Speed is a 1994 American action-thriller film directed by Jan de Bont, and set in Los Angeles. LAPD officer Jack Traven becomes the focus of a bomber and extortionist, retired Atlanta bomb squad sergeant Howard Payne. After Payne escapes his first entanglement with Traven, he sets up a bomb on a city bus that Traven boards and must keep moving above 50 miles per hour or the bomb will explode. The film stars Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Sandra Bullock and Jeff Daniels. It won two Academy Awards, for Best Sound and Best Sound Effects at the 67th Academy Awards in 1995.

Los Angeles SWAT members Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) and Harry Temple (Jeff Daniels) are among the many officers who respond to a call about a number of bombs planted in one of the express elevators located in a skyscraper. With the cables of the elevator blown, the unknown bomber (Dennis Hopper) gives one hour for the police to give him $3,700,000.00 before he takes out the emergency brakes. Though he detonates the bomb attached to the emergency brakes with three minutes left, Jack and Harry are able to successfully rescue all thirteen office workers before the elevator falls.

In kinematics, the speed of an object is the magnitude of its velocity (the rate of change of its position); it is thus a scalar quantity. The average speed of an object in an interval of time is the distance traveled by the object divided by the duration of the interval; the instantaneous speed is the limit of the average speed as the duration of the time interval approaches zero .

Like velocity, speed has the dimensions of a length divided by a time; the SI unit of speed is the meter per second, but the most usual unit of speed in everyday usage is the kilometer per hour or, in the USA and the UK, miles per hour. For air and marine travel the knot is commonly used.

The fastest possible speed at which energy or information can travel, according to special relativity, is the speed of light in vacuum c = 299,792,458 meters per second, approximately 1079 million kilometers per hour (671,000,000 mph). Matter cannot quite reach the speed of light, as this would require an infinite amount of energy. In relativity physics, the concept of rapidity replaces the classical idea of speed. In day-to-day athletics, it is proper to say that a teenager can achieve atleast 20 kmph (or 12.43 mph) of speed while a best runner can achieve 30 kmph (or 18.64 mph) which is similiar to run 100m running race in about 12 seconds. The average speed for a teenager is 24 kmph, which can be a result on running 100m in 15 seconds.

1994 was a significant year in film.

The top grosser worldwide was The Lion King, which to date stands as the highest-grossing traditionally-animated film of all time. Domestically in North America, it was slightly overtaken by Forrest Gump, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and a second consecutive Academy Award for Best Actor for Tom Hanks.

There were also several popular action films, including Speed and True Lies. In the comedy realm, there was The Mask and Four Weddings and a Funeral, the latter of which shocked Forrest Gump to win the BAFTA award for Best Film. 1994 also featured the watershed Quentin Tarantino film and Palme d'Or winner, Pulp Fiction.

Although a box office disappointment when originally released, 1994's The Shawshank Redemption, based on a Stephen King short story, would eventually become regarded as one of the films considered the greatest ever.

Additionally, Hoop Dreams, a documentary that follows the story of two African-American high school students in Chicago and their dream of becoming professional basketball players, received high critical and popular acclaim and is generally considered one of the best documentary films ever made.