30 Movies That Shaped The Millennial Generation

Ignore all the jokes about millennials and their avocado toast. The generation born between the early '80s and the mid-'90s (via PEW Research) is as complicated as any other — and we see that complexity reflected in their pop culture landmarks. If you assemble a list of classic millennial movies, you'll see risk-taking independent films as well as huge Hollywood spectacles. There's darkness as well as optimism. Millennials got to witness the beginning of a much-needed boost in diversity in Hollywood, as well as the rise of ground-breaking technology and CGI, all of which helped tell new (and sometimes old) stories in new ways.

Some of the films on our list are classics already that have either mainstream acclaim or devoted cult followings, while others may never get — or necessarily deserve — that level of critical respect.

In the end, that acclaim or recognition doesn't matter quite so much because for many, these movies feel immortal. And for many, what really matters are the memories of growing up with them, seeing them in theaters, and watching them over and over again on VHS tapes or DVDs. Let's take a look at the formative movies that make up a kind of common language for millennials.

Tim Burton's sensibility resonates with many millennials, who have responded to his heartfelt love of weird outsiders, kitsch, and darkly beautiful fantasy worlds. Burton's outlook is on display in all his films, but "The Nightmare Before Christmas" holds a special place in many millennials' hearts since this 1993 gem let this generation get the Burton experience early on. 

With its charmingly funky stop-motion animation, iconic Danny Elfman score, and deeply original fantasy elements, "The Nightmare Before Christmas" more than earns its accolades. Besides, how often do you get a movie that plays just as well on Christmas as on Halloween?

The movie takes us inside a world where every holiday is managed by its own pocket dimension. Jack Skellington (Chris Sarandon) is the "Pumpkin King" of the endearingly and disturbingly spooky Halloween Town, and for years, he and the resident werewolves, monsters, and zombies have kept Halloween as eerie as anyone could want. Unbeknownst to almost everyone, though, Jack has been craving some variety — and when he winds up finding the portal to Christmas Town, he decides that he will be the new "Sandy Claws." He means well ... but that doesn't mean this switch will go smoothly.

It's almost impossible to beat the amount of sheer imagination and conviction in every frame of "The Nightmare Before Christmas." Roger Ebert nailed it when he said, "It has the kind of offbeat, subversive energy that tells [older kids] wonderful things are likely to happen. ... I found the movie a feast for the eyes and the imagination."

Is "Space Jam" a good movie? Maybe not. With a low-to-middling critical score on Rotten Tomatoes and only so-so ratings from audiences, it's hard for us to argue that this is an underrated gem. That doesn't change our enormous affection for it — and we're not the only ones who have a soft spot for this goofy story of Michael Jordan teaming up with Bugs Bunny and the Looney Toons to play basketball against some sneakily powered-up aliens, who want to capture the Looney Toons and use them as theme park attractions. 

If you grew up in the '90s or the early '00s, the odds are good that "Space Jam" was a major part of your childhood. Some of these gags are probably permanently etched into your brain.

Crucially, "Space Jam" has a big heart and a playful spirit. For sheer humor, kids might be enraptured by the toons, but adults will probably gravitate towards the laconic Bill Murray playing himself. It captures some of that anarchic "Looney Tunes" energy, successfully combines it with an actual plot, anchors it with Michael Jordan's star power, and adds in plenty of cameos as seasoning. Plus, now we know why Michael Jordan went back to playing basketball! The Looney Toons revived his love of the game!

The Huffington Post may be right when it calls the movie a "cynical and highly successful marketing ploy" that we only continue to like because of nostalgia ... but we're okay with that. It works, and we have the rose-colored glasses to prove it.

"My Girl" is one of those formative weepies: a tender, bittersweet, funny coming-of-age story that had the side effect of making an entire generation afraid of bees.

