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The 99 Best Movies of 1999, Ranked

From ‘Phantom Menace’ to ‘The Matrix,’ ‘Fight Club’ to ‘The Virgin Suicides’ — we rank the standouts of a truly outstanding year at the movies

Image featuring movies of 1999

Clockwise from left: 'The Sixth Sense,' 'The Blair Witch Project,' 'The Matrix,' 'Fight Club,' 'Rushmore,' 'The Virgin Suicides.' PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW COOLEY. IMAGES IN ILLUSTATION: ©ARTISAN ENTERTAINMENT/EVERETT COLLECTION; BUENA VISTA PICTURES/EVERETT COLLECTION; COMEDY CENTRAL/EVERETT COLLECTION; 20TH CENT FOX/EVERETT COLLECTION; WARNER BROS/EVERETT COLLECTION; WALT DISNEY PICTURES/EVERETT COLLECTION

Maybe the thought first occurred to you during the end of March, when a graceful, modern update of a Shakespearean comedy and a groundbreaking science-fiction movie opened on the same weekend. Or perhaps it was the wave of summer releases that hit screens, from the single most anticipated blockbuster ever to Stanley Kubrick’s swan song, that made you think something special was starting to happen. Or it could have been the tsunami of zeitgeist-surfing movies — all from a generation of filmmakers who, having come out of the Sundance labs and/or cut their teeth on music videos, would resurrect the maverick spirit of the Seventies auteurs — that convinced you that 1999 wasn’t just shaping up to be a pretty good year at the movies. It was turning into a genuinely great year at the movies.

In fact, after the Golden Age apex of 1939 and the New Hollywood highlight of 1974, the last gasp of the Nineties is now considered to be one of single best 12-month stretches of American moviemaking ever. Add in the number of international films that were finally making their ways to our screens during those 12 months, and it would turn out to be a banner annum for American moviegoing as well. Not to mention that the lineups at both Cannes and Venice would earmark this as a standout year for the festival circuit as well. Thanks to a perfect storm of talent, timing, and taste, 1999 would quickly be viewed as a major milestone for the medium. And a quarter of a century later, it only looks that much more like a pinnacle.

So, in honor of the 25th anniversary, we’ve ranked the top 99 movies of 1999 — the best of the best, the box-office stand-outs, the big-name blockbusters, the brilliant indies and foreign-language landmarks, the bold documentaries, and a few of the batshit cult-movie outliers that helped define a truly outstanding year to be a movie lover.

A quick note about our selection process: For better or worse, we’re going by both release dates tied to a movie’s theatrical run in America *and* film festival premiere dates. So, for example, you’ll see Audition, Ghost Dog, Ratcatcher and Beau Travail here, even though each of these extraordinary works didn’t officially grace American screens for a week or longer until 2000. Yet you will also see a few leftovers from previous years, such as Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Princess Mononoke and Run Lola Run, since they didn’t get full U.S. releases until 1999. (There’s one notable exception, which we’ll single out below.)

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From Rolling Stone US

53

‘Felicia’s Journey’

Anthony Hopkins isn’t the only stocky Brit with a deranged chef on his resume of Nineties roles. To his alphabetical right stands Cockney tough guy Bob Hoskins, who brings a rather subtle, subdued menace to this haunting thriller about an Irish teenager who goes looking for her lost love and instead falls into the clutches of a seemingly kindly cook with some dangerously unresolved mommy issues. Just don’t expect cheap serial-killer thrills — not with Atom Egoyan behind the camera and keyboard. The Exotica director fractures his William Trevor source material into another puzzle-box tragedy of childhood trauma, predatory men, and a past that keeps bleeding (via a trickle of flashbacks) into the present. The sound design — an overlapping din of voices, industrial noise, and staccato violin — suggests the room tone of a disturbed mind. But it’s the English bulldog in the lead who really opens a window into that space, letting us see the pitiable boy behind the madman. —A.A.D.

52

‘Holy Smoke’

There’s a part of us that gets giddy at the idea that, having thrilled to Kate Winslet’s performance in Titanic, a gaggle of recently converted Winslet-ites then flocked to see this truly cracked psychodrama, about a young Australian woman who falls under the spell of a cultlike leader while in India. Once she’s eventually cajoled back to her hometown in Sydney, Winslet’s character is sequestered with an American (Harvey Keitel) who’s an expert in deprogramming brainwashed ex-cult members. Let’s just say that neither of them plans on giving up without a fight, and that the lines of what is and isn’t acceptable social behavior gets severely blurred in Jane Campion’s underrated take on spiritual voids and sexual power plays. Had Winslet’s previous movie not already been named Hideous Kinky, that title would have been equally appropriate here. —D.F.

51

‘Ravenous’

Most tales of how we tamed the wild, wild West leave out some of the more grisly footnotes — luckily, director Antonia Bird’s berserk frontier-horror parable is more than happy to fill in the gaps. A traumatized army lieutenant (Guy Pearce) is transferred to a remote outpost in California after the Mexican-American War left him “unfit” for normal duty. He’s barely settled in with his fellow misfits and scallywags when a mysterious Scottish drifter (Robert Carlyle) shows up on their doorstep. It seems he was a member of a settlers’ party heading west through the Sierra Nevada, and after they became stranded without food for several weeks… let’s just say that desperate times begat desperate measures. The soldiers accompany him to the scene of the crime to rescue his fellow survivors, at which point they discover that both old habits and new appetites are hard to shake off. A singular mix of revisionist Western, stalker flick, survivalist thriller and, yes, even wackadoo comedy, Ravenous distinguished itself as one of the sickest jokes of 1999 — a reminder that America’s origin story includes cowards, cannibals, and good old-fashioned psychopaths. —D.F.

50

‘The Hurricane’

In 1975, Bob Dylan released “Hurricane,” a song that decried the false conviction of middleweight boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who was given lifetime sentences for the 1966 killing of three people in a New Jersey bar. Director Norman Jewison chronicles his story in a stirring biopic that is part sports film and part courtroom drama, starring Denzel Washington, masterful as usual playing a man lethal in the ring but powerless in the face of a cruel legal system. The protest anthem helped keep Carter’s case alive in the culture years after he was initially incarcerated (he eventually had his conviction overturned in 1985). Yet the movie aided in putting a human face to this torn-from-the headlines story of racism and injustice, as well as reminding audiences of the work that activist groups (like the one led by Liev Schreiber in the film) do to free the innocent from prison. —T.G.