who have continued to discover it over the four decades since.
Arguably no filmmaker capitalized more on the teen experience than Hughes, the writer and sometimes director of youth-courting sensations like Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and of course Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But if all those movies could be called quintessential ’80s hits, The Breakfast Club is more timeless, even as it unfolds entirely within a kind of hourglass. The almost theatrical minimalism of Hughes’ scenario transcends trends. He shaved off all the extraneous conventions of high-school movies. There’s no big game, no prom, no graduation, no classroom even. It’s a teen movie that says that the teens alone are enough.
The Breakfast Club Trailer
The Breakfast Club, which turns 40 today (they grow up so fast!), made stars out of its stars – the core members of the so-called Brat Pack that took Hollywood by storm for a few whirlwind years. It’s primarily an acting showcase. When not trading sharp insults, the five deliver tearful monologues — sometimes in a literal circle, à la a drama club. Like their characters, they had their whole lives ahead of them, and it’s interesting to consider the careers that followed: Molly Ringwald becoming America’s sweetheart before decamping for Paris, Emilio Estevez headlining multiple hit franchises, Sheedy reinventing herself as an indie darling. And who could have guessed that Nelson, who arguably delivers the film’s most charismatic performance (all bad-boy bravado, until we get glimpses of the scared kid underneath), would land a comfy network sitcom gig a mere decade later?
The film is an optimistic fantasy of unexpected teenage solidarity. It takes a little suspension of disbelief to imagine that eight hours together could turn “a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal” into fast friends. Of course, Hughes’ script is smart enough to acknowledge the ephemerality of their kumbaya: None of them harbor too many delusions about their connection lasting once the five are back in their respective social circles. That’s the bittersweet power of the Billboard-climbing Simple Minds anthem that both opens and closes the movie: “Don’t you forget about me” is a touching plea to immortalize this fleeting day of communion, even once it fades with the ring of the school bell.
The hierarchies of high school don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, The Breakfast Club says. It’d be easier to take that message seriously if Hughes didn’t end up kind of reinforcing them. Allison’s miniature Pygmalion arc — emerging from the bathroom like a homecoming queen, dolled up by Ringwald’s Claire — betrays both the character’s countercultural kookiness and the film’s be-yourself ethos. She only wins the jock prince by fundamentally changing who she is; it’s a preview of the makeover plots of future teen comedies like She’s All That and Drive Me Crazy. And Hughes really does Brian dirty. However much empathy the dork garners with the cooler kids, he’s still doing their homework as they pair off and make out.
The Breakfast Club | Detention Dance
It’s a little ironic that a movie all about looking past stereotypes would codify them so much through its advertising campaign. That famous Annie Leibovitz poster, with the cast huddled together, treats each label the characters reject and rebel against as a marketable brand. The Breakfast Club might be the most influential teen movie of them all, and part of its influence was turning the genre into one big game of opposites attracting. How many major teen movies and TV shows derive their tension from the clash of cliques, and the supposedly revelatory revelation that jocks, freaks, and geeks aren’t so different after all?
You can see a little of The Breakfast Club in nearly every quick-witted teen entertainment that came after it. While films like Heathers explicitly positioned themselves as sardonic rebuttals to the Hughes school of kids-are-all-right sentimentality, plenty of descendants of the big and small screen simply updated the writer-director’s model for younger generations, swapping the music and fashion and slang, but not the essential spirit. The Breakfast Club’s single day of bickering and bonding bled into everything from Scream to My-So Called Life to the collegiate Community (a sitcom that references the film in its first episode, and arranged a guest spot for Hall a few weeks later). 
The Breakfast Club (6/8) Movie CLIP - Lunchtime (1985) HD
It’s also what you could call an essential Gen X text: Before Reality Bites or Singles or the comparably gabby work of Richard Linklater, there was this portrait of five teens divided by social status but united by their shared disaffection and desire not to become their parents. Not that the Latchkey Generation has a monopoly on such feelings. One reason The Breakfast Club endures where some of its ’80s contemporaries don’t is that it gets at the essential identity crisis of growing up: The whole world seems invested in defining you (and your future) at a time when you’re still very much on the cusp of figuring that out for yourself.
You could say that the kids of The Breakfast Club aren’t just rebelling against the boxes everyone wants to put them. They’re rebelling against the pressure to be anything before they’re ready to decide who they are. That’s the real reason a sequel was a bad idea, however appealing it may have sounded. In plucking a single significant day out of the lives of these characters — the kind any kid might mythically inflate in their mind, at a time when every emotion and experience feels massive — Hughes remained true to the embryonic beauty of late childhood, when the possibilities still seem endless because they essentially are. The movie is a freeze frame, just like the one on which it triumphantly, iconically ends.
The Breakfast Club is available to rent or purchase through the major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.

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On Sunday afternoon, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United square off in Premier League action. To say these teams are disappointed in their respective seasons is an understatement. Tottenham is 15th in the Premier League standings with 27 points entering Sunday's contest. With 13 defeats, the Spurs have clinched their seventh consecutive season of 10+ losses. With 14 games left, Tottenham could have their worst season since 2003-04, when they lost 19 times.
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How to watch Tottenham vs. Manchester United
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