Movies turning 25 in 2022 that everyone should see

Directed and written by James Cameron, Titanic means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Some people swoon at the forbidden romance of it all and declare Titanic the greatest movie of all time. Others can't get over the fact Rose (Kate Winslet) didn't even try to share her floating door with Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), which could have prevented his devastating death. Regardless of which side you fall on, Titanic's staying power is undeniable. The romantic drama won a whopping 11 Oscars, including best picture. 

After its Dec. 19, 1997, release, Titanic became the highest-grossing film in history and held the title for a long time before Cameron's Avatar surpassed it in 2010 followed by Avengers: Endgame in 2019 (h/t Box Office Mojo). On top of all that, Titanic's theme song "My Heart Will Go On" won Celine Dion two Grammys, for record of the year and best female pop vocal performance.

Boogie Nights  introduced Mark Wahlberg to the mainstream as a dramatic actor to be taken seriously—beyond Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch and Calvin Klein. Directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights  followed Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) as he discovers busboy Eddie Adams (Wahlberg) and transforms him into adult film star Dirk Diggler. 

Anderson (best screenplay), Reynolds (best supporting actor), and Julianne Moore (best supporting actress) were each nominated for an Oscar. The cast also boasted John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Don Cheadle, William H. Macy, Nicole Ari Parker, and more.

"I was really kind of turned off by the subject matter," Wahlberg admitted during a 2020 Vanity Fair career retrospective video. "I was not interested in doing a movie about pornography, and I was really just trying to build my career one role at a time. I felt like any time there was an opportunity to do something that seemed to be sexual or exploiting me physically, it was like, I don't know." Wahlberg continued to explain that he was sold after meeting with Anderson and Boogie Nights became "one of the great experiences of my career."

The stories behind Good Will Hunting is just as much folklore as Good Will Hunting  itself: Matt Damon began writing the script as a Harvard class assignment, and then asked Ben Affleck to help him finish it. Before the movie became a universal darling, Affleck and Damon were anonymous 20-something dreamers from Boston. And then Good Will Hunting  earned nine Oscar nominations and won two of them—best supporting actor for Robin Williams and best screenplay for Affleck and Damon—and their futures as A-list movie stars were set in motion. Damon reflected on the film for GQ this fall.

If you are in the 0.1 percent of people who have managed to not see Good Will Hunting  in 25 years, the movie follows M.I.T. janitor Will Hunting (Damon) as he struggles to find his direction and purpose despite his genius for mathematics. Sean (Williams), a psychology professor, steps in and changes his life forever. Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, and Minnie Driver also starred.

Directed by Jay Roach and written by Mike Myers, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery  introduced Myers as Austin Danger Powers—the shagadelic "world-class playboy and part-time secret agent from the 1960s" who "emerges after 30 years in a cryogenic state" to take on Dr. Evil, also played by Myers, alongside Ms. Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley). 

"After my dad died in 1991, I was taking stock of his influence on me as a person and his influence on me with comedy in general," Myers explained for The Hollywood Reporter 's oral history in 2017. "So Austin Powers was a tribute to my father, who [introduced me to] James Bond, Peter Sellers, The Beatles, The Goodies, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

"I wrote it in 1995, and the bones of the script came out in two weeks," he continued. "It was one of those things where I didn’t know if anybody would get this movie who didn’t grow up in my house. But when I showed it to [director] Jay Roach—we had met at a party and become movie buddies—he gave me 10 pages of typewritten notes. Everything he said made it better."

Myers and Roach re-teamed for Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) and Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002).

Starship Troopers  was based on Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 sci-fi novel by the same name and adapted by director Paul Verhoeven alongside screenwriter Edward Neumeier. Starring Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards, the premise was simple: "Humans in a fascist, militaristic future wage war with giant alien bugs." But as posited by David Roth for The New Yorker in 2020, the daunting and violent plot reflects more in present-day American society than it should.

Will Smith owned television for six seasons on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air from 1990 to '96, but a transition to the big screen was inevitable. During Fresh Prince's acclaimed run, Smith starred in movies such as Where the Day Takes You ('92), Made in America ('93), Six Degrees of Separation ('93), and Bad Boys ('95).

Two months after the Fresh Prince series finale aired, Independence Day premiered in July 1996. And then came Men in Black in 1997, where Smith teamed up with Tommy Lee Jones as Jay and Kay, respectively, to monitor (and humorously defend against) extraterrestrial activity on Earth. Per IMDb, Men in Black was the second-highest-grossing movie in 1997 behind only Titanic.