The movie tells the story of 11-year-old Vada (Anna Chlumsky) and Thomas J. (Macaulay Culkin). Thomas J. is sweet and earnest; Vada, whose father is the local mortician, is gloomier and more difficult. The two have a close friendship — one that eventually blossoms into a touching first kiss — and "My Girl" lets us soak up their time together and get to know them. Primarily, though, it's focused on Vada, who has a rocky year that starts the painful process of growing up ... and confronts her with a devastating loss.

While some critics like Owen Gleiberman dismissed the film as too sugary and formulaic, "My Girl" fans get to point to Roger Ebert himself as one of the movie's defenders. Ebert championed the film's sincerity, truth, and emotion, as he wrote, "The beauty in this film is in its directness. ... This is a movie that has its heart in the right place." If it also ripped your heart to shreds when you were growing up, you're in good company.

"Bring It On" may look like a straightforward cheerleader comedy but its sharp humor, empathy, and investment in social issues make it ahead of its time.

Torrance (Kirsten Dunst) has just become captain of her San Diego school's Nationals-winning cheerleading squad the Toros, but discovers that the previous captain stole the winning routines from the Clovers, a Black and Latinx squad in Compton. So, Torrance enlists the help of new recruit Missy (Eliza Dushku) to create an original routine and beat the Clovers at Nationals fair and square.

Co-star Jesse Bradford points out to i-D that "Bring It On" seamlessly combines cheerleading with complex issues of cultural appropriation. By building the plot around the plausible revelation of the Toros stealing the Clovers' routines, the movie doesn't cordon off its social criticism to a few lectures: It dramatizes them into an awesome story that sucks audiences in. It prompts viewers to think about some genuinely uncomfortable questions. What do you do when you find out the prestigious position you've inherited is built on theft and exploitation?

Of course, the movie also has a strong cast, terrific cheerleading stunts, and good jokes. It wouldn't have lasted so long if it weren't fun and full of satisfying storytelling. "Bring It On" flies onto our list because it still has social relevance more than 20 years later — and it got millennials thinking and talking about concepts that didn't become mainstream until well after the Toros' and Clovers' pom-poms started gathering dust.

Each generation needs its own lushly romantic melodrama with heartthrob actors, soaring music, unforgettable spectacle, and tons of earnest emotion and for millennials, it's no other than James Cameron's "Titanic." This 1997 film focuses on a swoon-worthy cross-class love story between Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), two passengers on the doomed Titanic. They're meant for each other — but Jack is a broke, struggling artist, and Rose is from an upper-crust family. She's supposed to marry for money, not love.

Cameron gets his audience swept up in Rose and Jack's bittersweet romance, and it's so compelling that you can almost forget that there's a clock ticking in the background. Sooner or later, the Titanic is going to collide with that iceberg, and the emergency and desperate quest for survival will take over. The movie is equally vivid and riveting when it comes to the tension and tragedy of the disaster.

It's easy to crack jokes about "Titanic," but even if you think the movie doesn't hold up to critical inspection, you can't deny the seismic impact it had on viewers, who were just the right age at the time. Empire concluded that a few years down the line from "Titanic's" release, if "you ask the generation then producing, directing or hacking out reviews what turned them on to movies in the first place, more than a few will answer 'Titanic.'"

"Edward Scissorhands" captures a sea change in American culture. Because it's a Tim Burton film — and for some, it's the Tim Burton film — this allegory features a pastel and hidebound suburbia and a lonely new arrival with scissor-blades for fingers, and those frills are a wonderful bonus. When Burton is working at the top of his form as he is here, he's a master of creating artificial and exaggerated worlds and characters that somehow speak to something real and true inside us all.

The movie packs a political punch specific to its time and place, but it also appeals to its viewers on a more personal level. With "Edward Scissorhands," we can, of course, identify with Edward (Johnny Depp) — the shunned and stigmatized outsider whose unavoidable weirdness is either gawked at or mocked. But even more than that, we can identify with Kim (Winona Ryder), who falls in love with him. The love story between Kim and Edward is touching, and it's also the perfect metaphor for being drawn to the unconventional and the uncomfortable.

