1990s

Fifth Generation film-maker Yimou Zhang (whose debut was Hong Gao Liang in 1987) directed his masterpiece, Dahong Denglong Gaogao Gua (1991), a film whose sumptuous cinematography is contrasted with its themes of repression and jealousy. His fellow Fifth Generation director, Kaige Chen, made the lavish Ba Wang Bie Ji in 1993.

With the collapse of the military dictatorship in South Korea in the early 1990s, restrictions on foreign media were lifted. This led to an influx of Hollywood films, with which the country's national film industry could not compete. After securing corporate sponsorship, a new wave of South Korean films achieved increasing domestic and international success. The instant and unprecedented box-office popularity of Seopyeonje (Im Kwon-Taek, 1993) and Swiri (Kang Je-Gyu, 1999) heralded a New Korean Cinema movement and reasserted the dominance of South Korea's film industry within Asia, a trend known as Hallyu. (A short-lived Korean new wave movement, known as Yongsang Sedae, had existed in the 1970s, initiated in 1974 by Yi Chang-Ho's Pyoldul Ui Kohyang.)

1997 was a breakthrough year for the cinema of Iran. The country's long history of exploitative 'filmfarsi' productions was broken by the international acclaim garnered by the films of Abbas Kiarostami (Nema-Ye Nazdik, 1990; Ta'm E Guilass, 1997). Kiarostami had previously written Jafar Panahi's Badkonake Sefid (1995); his Bad Ma Ra Khahad Bord (1999) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf's later Safar E Ghandehar (2001) took Iranian cinema, by now at the forefront of international appreciation, into the next century. Safar E Ghandehar, which follows a woman travelling in the Afghan desert, was released at the same time as Afghanistan's Taliban regime was overthrown. Bahman Ghobadi's Zamani Baraye Masti Asbha (2000) and Lakposhtha Ham Parvaz Mikonand (2004) present a Kurdish perpective on the conflict in the Middle East. One of the few precursors of the 1990s Iranian New Wave (Cinema Motefavet) was Dariush Mehrjui's GaavGaav (1969).

A group of Danish directors formed Dogme '95, and agreed to a Vow Of Chastity manifesto (1995) pledging never to use artificial lighting, post-synchronised sound, camera tripods, or studio sets. In an anti-auteurist gesture, they also refused to allow themselves directorial credits. Each Dogme '95 film was prefaced with a title-card certifying its accordance with the Dogme code. The first such film was Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (1998).

Such ultra-realism was challenged by The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), which was concerned with the mutli-layered and illusory nature of reality itself (a more technologically sophisticated version of earlier 'virtual reality' films such as David Cronenberg's Videodrome from 1982) and Peter Jackson's epic fantasy The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (2001).

In France, La Haine (Matieu Kassovitz, 1995) was arguably the film of the decade, highlighting the racial tension in 'banlieu' ghettos. (A similar theme is explored from an Arab perspective in Cinema Beur films made by French Arabs, such as Karim Dridi's Bye-Bye from 1995.) In Michael Haneke's Austrian film Funny Games (1997), an exercise in 'epater le bourgeois', two young murderers invade a family's holiday home.

American cinema began incorporating digital imagery into its blockbuster films, notably morphing metal in James Cameron's Terminator II: Judgement Day (1991) and incredible digitally-generated dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993). The next step, total digital animation, was taken by the Pixar studio with Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995). (The use of computers in film animation began in 1960, when John Whitney founded Motion Graphics and produced abstract animations via an analogue computer he had invented. In 1961, he compiled his earliest films into a showreel titled Catalog.)

A major new studio, Dreamworks SKG, was established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. After several years of construction delays, Dreamworks began active film production in 1997 and quickly became one of the most successful film studios in Hollywood. Its greatest commercial successes were the digital animations it produced to compete with Pixar, including Shrek (Andrew Adamson, 2001). Shrek was notable for its conscious attempts to appeal to both children and adults, and it also contained several thinly-disguised Disney parodies (following Jeffrey Katzenberg's split with Disney and several Pixar/Disney collaborations). Dreamworks was sold in 2005, and is now under the same ownership as Paramount.

Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995), and Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) all weave together complex inter-connected stories (as did Christopher Nolan's reverse-narrative Memento in 2001). Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) was a masterful late western, briefly reviving a previously dormant genre. The last masterpiece of the century was Todo Sobre Mi Madre (1999) by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, who later directed the emotionally devastating Hable Con Ella (2002). (Almodovar's uninhibited earlier films, such as Pepi Luci Bom Y Otras Chicas Del Monton (1980), signified his association with La Movida Madrilena, a hedonistic youth subculture in 1980s Madrid.)

The most promising new director in world cinema at the turn of the 21st century was perhaps Hong Kong's Wong Kar-Wai. His A Fei Zheng Chuan (1991) and Chong Qing Sen Lin (1994) developed cult followings, and his epic 2046 (2004) was an international arthouse success.

Indie Cinema

Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi (1992, known as a Burrito western) and Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994) were 'indie' films produced on ultra-low budgets, inspired by Sex Lies And Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989) and Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1991). Arguably the first major indie film of the period was Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984). A group of independent films with gay themes (such as Gus VanSant's My Own Private Idaho, 1991) was defined by critics as New Queer Cinema, a trend that began with the film festival success of Poison (Todd Haynes, 1990). Throughout the decade, indie cinema was dominated by former video-junkie Quentin Tarantino, whose audacious debut Reservoir Dogs (1992) was followed by the highly acclaimed Pulp Fiction (1994). Reservoir Dogs was cited as an example of New Brutalism, an umbrella term for a group of explicitly brutal American films released in the early 1990s.

At the turn of the 21st century, several American indie film-makers were accused of selling out, as they directed studio projects alongside independent productions. A new group of intimate, low-budget films, collectively labelled Mumblecore, was hailed as a revival of real independent cinema. Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2005) are the most successful films of the Mumblecore movement. Furthermore, a sub-division of indie, known as Microcinema, comprised films with ultra-low budgets and independent distribution, such as the plethora of digital videos available online.