A franchise was born, as Men in Black II hit in 2002 and Men in Black 3 in 2012. Men in Black: International  came in 2019, but Smith was not in it. Instead, the fourth installment was led by Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson.

Roberto Benigni directed and starred in Life Is Beautiful, an Italian dramedy. "Guido is a charming, bumbling Jewish waiter whose colorful imagination and playful spirit help him to woo a beautiful schoolteacher," the official synopsis explains. "The couple marries and has a young son, but before long their idyllic world is threatened by Nazi soldiers who force the family into a concentration camp. Guido must now use his imagination again." Nicoletta Braschi and Giorgio Cantarini starred as Dora and Giosuè, respectively—Guido's wife and son. 

The film earned seven Oscar nominations at the 71st Academy Awards, becoming just the second-ever movie at the time to be up for best picture and best foreign film. Benigni took home the Oscar for best actor, while Life Is Beautiful also claimed best foreign film and best music, original dramatic score.

In some ways, apparently, 1997 was the Year of the Alien. Directed by Luc Besson, The Fifth Element starred Bruce Willis as Korben Dallas, a former special forces major now working as a taxi driver. He becomes enmeshed "in the search for a legendary cosmic weapon to keep Evil and Mr. Zorg at bay." Rounding out the cast were Gary Oldman, Milla Jovovich, Ian Holm, Chris Tucker, Luke Perry, Brion James, and Tom Lister Jr. 

Director Curtis Hanson adapted L.A. Confidential from James Ellroy's 1990 novel by the same name, which centers around mounting corruption in 1950s Los Angeles and three policemen's investigation into a series of murders. The star-studded cast featured the since-disgraced Kevin Spacey , Kim Basinger, Russell Crowe, Danny DeVito, and Guy Pearce.

The crime drama was nominated nine times at the 70th Academy Awards. Basinger won best supporting actress, and Hanson won best adapted screenplay alongside Brian Helgeland.

For George Clooney, 25 years removed from Batman & Robin is not far enough in the past. 

"I'd gotten killed for doing Batman & Robin, and I understood for the first time because, quite honestly, when I got Batman & Robin, I was just an actor getting an acting job, and I was excited to play Batman," Clooney reflected earlier this year. "What I realized after that was I was gonna be held responsible for the movie itself—not just for my performance or what I was doing. And so, I knew I needed to focus on better scripts. The script was the most important thing. You can't make a good film out a bad script. It's impossible."

In the universally ridiculed movie, Batman (Clooney) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) go up against Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) to protect Gotham City.

After the booming success of 1993's Jurassic Park—to the tune of $402.45 million at the U.S. box office and three Oscars—Steven Spielberg returned with The Lost World: Jurassic Park in 1997. 

The official synopsis explains: "In this sequel, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) summons chaos theorist and onetime colleague Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to his home with some startling information—while nearly everything at his Jurassic Park had been destroyed, engineers were also operating a second site, where other dinosaurs, resurrected through DNA cloning technology, had been kept in hiding. Hammond has learned the dinosaurs on the second island are alive and well and even breeding; Hammond wants Malcolm to observe and document the reptiles before Hammond's financiers can get to them. Malcolm declares he had enough of the dinosaurs the first time out but decides to make the trip when he finds out that his girlfriend, paleontologist Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), is already there."

Vince Vaughn and Pete Postlethwaite also starred.

Jurassic Park III followed in 2001, though without Spielberg. The Jurassic franchise was revived in 2015 with the Chris Pratt-led Jurassic World. Pratt also fronted Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and will again star as Owen Grady next June in Jurassic World: Dominion.

Yet another heavy hitter in terms of leading stars, as Wolfgang Peterson's Air Force One,  was fronted by Glenn Close, Harrison Ford, and Gary Oldman. In the action drama, written by Andrew W. Marlowe, President James Marshall (Ford) is flying back to the United States from Russia after giving a stern anti-terrorism speech. Air Force One is hijacked by terrorists led by Egor Korshunov (Oldman). Vice President Kathryn Bennett (Close) must work to diffuse the traumatizing situation from Washington, D.C.

Air Force One was nominated for two Oscars.

Hercules was the highest-grossing Disney movie for the year 1997 at $99.1 million earned domestically (h/t Business Insider)—ranking as the 16th U.S. box-office draw overall (h/t IMDb). But as with every Disney classic, Hercules was made with kids in mind. And kids don't care about gross earnings.