For millennial teens working out their tastes, obsessions, and passions in a judgmental environment — i.e. in any high school anywhere — it meant a lot to see Kim choosing Edward and loving him all her life. It not only promised audiences that they didn't have to be "normal," but it also promised them that they could grow up without becoming a kind of pod person embracing a bland, lifeless world they didn't want.

For millennials, "The Matrix" will always exemplify a particular brand of cool. This 1999 movie hit at exactly the right time to inspire a generation-wide obsession with leather dusters, stylized action scenes, slow-mo bullet-dodging, tinted visuals, hackers, and mysteries and mythos. The film tossed out some of the distinctions between science fiction and fantasy to create a deep, intriguing universe that audiences found intoxicating and for some, the world of "The Matrix" is just one of many reasons that make it the best sci-fi movie ever.

As TV Guide noted, the film's plot works on various levels, as its blending of sci-fi and thriller genres, combined with its incredible action scenes, all work to create "a pretty compelling call to the dead-above-the-eyeballs masses to unite and cast off their chains." It's a sleek shock to the system.

Keanu Reeves stars as Neo, a disaffected hacker, who learns that his reality is actually the computer-generated "Matrix," a simulation managed by machines who now use dreaming humans as living batteries. There's a chance that Neo is the prophesied "One," who can overcome the machines and save humanity. But before he can even start discovering his destiny, he has to learn the ropes from allies like Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and avoid killers like the sinister Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving).

"The Matrix" is a pop culture landmark, with quotes and references that — for better and for worse — have become common parlance. Its success also marked the rising fortunes of its directors, the siblings Lana and Lilly Wachowski, who remain a great source for ambitious, genre-defying films that aren't afraid to go big or go home.

Would we leave "Clueless" off this list? Ugh, as if! Writer-director Amy Heckerling's modernized but faithful 1995 "Emma" adaptation keeps all of Jane Austen's wit, social satire, and subtle romance, while also offering a loving and pitch-perfect portrait of wealthy and oblivious Bel Air teens in the '90s.

Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) is living her best life: She's wealthy, effortlessly popular, and genuinely outgoing. She even has a computer to help her plan the perfect outfit. All she wants — besides a driver's license — is the amusement and satisfaction of a little good-hearted social meddling. After all, she did some matchmaking with the school's two loneliest teachers, and that worked out, so she clearly has a gift. 

She's exactly the right person to elevate new student Tai (Brittany Murphy) to her inner circle and get her to abandon her tragic stoner aesthetic and the boy that comes with it. Never mind what Cher's former stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd) thinks. Cher will find the right guy for Tai and the right guy for her. She's got this ... except she doesn't.

"Clueless" is a pleasure to watch, and as Roger Ebert pointed out, you don't even have to be in the movie's target audience to enjoy it: "It will appeal to anyone who has a sense of humor and an ear for the ironic. Heckerling walks a fine line between satire and put-on, but she finds it, and her dialogue could be anthologized."

Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" gives girls a dark and lushly romantic fantasy world where they can take center stage, so it's no surprise that this was a formative cinematic experience for young millennials.

The film follows 16-year-old Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), who makes an impulsive, ill-advised wish to be rid of her baby brother ... and then has to rescue him from the clutches of the compelling Goblin King (David Bowie). Sarah's journey takes her through a weird, fascinating, and often creepy landscape that includes everything from the titular labyrinth to the Bog of Eternal Stench to a panoply of puppet creatures, who act as both friend and foe. Sarah has to learn to get by in a complicated and murky world, one where resentment doesn't preclude love, friends can betray you, and seduction and danger can go hand-in-hand.

That learning curve means that for all the rich and evocative fantasy elements, this is, at its heart, about a girl growing up. All the outer wonders are matched by inner depths, especially when it comes to Sarah's coming-of-age and her complicated, charged relationship with the Goblin King. It's hard to think of any other film that creates such a successful and believable dreamscape. As Daily Dead wrote, "It is that unfettered creativity, along with the mixing of the dark and light, the whimsical with the sinister, that distinguishes 'Labyrinth' from other films of the 1980s."

