I read and reference Entertainment Weekly the way a lot of people read and reference the newspaper – it is my most-quoted source. It got to the point where I just started calling EW “the paper.” So, without further ado, here is The Paper’s Top 10 List of Movies that Changed Hollywood:
HOOP DREAMS (1994)
Two high school basketball players come to embody a giant, complex portrait of American society in this magnificent documentary. Today’s audience for nonfiction films can thank it for profoundly changing the game. —Lisa Schwarzbaum
PULP FICTION (1994)
In his famous tale of talk-happy hoodlums, Quentin Tarantino flipped time and wove the hippest pop references of the century into his filmmaking DNA. What it all added up to is that he reinvented the primal pleasures of screen narrative. —Owen Gleiberman
CLERKS (1994)
Shot for $27,500, Kevin Smith’s slacker landmark is the ultimate low-budget do-it-yourself indie, because it’s such a perfect fusion of form and function: It’s about two dudes trying not to bore themselves as they while away the hours as one of them works at a grimy convenience store — and the movie basically consists of Smith and his actors trying not to bore themselves as they shoot an entire movie in a New Jersey convenience store. Smith’s economy of means and hilariously profane, porn-fixated, say-what-you-wanna-say dialogue opened the door to a hundred grunge auteurs. —OG
TOY STORY (1995)
Pixar’s first feature-length movie demonstrated the potential magic of CGI with such brilliance that the light is still being reflected back to us today. And in that explosion of energy, we glimpsed a timeless truth: Technology is great, but story is even greater. —LS
BILLY MADISON (1995)
Back in the mid-’90s, when Adam Sandler starred in this sweetly stupido arrested-development comedy about a doofus who goes back to school (grades 1-12), he seemed like one more Saturday Night Live star working on one more third-rate movie career by churning out one more cheaply forgettable farce. Yet Billy Madison turned out to be the movie that launched the Sandler empire — and, in the process, kept grown-up juvenility alive and thriving, in Hollywood and (arguably) America, for years to come. —OG
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)
A horror film that seemed almost real. For a decade it was an anomaly, but the influence of Blair Witch is just starting to be fully felt, as the faux-documentary drama becomes a touchstone of the reality age. —OG
THE MATRIX (1999)
The quintessential mind-blower/eye candy with which to end a dizzying century, this daredevil action sci-fi conjuring act by Larry and Andy Wachowski spun pop culture influences from spaghetti Westerns to anime into a gorgeous potluck of style. The cyberfuture the brother filmmakers imagined is now our present. And the ”bullet time” effect they made their signature shot has since become a standard Hollywood visual shorthand. —LS
MEMENTO (2000)
The intriguingly disorienting storytelling is the story in Christopher Nolan’s ingenious puzzle of a psychological thriller. By creating a kind of narrative helix, reeling backward and forward, Memento not only reflected the condition of amnesia suffered by Guy Pearce’s character (forced to cover his body with Notes To Self), but also staked out heady new possibilities for playful filmmakers. And none has been more intellectually playful than Nolan himself, who went on to cut time into a Mobiüs strip last year in Inception. —LS
CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000)
Ang Lee’s sumptuous panoply of warriors flying through the air and dancing on treetops introduced an international audience to what fans of the long and glorious tradition of Hong Kong martial-arts movies have known for decades: The breathtaking Wu Xia tradition of cinematic storytelling will knock your socks off. After Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, every action hero wanted to hang in the air, at least for a graceful few seconds. —LS
OCEAN’S ELEVEN (2001)
Steven Soderbergh wasn’t the first fluky wunderkind director to cross over to the corporate Hollywood of the blockbuster era (that would be Tim Burton, with 1989′s Batman). But in this exhilarating, star-packed shell game of a heist comedy, he was the first to prove that you could be a popcorn entertainer by making more than a comic book. —OG
Their full story is here