Who doesn't love a good underdog story? Hercules, voiced by Tate Donovan, is stripped by Hades (James Woods) of his god-like powers as a baby despite having Zeus and Hera as parents. He is flung from the heavens down to Earth, where he has to build himself into a hero from scratch—with the help of Phil (Danny DeVito) and Pegasus. Hercules is put to the true test when Hades threatens Megara (Susan Egan), the love of his life.

It was reported in April 2020 that a live-action Hercules remake was in the works with Dave Callaham signed on to write the script, and Joe and Anthony Russo set to produce. Joe Russo provided an update on development earlier this year.

Before Matt Damon became synonymous with Good Will Hunting, he landed his first-ever leading role in The Rainmaker, which hit theaters the month before Good Will Hunting.

The Rainmaker  was adapted by Francis Ford Coppola from John Grisham's 1995 novel by the same name. In it, Damon starred as Memphis lawyer Rudy Baylor working under J. Lyman Stone (Mickey Rourke) and meets Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito) while checking up on hospitals for potential clients. Rudy teams up with Deck to fight on behalf of Buddy Black (Red West) and Dot Black (Mary Kay Place), whose son Donny Ray (Johnny Whitworth) is battling cancer and needs a bone marrow transplant that the family's insurance company denies.

Clare Danes, Danny Glover, Dean Stockwell, and Jon Voight were also featured.

Jim Carrey had  an iconic stake in 1990s comedy. Liar, Liar came out after The Mask ('94), Dumb and Dumber ('94), Ace Ventura: Pet Detective ('94), Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls ('95), and The Cable Guy ('95). 

Directed by Tom Shadyac—and written by Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur—Liar, Liar follows work-obsessed lawyer Fletcher Reede. When Fletcher misses his son Max's (Justin Cooper) fifth birthday, Max makes a wish that his dad can't lie "for only one day." That leads to 24 hours of hilarious truths.

As Good as It Gets  is responsible for one of Jack Nicholson's three Oscars, and for good reason. James L. Brooks' romantic dramedy is Nicholson's playground as the extremely unlikeable, OCD-plagued author Melvin Udall.

Melvin tolerates his neighbor Simon (Greg Kinnear), but other than that, he keeps to himself and sticks to his routine—until Simon is brutally beaten during a robbery, and Melvin has to watch after his dog, Verdell. That is the movie's first love story, Melvin and Verdell, which softens Melvin and allows him to open up to Carol (Helen Hunt), a local diner waitress whose presence begins only as part of his daily ritual and blossoms into romantic possibility.

Along with Nicholson's Oscar for best actor, Hunt took home best actress at the 70th Academy Awards.

No, not Amazon Prime Video's I Know What You Did Last Summer  series—the 1997 movie starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Ryan Phillippe. (That has to be the most '90s cast of all time.) The horror thriller was adapted from Lois Duncan's 1973 novel by the same name and directed by Jim Gillespie.

On the Fourth of July, high school seniors Julie (Hewitt), Ray (Prinze Jr.), Helen (Gellar), and Barry (Phillippe) get drunk on the beach and hit a stranger with their car on the way home. They ditch the evidence and, terrified, agree to never tell anybody. That soon turns to all-consuming paranoia when Julie receives a note simply reading, "I know what you did last summer."

Hewitt and Prinze Jr. reprised their roles for I Still Know What You Did Last Summer in 1998.

Con Air  was peak Nicolas Cage.

"When I was making Jerry Bruckheimer movies back-to-back, that was just a high-pressure game," Cage said of Con Air and The Rock in an interview with Variety in July, explaining why he now prefers independent films. "There were a lot of fun moments, but at the same time, there was also ‘We wrote this line. It has to be said this way.'"

People really liked the lines Cage delivered, though, as Con Air collected $101.12 million at the U.S. box office (h/t IMDb). 

In the Simon West-directed thriller, Cage plays Cameron Poe, a former U.S. Ranger who served time in prison a drunken brawl in defense of his wife, Tricia (Monica Potter). Now on parole, per the official synopsis, Cameron "must fly home aboard a prison transport flight dubbed 'Jailbird' with some of the worst criminals living. Along with Diamond Dog (Ving Rhames) and Baby-O (Mykelti Williamson), genius serial killer Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom (John Malkovich) unleashes a violent escape plot in mid-flight. Secretly working with U.S. Marshall Vince Larkin (John Cusack), Poe tries to foil Grissom's plan."

With the fifth Scream installment out in 2022, it's only right to revisit Scream 2 here.

Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's original Scream movie arrived in 1996 and became enough of a phenomenon—$103 million at the U.S. box office (h/t IMDb )—that a sequel was necessary in 1997. Again directed by Craven, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette reprised their roles as a new series of disturbing murders from Ghostface ensue.

Scream exploded into a full-blown franchise, including video games, merchandise, and a television series. Craven returned to direct two more Scream movies—Scream 3 in 2000 and Scream 4 in 2011—before he died of brain cancer in 2015. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett took over for 2022's Scream. 

Brendan Fraser was everywhere in the 1990s—so much so that it drone too long to list all of his '90s roles. But to name a few, he starred in Encino Man ('92), School Ties ('92), Airheads ('94), and eventually, as the titular George in George of the Jungle. (Plus, who could forget 1999's The Mummy?)

Directed by Sam Weisman, George of the Jungle chronicles George as he falls in love with heiress Ursula Stanhope (Leslie Mann). Falling in love is always complicated, but it is even more so when you have been raised up to that point in a jungle by apes. Mann admitted in a 2018 interview with NewBeauty that she "had a huge crush" on Fraser while making the movie.

Don't be fooled by Anastasia 's animation—or even the fact it's a musical. Don Bluth and Gary Goldman's film packs a weighty punch, as the titular Anastasia (Kirsten Dunst, Meg Ryan) fights to survive against evil sorcerer Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd), who killed the Romanov family except for her and Dowager Empress Marie (Angela Lansbury), Anastasia's grandmother. 

While Anastasia and Marie are trying to flee, they lose their grip of each other. The plot skips 10 years, where there is mystery around Anastasia's whereabouts. She is now an orphan known as Anya. Marie is desperate to find her, and conmen Dimitri (John Cusack) and Vladimir (Kelsey Grammer) are determined to claim the reward for finding her. Eventually, they are reunited; Dimitri turns into a good guy whom Anastasia falls in love with and marries instead of inheriting her royal duties.

The movie is very loosely based on the true story of a Russian princess named Anastasia whose family was murdered by Communists in 1918, amid the Russian Revolution (h/t The Chicago Tribune). 

What's better than a '90s Julia Roberts romantic comedy? Reminiscing on a '90s Julia Roberts romantic comedy. My Best Friend's Wedding was nestled perfectly between Pretty Woman (1990), Something to Talk About ('95), Stepmom ('98), Notting Hill ('99), and Runaway Bride ('99).

Directed by P.J. Hogan, the cult classic features Roberts as Julianne, whose lifelong best friend Michael is engaged to Kimberly (Cameron Diaz). That serves as an emotional awakening for Julianna, realizing she has actually loved Michael all this time, and now she has four days to get rid of Kimberly. It's deliciously predictable and satisfying all the same.

Do you know what this list needs? Jennifer Lopez.

Think of Anaconda as the Snakes on a Plane  of the '90s. Terri Flores (Lopez) is a filmmaker. She and her crew of Dr. Steven Cale (Eric Stoltz) and cameraman Danny Rich (Ice Cube) are trying to make a documentary about a long-lost Indian tribe in the Amazon. Instead, they meet peculiar hunter Paul Serone (Jon Voight), who forces them to help him capture an anaconda.

Owen Wilson and Danny Trejo also starred.

Before Kenan Thompson was the longest-tenured Saturday Night Live cast member in history, he was Kel Mitchell's comedic partner—from Nickelodeon's All That and Kenan & Kel to feature-length film Good Burger. 

Good Burger was derived from a sketch by the same name on All That, and the movie centers on teenagers Ed (Mitchell) and Dexter (Thompson) as they try to save their Good Burger restaurant from going out of business after chain restaurant Mondo Burger opens. Sinbad also starred.

Mitchell and Thompson reunited to perform a "Good Burger" sketch on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon  in 2015. Watch here.

Three of Pierce Brosnan's four James Bond movies came in the 1990s. He debuted as 007 in 1995's GoldenEye and returned in 1997 with Tomorrow Never Dies. 

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, Bond must stop an international war between China and the U.K. after media mogul Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) will not abide by China's refusal to broadcast. Chinese secret agent Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) lends her services to Bond. Teri Hatcher, Ricky Jay, and Vincent Schiavelli also starred.

Brosnan returned for The World Is Not Enough in 1999 and wrapped his Bond tenure with Die Another Day  (2002). Daniel Craig took over for Casino Royale ('06), Quantum of Solace ('08), Skyfall ('12), Spectre ('15), and No Time to Die ('21). Who will next play James Bond is anybody's guess.