"Napoleon Dynamite" is a slice-of-life story following its titlular character (Jon Heder), an Idaho teenager with an off-kilter approach to life, a bizarre family, and a commitment to getting his new transfer student best friend, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), elected class president against all odds.

Like a lot of cult movies, it's offbeat and not for everyone and it manages to be odd and out-of-step even for a cult movie. Even film critic Scott Tobias, who wrote a series on the New Cult Canon for The AV Club, was baffled by it: "It left me genuinely flummoxed, as if it were a dog whistle only some can hear." Some people don't get it while others continue to flock to the town it's set in (via The Salt Lake Tribune).

Part of the film's charm might be that it legitimately doesn't feel like anything else. It was made far outside Hollywood and shows almost no interest in more mainstream approaches to comedy, acting, or dialogue. It's structured like a high school movie, but it follows a hero whose "flirtation" consists of telling a girl, "You could be drinking whole [milk] if you wanted to." Napoleon is a constant fountain of comedic irritation, weird habits, and intense interests — and we're into it. The one thing you can say about Napoleon is that he is, as they say, living his truth.

Even if you don't like it, the movie's very divisiveness makes it an important film for millennials. It's one of this generation's major cult films that taught audiences how eccentric art can be and how far tastes can diverge.

Heather, Josh, and Mike trek into the woods to film Heather's documentary on the local legend of the Blair Witch, a centuries-old supernatural figure, who supposedly committed and inspired multiple grisly murders. When it's time to head home, though, the trio can't seem to find their way out of the woods ... and they start to feel like they're not alone out there.

"The Blair Witch Project" helped shake up the horror landscape and define how millennials thought about the genre. According to USA Today, this 1999 found footage mockumentary was one of the first films to embrace the internet and use it to its advantage by stirring up word of mouth and blurring the line between fiction and reality. Even when you know it's not real, the film is still effective and wonderfully creepy. Multiply that terror by ten for the early wave of audiences who went in half-convinced this was about actual documentary filmmakers investigating real folklore.

"The Blair Witch Project" didn't invent the found footage format, but as Collider notes, its success popularized it and inspired plenty of follow-ups like "Paranormal Activity." Roger Ebert even listed it as one of the 10 most influential films of the 20th century — alongside "The Battleship Potemkin" and "Citizen Kane" — that transformed the expectations of how a film could be made and received.

Furthermore, the movie is a lot more than just its gimmick. This is a grueling horror masterpiece with a particularly chilling ending, and critical publications like The Hollywood Reporter continue to rank it high on all-time horror lists ... and we still don't want to watch it too late at night.

This story of a boy's rise from the slums of Mumbai to quiz show success has, at its best, a beautiful kinetic energy and a fairy tale-like resonance. Dev Patel shines as Jamal, a romantic optimist, who has been subjected to a life full of tragedies and indignities — but who holds out hope that his success on India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" will give him the chance to reunite with his long-lost love Latika (Freida Pinto).

As its Rotten Tomatoes scores show, "Slumdog Millionaire" was a major critical success and it even picked up eight Academy Awards. For English-speaking audiences, it was a potential gateway into Bollywood cinema, especially given the prominent acting careers of the film's co-stars Irrfan Khan and Anil Kapoor. Its exultant final musical number, "Jai Ho," remains joyous and ridiculously catchy. 

It's easy to see why a lot of millennials responded to the movie as both a well-constructed romantic melodrama and a doorway to global concerns and international settings that Hollywood rarely focuses on. However, IndiaFacts notes that the movie hasn't always been a hit with Indian audiences, with some critics arguing that the film features a troubling anti-Hindu subtext, a sanitized portrayal of Americans in India, and a sensationalized and voyeuristic approach to Mumbai poverty.

Whether or not "Slumdog Millionaire" holds up — or ever worked for you at all — it's still a landmark film that opened new doors in Bollywood (via The Guardian), pointed Hollywood toward new and diverse influences, and helped introduce younger audiences to the possibilities of world cinema.

