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 199 works across all media 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
Still Dre
1999 · From 2001
Jay-Z wrote every line of it, Scott Storch played the piano figure, and Dre's seven-year album silence ended.
★ 7.8
2001
1999
Dre hired live musicians instead of sampling, and had Jay-Z write the words to Still D.R.E. for him. Eminem turns up throughout.
★ 7.7
Say My Name
1999
Rodney Jerkins chopped the beat into stop-start halves, and a phone call full of suspicion became two Grammys.
★ 7.7
Disgrace
1999 · 220 pages
David Lurie loses his professorship over an affair with a student and retreats to his daughter's farm in the new South Africa, where three men arrive. Coetzee offers no comfort and no absolution.
★ 7.7
The Next Episode
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg
1999 · From 2001
Dre and Mel-Man built it on a David McCallum orchestral cut from 1967, arranged by Axelrod, and Nate Dogg closes.
★ 7.6
Big Pimpin'
1999 · From Vol. 3... Life and Times of S. Carter
Timbaland looped a flute from a 1957 Egyptian record, and Pimp C nearly turned the beat down for sounding pop.
★ 7.4
Back That Azz UpJuvenile
Back That Azz Up
1999
Mannie Fresh's violin line over a bounce beat, Lil Wayne's chant at the close, and New Orleans bounce gone national.
★ 7.3
Californication
1999 · From Californication
Frusciante drew the sparse riff from The Cure's "Carnage Visors" on his first album back, and Kiedis indicts Hollywood.
★ 7.3
I Want it That Way
1999
Cut at Cheiron in Stockholm with a chorus that contradicts its verses; the coherent version got shelved.
★ 7.2
You Got Me
The Roots and Erykah Badu
1999 · From Things Fall Apart
Jill Scott's hook, re-sung by Badu at the label's request, and Questlove driving the outro into drum and bass.
★ 7.1
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
The Sixth Sense · 1999
Bigger & Blacker · 1999
Forgot About Dre
1999 · From 2001
Eminem wrote the verses as a reference for Snoop Dogg, by Dre's account, and Dre kept the guide vocal.
★ 6.9
I don't have a girlfriend, I just know a girl who would get really mad if she heard me say that.
Comedy Central Presents · 1999
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
Embracing Defeat
Japan in the Wake of World War II
1999 · 680 pages
Defeated Japan is starving and occupied. Dower tells the years after 1945 from street level, through black markets, pulp magazines, and letters to MacArthur. The Japanese emerge remaking themselves rather than remade.
★ 6.7
Things Fall Apart
1999
Questlove and Black Thought began by busking on Philadelphia street corners, which is why a live band plays everything here rather than a sampler.
★ 6.7
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
Scar Tissue
1999 · From Californication
Frusciante's slide guitar on his first record back with the band, then sixteen weeks atop Billboard's modern rock chart.
★ 6.4
All The Small Things
1999
Palm-muted C major at 150 beats a minute, Roger Manning's synth on top, and a boy-band parody video.
★ 6.4
What's My Age Again?
1999
Hoppus was twenty-six and picked twenty-three purely for the rhyme; MCA made them drop the title "Peter Pan Complex".
★ 6.4
Selected Non-Fictions
1999 · 560 pages
Borges wrote criticism the way he wrote fiction, in short pieces with trapdoors, on subjects from Dante to King Kong. Every writer creates his own precursors, he argues, and literary history rearranges itself.
★ 6.4
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
Ms. Fat Booty
1999 · From Black on Both Sides
Ayatollah looped the chorus of Aretha's 1965 Columbia single "One Step Ahead", and Mos Def narrates a romance collapsing.
★ 6.3
Smooth
Santana and Rob Thomas
1999 · From Supernatural
Itaal Shur wrote it as "Room 17"; Rob Thomas rewrote the melody and Santana's guitar answers him line for line.
★ 6.2
Got Your Money
1999
Neptunes production at its bounciest, with Kelis on the hook a month before her own debut single.
★ 6.1
Livin' La Vida Loca
1999
Five weeks at number one, reportedly the first chart-topper built entirely in Pro Tools, and Latin pop's door kicked open.
★ 6.1