I knew I'd forgotten some, yeah I'd definitely add Thelma & Louise and Jurassic Park, awesome films.

The kaiju genre also saw something of a renaissance in the mid to late 1990s with the Heisei Gamera trilogy, three movies that did a lot to modernize the genre both in adopting computer generated effects and a more serious tone that lent less on cheese and felt more grounded.

My old pal Goji had an okay time the 90s; I did really enjoy the 1995 entry, Godzilla vs Destoroyah, it's one of my favourites of the whole series.

I agree the 20s and 70s were excellent decades for movies. But my favorite decades are surprisingly the 2000s and 2010s (the 2020s suck so far though), which had an absolute explosion in independent cinema spitting out unique auteurs around the globe.

For the 70s, some of my favorite movies include:

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970)

Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Werner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God

Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now

Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon

Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore

Brian de Palma's Carrie

Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point

Honorable mentions: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Passenger, Salo: 120 days of Sodom, Fellini's Roma, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Ascent, The Conversation, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, In the Realm of Senses, American Graffiti, Cries and Whispers, Nashville, Chinatown, The Godfather pt 1+2

In addition to many movies I already saw mentioned in here, I thought Deliverance was pretty great.

Heh, as I said, our tastes in movies are pretty much the opposite.  These are the time periods I like for different types of media:

Movies: Late 70's and 80's. (already said)

Music: Late 60's and 70's.  The 80's were mostly a lull period, and then the 90's came back and were about as awesome as the 60's/70's.  There was some good indie music in the late 80's too, but almost no one was listening to it at the time (The Pixies, Sonic Youth, etc...).

Video Games: Late 80's and 90's.  Console gaming really became amazing in the late 80's and PC gaming came into it's own in the 90's.  Since then, gaming has had plenty of great games come along, but not as frequently as during the late 80's and 90's.

TV: Now.  Streaming services have caused a TV Renaissance.  They are all trying their best to deliver the best TV possible right now.

From what I can tell, you seem to like edgy/counterculture stuff in most media.  (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)  I kind of think we have similar tastes in music, because I like my music to be edgy including indie music.  For movies, I like to be hooked in with an original concept that is actually telling a timeless or universal story underneath.  This probably makes my taste in movies seem conservative.  For games, what I like most is easy to learn and simple to master (and there are some genres I like more than others: RPG, Strategy, Beatem up, etc...).  For TV, I am almost open to anything if it's done well enough, but I do tend to prefer comedies or something with a big budget.

The main constant for me is that I really like originality in every medium.  I tend to rank the first entry in a series higher than most people do.  For example, I like Star Wars better than Empire Strikes Back.  I really liked Suikoden 1, but I still haven't finished Suikoden 2.  I get bored really easily when I feel like I'm getting more of the same.  So my favorite time period for each of these media tends to be the one that I perceive as being both original and well done.

Godfather part 1 - still think a lot about that film. How would you be able to live like that, all your life? Must be tough.

My favorite Godzilla movie from the '90s is definitely Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. (See what I mean about 1991 in particular just standing out as an especially good year for cinema?) That's actually like one of my top three favorite Godzilla movies. It's among the most controversial because of its nationalistic criticisms of the American role in World War 2 and its certain rejection of Japan's post-war "economic miracle", but you know, it's precisely for reasons like these that I love it! It stands out as very unique in the franchise. I just find its narrative direction refreshingly bold and interesting. A clever way of weaving time travel into Godzilla in a bid to compete with the Back to the Future franchise! The cast is too big, but the core story's too interesting to pass up. There are good reasons why this one's often considered a fan favorite. I'm one of those people.

I do like that one quite a lot, probably my second favourite of the 90s era, I just found some the bad English acting and poor human action scenes a bit of a negative.

Great kaiju scenes though.

To answer your query (?), it just depends. Like my favorite new games released this year are Deadeus (better known as that new Game Boy game) and It Takes Two. The former could justifiably be classified as you suggest, but It Takes Two is both thematically and aesthetically a lot like a Pixar movie. I like media that I feel like was created for a purpose (even if that purpose is just for me to have fun) that is not simply to make money. I dislike superficiality. I guess that does often land me on countercultural sorts of material.

Maybe to more easily grasp what I'm saying, it might help to clarify that I don't feel that like offensiveness is valuable in and of itself. Like if it's something that's done as just a marketing strategy, I'm not there for it. Sometimes a movie or a game or what have you is created for the sole purpose of generating predictable negative press that the creators can cash in on by pretending to be victims. Like perhaps the creators can't afford to advertise much or generate other publicity, so in order to make money, they design their game/movie to be as offensive as possible so the press will give it the publicity they can't afford otherwise. That is a real marketing strategy that exists and I don't really view it differently from any other. If the quest for profit determined your design decisions, you're a sellout and you suck. This is why, for example, yeah lots of obscure, M-rated games rank in highly on my annual top 50 lists, but you won't find any AO-rated titles there, by contrast. (Sorry Postal, Ethnic Cleansing, Rape Lay, Hatred, Super Columbine Massacre RPG, etc.) I feel similarly about the NC-17 rating for films. That's not art, that's capitalism. Films like that wouldn't exist in a world without money. At least that's my view of it anyway. I just mention this to highlight the existence of a distinction in my mind between art that challenges and bullshit profit-driven schemes.

I think most good art does challenge you though, that much is true. Pushing boundaries, challenging established norms, and presenting new ideas is part of what makes art worth having in the first place to me. The most important thing though is that it be something you as the artist mean. If it's not sincere, it'll show. More than anything else, I love the raw humanity of authentic self-expression! I mean that will be true even if I don't agree with what you, the artist, are actually saying!

Being a child of the 90s, I always viewed the decade in film as being before my time and not really my style, but the more I examine it the more I'm realizing it's actually pretty strong, lots of grittier, edgier stuff which I dig. And I'm still discovering more.

The original Star Wars, Alien, The Godfather, Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange, Rocky, Network, Jaws, Live and Let Die, Man with the Golden Gun. Still doesn't beat the 90s for me but underrated.

Checked out Midnight Express on your recommendation and I agree: excellent film! I was struck by the authenticity with which it presented prison life in particular. And yeah, it's got one hell of a smooth soundtrack!