The Matrix
Directed by The Wachowskis
1999
Action filmmaking divides neatly into before and after this one: the Wachowskis fused Hong Kong wire work with a philosophy seminar's premise and everyone spent five years copying it.
★ 8.9
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1999
Showing 15 films from 1999
Fight Club
Directed by David Fincher
1999
Twenty-five years of argument have still not settled what it is actually saying: Fincher made consumer despair look genuinely thrilling, which is either the joke or the problem.
★ 8.6
Beau Travail
Directed by Claire Denis
1999
Denis turned Melville's Billy Budd into something closer to dance than to drama: Foreign Legionnaires drilling in the Djibouti heat, all bodies and sun and things nobody will say.
★ 8.2
Toy Story 2
Directed by John Lasseter and Ash Brannon
1999
Pixar scrapped the whole film and rebuilt it in nine months, and it came out better than expected: the song about being outgrown is what people remember.
★ 7.0
Magnolia
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
1999
Three hours, nine storylines, and a last act nobody sees coming: Anderson made the most ambitious American film of the nineties and dared it to collapse under itself.
★ 6.8
The Sixth Sense
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
1999
The ending changed how an entire generation watched films, and it is genuinely unguessable: a child psychologist takes on a boy who is frightened of something very specific.
★ 6.8
The Straight Story
Directed by David Lynch
1999
The strangest thing in David Lynch's filmography is this: a G-rated Disney picture in which an old man drives a riding lawnmower from Iowa to Wisconsin to reach his estranged brother.
★ 6.5
Election
Directed by Alexander Payne
1999
Reese Witherspoon has never been better used: a high-school student council election becomes a study of ambition and resentment, and Payne refuses to let a single character off the hook.
★ 6.3
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Directed by Anthony Minghella
1999
Nothing else captures the pull of wanting somebody else's life this well: Minghella fills the Italian coast with sunlight and good clothes, and lets a young man's envy curdle in plain sight.
★ 6.3
Three Kings
Directed by David O. Russell
1999
Russell shot it on bleached film stock so the desert looks radioactive: four American soldiers go looking for Kuwaiti gold in the days after the Gulf War stops, carrying a stolen map.
★ 6.0
The Green Mile
Directed by Frank Darabont
1999
Darabont's second Stephen King prison film runs three hours and nobody notices: a death row guard in 1935 takes delivery of the largest, quietest inmate the block has ever held.
★ 5.4
Office Space
Directed by Mike Judge
1999
It died in theaters and then took over every office in America on video: Mike Judge got the cubicle exactly right, down to the stapler, the printer and the phrase about the memo.
★ 5.3
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut
Directed by Trey Parker
1999
It is a musical written by people who love musicals: Trey Parker and the composer Marc Shaiman took an Oscar nomination for a song nobody could print, and the censorship satire is exact.
★ 5.3
American Beauty
Directed by Sam Mendes
1999
Conrad Hall photographed suburbia like a crime scene and took the cinematography Oscar for it: Sam Mendes came from the theater and made the most contested Best Picture of its era.
★ 4.5
The Thomas Crown Affair
Directed by John McTiernan
1999
John McTiernan's remake is better than the original and knows how adult it is: a billionaire steals a Monet for entertainment, and the insurance investigator enjoys the chase as much as he does.
★ 2.5