5. “Being John Malkovich”
It sounded, at first, like a bad joke. An “SNL” sketch, perhaps, one of the ones on right at the end where they bury the weirdest stuff. A puppeteer (John Cusack) working on the 7 1/2th floor of an office building finds a portal that enables him to experience life through the eyes of the popular actor John Malkovich (John Malkovich), which embroils him in a strange love triangle/quadrangle with his wife (Cameron Diaz) and his co-worker (Catherine Keener). A joke right? And in the wrong hands, a bad one. But this undeniably had the right hands in former TV writer Charlie Kaufman and young music video director Spike Jonze. With them, the high concept twists and turns in and around itself, and while there’s plenty of absurdist comedy in play, it’s also a surprisingly dark and poignant tale: its situation might be ridiculous, but its Chekhovian web of love stories, the philosophical questions it poses and the pain at the centre of its characters (brought to life by great work by everyone, including a transformed Diaz and a thoroughly game and committed Malkovich) are throughly real. It’s rare to find a true, fully-formed, original voice in movies: to get two at once, with Jonze and Kaufman, was a real treat.
4. “Magnolia”
How do you — could you? — follow a breakthrough film as accomplished and ambitious as “Boogie Nights?” Well, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s case, you make a movie as if you’re worried that no one will ever let you make a movie again, a 190-minute, star-studded sprawl of a picture following a group of characters it would blow through our word limit to run down in Anderson’s beloved San Fernando Valley. If “Boogie Nights” was PTA at 75% Scorsese and 25% Altman, the ratio is reversed here, but the main impression that the director gives is of a filmmaker high on the fumes of freedom, and throwing every idea he ever had on screen, from the bravura prologue sequence through to the sing along and climactic rain of frogs. As bold and brilliant as many of these gambits are, it’s the quiet moments that resonate the most: the soft kindness of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Phil, a father forced to come to terms with his sins, a smiling face of a troubled young woman. Not every scene or even story works — this is an artist working without restriction with all the indulgence and missteps that that might imply. But so, so much of it works and works gorgeously, and even if Anderson would go on to make less unruly movies, it’s hard not to agree with the director when he said “I really feel that ‘Magnolia’ is, for better or worse, the best movie I’ll ever make.”
3. “All About My Mother”
As you might have noticed by his relative lack of presence in these lists, the 90s feel, in retrospect, like a period of experimentation and growth for Pedro Almodovar, leading towards an extraordinary run in the 2000s that would include other masterpieces like “Talk To Her” and “Volver.” But that run began with 1999’s astonishing “All About My Mother,” which won the director the Foreign Language Oscar. Steering fully into a kind of Sirkian melodrama, albeit one with Almodovar’s preoccupations and peccadilloes, it sees a nurse, Manuela (Cecilia Roth) suffering the loss of her son in a hit-and-run, and going on to encounter an old friend, a trans prostitute (Antonia San Juan), a pregnant nun (Penelope Cruz), her late son’s favorite actress (Marisa Paredes) and the actresses’s drug-addicted lover (Candela Pena) as she searches for her boy’s father (Fernando Fernan Gomez), who never knew he had a child. Run through with tragedy, dark comedy and, well, vibrant life, it’s a film that could seem overstuffed and over the top, but Almodovar’s generosity, compassion, bold visual eye and meta-textuality always make you feel that you’re in the surest of hands. More great films would follow from him, but this, we suspect, is the one he’ll be remembered for.
2. “The Insider”
Few directors are more beloved by Film Twitter than Michael Mann, and we’re sure that every person you acted would give you a different answer as to their favorite Mann film: the simplicity and purity of “Thief,” the maximalism of “Manhunter,” the classicism of “Last Of The Mohicans,” the scope and sprawl of “Heat,” the no-frills genre of “Collateral,” the unchecked id of “Miami Vice,” the near-abstraction of “Blackhat.” For us, his finest hour is “The Insider,” a film that shifts his favorite subject of ultra-professional men (and, occasionally, the women who love them) into the murkier locations of backrooms and courtrooms. Eric Roth’s magnificent screenplay tells the true story of Jeffrey Wigand (a transformed Russell Crowe), a tobacco executive who decided to blow the whistle on his industry after being fired and Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), the 60 Minutes producer who tried to help him get the story out, zipping through the legal technicalities and moral compromises that might have sunk other filmmakers with the energy and visual propulsion of the gunfight scene in “Heat.” It’s utterly gripping, deeply human and still, eighteen years on, vitally important: few other movies have gotten to the heart of the rotten, insiduous effect of corporations on American life with quite the clarity that Mann does here.
1. “Beau Travail”
Picking a number one for one of the most remarkable years in movie history was a difficult feat. And yet as much as we quarrelled over the make-up and order of the rest of this Top 10, the number one slot was never in question: that’s how perfect Claire Denis’ masterful “Beau Travail” is. Loosely based on Herman Mellville’s naval tragedy “Billy Budd” (and using Benjamin Britten’s opera for the score), it transposes the story to the French foreign legion in Dijibouti, as former Sergeant Major Galoup (the remarkable Denis Lavant) recalls his rivalry with Sentain (Gregoire Colin), a beautiful, good-hearted hero who he’s at once deeply jealous of and curiously drawn to. Infused with homoeroticism and the latent post-colonial streak so often found in Denis’ work, it tells its story in the absence of story, becoming at times almost an experimental film of movement in its documentation of the Legion’s exercises and their fights, circling each other like animals. It’s a film about routine, about memory, about sensuality and the human body, about hierachy and jealousy and more than anything, about men and the way that they work and live together. And perhaps it took a women to tell that story with such clarity, precision and poetry.
It was a nightmare to pare this down to just 10: 1999 was such an exceptional year that we probably could have included 50 films and still felt like we were leaving something out. Nevertheless, to name the ones that most nearly made the cut, there was Steven Soderbergh’s fractured art-noir “The Limey,” the joyous “Galaxy Quest,” one of the few perfect studio comedies in living memory, Brad Bird’s wonderful tearjerker “The Iron Giant” (“Suuuuuuperrmaaaaaaaan!”), Pixar’s better-than-the-original sequel “Toy Story 2,” the Dardennes’ first Palme D’Or winner “Rosetta” and Stanley Kubrick’s difficult but rewarding swansong “Eyes Wide Shut.”
Beyond that, we could also have included Kiarostami’s “The Wind Will Carry Us,” Anthony Minghella’s tremendous “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Alexander Payne’s savage satire “Election,” Jim Jarmusch’s beguiling thriller “Ghost Dog,” David Lynch’s slice of Americana “The Straight Story,” Kimberley Pierce’s powerful “Boys Don’t Cry,” Michael Winterbottom’s underrated “Wonderland,” one of the great London movies, Mike Leigh’s lavish, atypical “Topsy-Turvy” and Takashi Miike’s horrifying “Audition.” Oh, and Leos Carax’s divisive “Pola X,” David Mamet’s understated “The Winslow Boy” and Alison Maclean’s underrated “Jesus’ Son.”
There’s a few dozen more we could have mentioned, from “American Movie” and “Bowfinger” to “Time Regained” and “The War Zone,” but we’ll leave it for you to add your own favorites in the comments.
