The 1990s had a house style, and “Outbreak” epitomizes it: mess. Like lots of hits from this era, it’s brazen, chaotic, noisy, ludicrous, confused, overlit, has J.T. Walsh going nuclear and is simultaneously underwritten and over-plotted. Not only does Hoffman have to catch that monkey, he’s got to stop the military from bombing an infected California town (the mission is Operation Clean Sweep!), save his failed marriage to Dr. Rene Russo and keep Donald Sutherland, Kevin Spacey and Morgan Freeman from outacting him.

“Outbreak” held off three new movies: “Tall Tale,” “Major Payne,” and “Dolores Claiborne,” not one of which would get made now and all of which I’ll get to shortly. ““Pulp Fiction” and “Forrest Gump” were still hits, lurking outside the Top 10 on this Academy Awards weekend; and vaulting to fourth place was four-time-nominee “The Madness of King George.” That movie is the perfect example of another bygone style: the alt-costume drama, exemplified by “Amadeus,” and the films of Sally Potter and Derek Jarman. The standards of literary adaptation and historical integrity, of decorum, were still being set by Merchant Ivory and Masterpiece Theater. Nicholas Hytner, the stage director who made “King George,” went a different direction, one where the cameras actually moved.

Right behind it, at No. 5, was John Sayles’s “The Secret of Roan Inish,” a departure from Sayles’s ambitious social-realist dramas, like “Eight Men Out” and “City of Hope.” This one’s a quiet Irish fable with a whiff of magic. Sayles never gets talked about in the same breath as Scorsese, Spike Lee and Woody Allen. He was, locationally speaking, New Jersey to their New York. But he’s feeling and intelligent and maybe the best white American filmmaker ever to consistently consider race and class as systemic, historical and personal matters. He gets it. Naturally, one of his biggest hits had nothing to do with any of that.

But it might be hard to remember during these keyed-up times — when good HR is as crucial to a movie’s moral success as a great trailer is to its commercial prospects — that, in the ’90s, movies with nonwhite people and stories about race weren’t rare. I don’t know if the folks who made “Man of the House” (an obnoxious hit at No. 6, in its fourth week out) know it’s a movie about a kind of whiteness, but Jonathan Taylor Thomas, at peak Tiger Beat swag, giving his mom’s new boyfriend the business, feels like WASP karma, because the boyfriend is played by Chevy Chase. And an ensemble divorced-dude comedy like “Bye Bye Love,” with Paul Reiser, Matthew Modine, and Randy Quaid and down at No. 10, is, by 2020 standards, practically a privilege-palooza and, by 1995 standards, not unfunny.