10 Winona Ryder Movies Every ‘90s Kid Is Due for a Rewatch On

Back in the 1990s, Winona Ryder went from goth teen to two-time Oscar nominee, picking up nominations in back-to-back years for The Age of Innocence and Little Women. She also played a Puritan, an android, and a vampire’s bride, and starred in the movie that sent Lisa Loeb to No. 1. Here are 10 of her movies from the decade, in the order they came out, with a reason to queue each one up again. (Rotten Tomatoes scores are as of October 2026.)Mermaids (1990)Edward Scissorhands (1990)Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)The Age of Innocence (1993)Reality Bites (1994)Little Women (1994)How to Make an American Quilt (1995)The Crucible (1996)Alien Resurrection (1997)Girl, Interrupted (1999)Mermaids (1990)Based on Patty Dann’s 1986 novel, Mermaids follows a single mother who packs up her two daughters and moves to a new town every time a relationship goes south. Winona Ryder wasn’t the first Charlotte Flax: Emily Lloyd was cast, then had to leave over another film commitment, and the movie went through Lasse Hallström and Frank Oz before Richard Benjamin finally directed it. Charlotte is a Jewish teenager in 1963 who has turned into a Catholic zealot, which is a lot to live down when your mother is Cher. The National Board of Review named Ryder Best Supporting Actress, she picked up a Golden Globe nomination, and Cher’s “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” came out of the soundtrack. The movie made $35.4 million domestic and sits at 71 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.Edward Scissorhands (1990)Edward Scissorhands is a suburban fairy tale about an inventor’s unfinished creation, a young man with scissors where his hands should be, who gets taken home by the neighborhood Avon lady. Tim Burton cast Johnny Depp opposite Depp’s then-girlfriend, Ryder, and her Kim Boggs is the one telling the whole story: the film opens on an old woman explaining to her granddaughter why it snows. The film made $56.4 million domestic and holds a 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Mental Floss has covered why Ryder couldn’t relate to Kim, but not the topiaries: Tavern on the Green’s owner, Warner LeRoy, paid $2,500 for 11 of them, believing they were props from the film, and only learned from the movie’s greensman that they weren’t props at all; the seller later admitted they’d come from an opening-night party.Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)As the title promises, the film goes back to Stoker’s 1897 novel, with Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker and Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing. Ryder rescued the script and brought Francis Ford Coppola aboard, and it paid off: the movie opened to $30.5 million and finished at $82.5 million domestic, the biggest U.S. gross of anything on this list. She plays Mina opposite Gary Oldman’s count, and the film won three of its four Oscar nominations, for costume design, makeup, and sound effects editing. Critics gave it 69 percent via Rotten Tomatoes, and the consensus calls it “overblown in the best sense of the word.”The Age of Innocence (1993)The Age of Innocence adapts Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel about a New York society lawyer in the 1870s (Daniel Day-Lewis) who falls for his fiancée’s cousin (Michelle Pfeiffer), the book that made Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for a novel. Martin Scorsese picked Ryder to play May Welland after meeting her for the first time at an event in Los Angeles, and she won a Golden Globe for it, then landed her first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress, in a movie that made $32.3 million domestic and holds an 88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The period detail went all the way to the kitchen: the Chicago Tribune reported that the film’s food stylist once had to keep live turtles in his hotel bathroom when a turtle-soup scene was delayed.Reality Bites (1994)Written by Helen Childress, Reality Bites is a romantic comedy about four friends in Houston, one of them a valedictorian torn between a slacker musician (Ethan Hawke) and a TV producer (Ben Stiller). Ryder’s Lelaina spends the movie filming a documentary about her friends floundering after college, with Stiller directing and co-starring. Mental Floss has already explained how “Stay” got into the film; Billboard adds that it happened because U2 canceled a screening the producers were supposed to attend in Ireland, which left them free to hear the song. On August 6, 1994, “Stay (I Missed You)” made Loeb the first unsigned act to top the Hot 100, and it stayed there for three weeks. The movie made $21 million domestic and sits at 62 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.Little Women (1994)The 1994 film was the first big-screen version of Louisa May Alcott’s novel about the four March sisters since 1949, with Susan Sarandon as Marmee and Claire Danes as Beth. Ryder took the part of Jo March partly for a girl from her hometown of Petaluma, California: Polly Klaas was kidnapped in 1993 and killed, and Ryder had offered a $200,000 reward during the search. “She wanted to be an actress and her favorite book was Little Women, so that was a big reason I did that movie and dedicated it to her,” she told Interview. Gillian Armstrong’s film earned Ryder a second straight Oscar nomination, her first for Best Actress, made $50.1 million domestic, and at 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, ranks second only to Greta Gerwig’s among the major adaptations.How to Make an American Quilt (1995)How to Make an American Quilt started as Whitney Otto’s 1991 novel, which Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment optioned. In Jocelyn Moorhouse’s film, Ryder plays Finn Dodd, a graduate student with cold feet who goes to visit her grandmother (Ellen Burstyn), her great-aunt (Anne Bancroft), and a quilting circle that includes Maya Angelou. It opened to $5.8 million and finished with $23.6 million domestic, and the critics’ consensus behind its 62 percent on Rotten Tomatoes says the movie “is a bit of a patchwork from a storytelling standpoint, but a strong ensemble cast led by Winona Ryder helps hold it all together.”The Crucible (1996)Arthur Miller adapted his own play for Nicholas Hytner’s film and got an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, while Joan Allen got one for playing Elizabeth Proctor. Ryder is Abigail Williams, the girl whose affair with Daniel Day-Lewis’s John Proctor sets off the accusations. (Mental Floss has the play’s own history, FBI trouble included.) The movie opened in limited release to $62,995 and made just $7.3 million domestic, the smallest gross here, though it holds a 72 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.Alien Resurrection (1997)Alien Resurrection jumps 200 years past Alien 3, when scientists clone Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley to get at the alien queen she was carrying when she died. The fourth Alien cast Ryder as Annalee Call, the crew member who turns out to be the movie’s android, with a script by Joss Whedon and French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet behind the camera. A ReelReviews production history says the underwater scenes were hard on Ryder, since she had nearly drowned as a child, and that she asked for a body double and didn’t get one. Critics gave it 55 percent via Rotten Tomatoes, but it made $47.8 million in the U.S. and $113.6 million overseas, for $161.4 million worldwide, the second-biggest worldwide total on this list, behind Dracula.Girl, Interrupted (1999)Girl, Interrupted is set in the late 1960s, when a young woman washes down 50 aspirin with a bottle of vodka and ends up at Claymoore, a fictionalized version of Massachusetts’s McLean Hospital. Ryder loved Susanna Kaysen’s memoir so much that she tried to buy the movie rights, according to The Seattle Times, but producer Douglas Wick already had them, so she signed on as an executive producer and handpicked director James Mangold to direct. Ryder plays Kaysen, and Angelina Jolie won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Lisa. It opened on December 21, 1999, and made $28.9 million domestic on a $40 million budget. The gap between critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes is the widest on this list: 53 percent from critics, 84 percent from viewers.