When hobbit Frodo (Elijah Wood) inherits his beloved uncle's magic ring, he also inherits an earth-shattering responsibility: The ring offers extraordinary power, and if it falls into the hands of the malevolent Sauron, it could spell the end of everything. Along with a band of warriors and companions, Frodo must embark on a dangerous journey to destroy the ring, which is already exerting a corrupting influence on everything around it.

"The Lord of the Rings" trilogy remade the entertainment landscape. It proved that high fantasy stories could work on the screen and it's hard to imagine shows like "Game of Thrones" or "The Wheel of Time" ever being green-lit without the spectacular success of Peter Jackson's original trilogy, which grossed nearly $3 billion in ticket sales alone (via The Numbers). 

It showed off the potential to use the latest CGI techniques for storytelling as well as spectacle. It was such a sensation that New Zealand welcomed in a whole new wave of tourists, as wide-eyed fans headed off in droves to see the film's stunning Middle-Earth landscapes in person (via Variety).

The best part of the trilogy's legacy, however, is the mark it left on its loyal fans. The movies' sincerity, warmth, and original December release dates have made "Lord of the Rings" marathons a holiday tradition in many households (via GeekDad). These movies have a permanent place in our hearts, and whenever we're talking about genuine heroism, or amazing theater experiences, they're going to come up — and those memories are always going to make us smile.

Ultimate Movie Year recounts Ice Cube's ambition to have the stoner comedy "Friday"— which he co-wrote and starred in — portray Black, working class South Central Los Angeles as a place where two ordinary guys like the newly unemployed Craig (Ice Cube) and his friend Smokey (Chris Tucker) could just hang out, chat, and smoke weed. Well, and scrounge around trying to find $200 to pay for the marijuana they smoked instead of selling, but that's more adventurous than gritty.

Many people had an image of South Central LA as hyper-violent and depressing and Ice Cube wanted to offer a different perspective with "Friday." Needless to say, he succeeded in his goal. "Friday" not only effectively challenges on-screen stereotypes, but it also shines as a laid-back, funny hangout film. 

"Friday" has even achieved internet immortality, with one of its lines — "Bye, Felicia" — turning into a lasting meme that, as Ice Cube himself put it in during an appearance on "Conan," is the perfect thing "to get anyone out of your face."

Of course, the movie is a lot more than its most-quoted line. In fact, Angela Means, the actress that played Felicia, told Hype+ that she really wishes people would stop trying to dismiss Felicia and instead think about her — and her real-life counterparts — with more empathy. "Friday" is a sharp, funny, and unconventional film that acknowledges poverty, drugs, and fatalism with a daring shrug, having, as Entertainment Weekly says, "the nerve to suggest that the line between tragedy and comedy may be in the bloodshot eye of the beholder."

"Menace II Society" deals unflinchingly with how the onslaught of drugs and violence, the weight of prejudice, and the constriction of limited options can all leave characters nihilistic enough to squander what few chances they're given. As Owen Gleiberman wrote in Entertainment Weekly, the film is "bleak, brilliant, unsparing." Crucially, however, while it's a movie that will leave you in shreds, it's far from a slog; in fact, it has energy and tension to spare.

Best friends Caine (Tyrin Turner) and O-Dog (Larenz Tate) are two restless, impulsive teenage boys bound for tragedy — sometimes of their own making. They're in a 1993 Los Angeles that seethes with racism, machismo, and bottled-up frustration, and their lives are about to explode. O-Dog, the more callous of the two, murders a liquor store owner and his wife and decides to embrace his new hardened identity and the trouble that comes with it. Caine tries, not always successfully, to extricate himself. Even when he seems to slip out of one trap, however, there's another one waiting.

While Rotten Tomatoes shows that "Menace II Society" received great critical acclaim, the best indication of the mark it left on millennials is probably the fact that it snagged the 1994 MTV Movie Award for Best Movie (via IMDb). It's not just a great and important film; it's one that its target audience could embrace as cool — which meant they could watch it over and over again and let its significance really sink in.