Starting with Cadillac Man and ending with Bicentennial Man, Robin Williams made 27 films over the course of the 90s. That's a whole spectrum of Robin Williamses: kooky (Mrs Doubtfire), mournful (What Dreams May Come), creepy (Jack) and annoying (again, Bicentennial Man). Yet the most 90s Robin Williams performance of all is his turn as the Genie in Disney's Aladdin, in which he is allowed to blabber and gibber and yelp and riff about nothing at a mile a minute for ages. It's brilliant, but exhausting. Remember, this film had two sound editors. Pray for them.  A definitively 90s film because it was the first to really harness the power of the internet. The Blair Witch stealth-marketing campaign could have only worked back then, when the internet was established enough to convince people they were really watching a documentary, but not so established that the whole thing could be debunked on Twitter a nanosecond later.  In the mid-90s, all teenage girls convinced themselves that they could do spells. Cut to lunchtimes spent chanting "light as a feather, stiff as a board" to inspire levitation, and maths lessons consisting of trying to make your pencil stand on its tip for 45 minutes straight.  Kids in the 90s didn't see Jim Morrison as a fat drunk. Thanks to Oliver Stone, they saw him as a sort of poet Jesus. They were wrong, but that didn't stop them from lining their bedroom walls with posters of Val Kilmer anyway.  Sensitive? Capable of disguising your surging emotions with studied ennui? Plagued by an objectively awful haircut? Only enjoy watching depressing Bergman-esque films because you think they make you look deeper? You're a fan of Edward Scissorhands, aren't you?  Reading on a mobile? Watch here  On its release, Fight Club was too wrapped up in pre-millennial angst to properly reflect the 90s. Viewed today, however, it seems very pre-9/11. The world would soon have bigger things to deal with than anxiety about mass-produced furniture. What's more, the ending could have only been made in a time before the attacks on the World Trade Centre.  Patrick Swayze communicating with a short-haired Demi Moore from beyond the grave through Whoopi Goldberg, to the sound of the Righteous Brothers: about as 90s as spilling Sunny Delight down your Global Hypercolour T-shirt.  Pre-Titanic Kate Winslet. Pre-Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson. A story about a dangerous codependent friendship. Line drawings of dragons. You're welcome, all girls who were 12 in 1994.  One of the most influential films on this entire list. Now Hollywood blows up cities 10 times every summer. Back in 1996, it was still a relatively new spectacle. Bonus: Will Smith got to punch an alien in the face.  Anyone wanting to make a dinosaur film before Jurassic Park had to either resort to stop-motion or just filming an iguana up close and hoping that nobody would notice. But Jurassic Park changed everything. Thanks to groundbreaking computer animation, these prehistoric monsters could be rendered more realistically than ever. Plus, it featured a T-rex biting a man while he's sitting on the toilet.  A quasi-documentary about some teenagers talking about sex, contracting HIV and then killing a man on drugs. It's basically I Know What You Did Last Summer, but for people who grew up not wearing socks.  In the early 90s, a Disney big shot wanted to know what Hamlet would be like if it had more farting warthogs and Elton John songs in it. The Lion King was the result. Thank God for Disney big shots.  Evidence of why the 90s were good: it's when The Matrix was released. Evidence of why the noughties were awful: it's when The Matrix sequels were released.  Included on this list partly because of the media froth it caused about copycat murders, and partly because it's like watching a cluster migraine.  George Clooney before he became a cartoon Dean Martin impersonator. Jennifer Lopez when she could still realistically be called an actor. Sexual chemistry powerful enough to blow your socks off – and maybe the rest of your clothes.  In the 90s, surf culture hit the mainstream with such force that people could actually say "cowabunga" out loud without becoming so ravaged by self-hatred that they would immediately punch themselves in the throat. Point Break is the perfect encapsulation of that time.  OK, not a film, but Quentin Tarantino has spent his entire career trying to escape the shadow of the three movies he directed in the 90s. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (and, to a lesser extent, Jackie Brown) came out of nowhere and turned cinema on its head. You just have to look at all the dreary, dialogue-laden, reference-saturated indie films that arrived in their wake as proof. (I especially do not recommend Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead to anyone).  Because people in the 90s whined like there was no tomorrow. And also used the word "bites" as a negative adjective. It really was a different time.  Reading on a mobile? Watch here  It left us too traumatised to make popcorn in our own homes, and features some of the best close-ups of a cordless landline phone. Scream was a Wes Craven classic, a tongue-in-cheek, self-referential horror. It spawned the parody Scary Movie (funny), many more awful films besides (every other Scary Movie in the franchise), and a bucketload of poor imitations.  How could T stand for anything else? The biggest film of the 90s (and most of the next decade), Titanic was an unstoppable reflection of the period that produced it. Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his grinning poster-boy powers, Kate Winslet in her pomp, and a theme tune so shrill that even Celine Dion seems to have gone off it. If you had the misfortune of watching Titanic in a cinema wedged between two pairs of horny teenagers slapping each other around the face with their tongues, you'll understand.  It's been 19 years. Surely – surely – it's not a spoiler to reveal who Keyser Soze is any more. The breathtaking twist at the end of this film, and the labyrinthine journey towards it, heralded a new bravery in film-making. Buoyed by Tarantino's success with narrative trickery, clever crime films such as The Usual Suspects suddenly became lauded by the masses. Oh. Apparently it is still a spoiler to say who Keyser Soze is, though. Sorry.  Two versions of The Vanishing were made. One happened in Holland in the 80s, and was acclaimed for its darkly uncompromising ending. The other happened in America in the 90s, and is widely regarded as dismal because the only way its ending could have been cheerier is if Kiefer Sutherland had donned a propeller hat and spent the duration of the credits riding in circles on a little pony while singing nursery rhymes. Listen, nobody said the 90s were all good.  Five years before Mike Myers was "groovy, baby", and a year before he married an axe murderer, he was a rock musician doubling as a cable TV host in this fun, much-loved caper with cameos from none other than Meat Loaf and Alice Cooper.  One of the greatest TV shows of the decade produced this mess of a film. It's definitively 90s for Dana Scully's haircut and the fact that there's a Noel Gallagher solo track on the credits. Which, short of being a pair of high-waisted stonewashed jeans, is about as 90s as you can get.  Kiefer. Christian. Emilio. Lou. Four men who started the decade with everything to lose. Four men who had pretty much lost it all by the end of the decade. Great going, guys.  Look, it's a film about a dog that makes friends with a dolphin. Steve Guttenberg is in it. He eats an apple in the trailer. OK, there weren't many films beginning with Z in the 90s. Leave me alone.  • This article was amended on 20 March 2014. The original incorrectly said that Jeff Goldblum was pictured using a toilet in Jurassic Park
The 90s will go down in history as the decade that brought us Titanic. But it also introduced us to Quentin Tarantino and The Matrix. Stuart Heritage picks his 26 iconic movies