The Best Movies From 1999, According to Our Critics

Pelican Press · August 25, 2024

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The Best Movies From 1999, According to Our Critics

On the 25th anniversary of what many argue is the greatest year in movie history, we asked film staff writers and critics to share the movie from 1999 that they love the best or feel is most overlooked. After reading their picks, let us know your choices.

Best Comedy

‘Being John Malkovich’

Capping a decade of high-concept comedies, Spike Jonze’s “Being John Malkovich” (available on

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) raised the stakes with the most outlandish premise yet: When a downtrodden puppeteer (John Cusack) takes an office job to make ends meet, he discovers a hidden portal there that allows him to enter the mind of medium-famous character actor John Malkovich. Jonze’s smartest instinct is to resist piling onto a concept that’s already perilously clever. Instead, the movie is underplayed, intimate and even a little scuzzy-looking. But that approach to Charlie Kaufman’s surprising screenplay leaves room for viewers to wonder as they watch: Why are we so certain that our lives would improve with even a modicum of fame? And are these bodies the wrong containers for what we feel inside? KYLE BUCHANAN

Buchanan’s other 1999 favorites: “eXistenZ,” “

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,” “

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,” “

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”

A haunting exploration of ******* and *********, Claire Denis’s “

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” (available on

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) takes place in the East ******** country of Djibouti, a onetime French territory. There, French Foreign Legion soldiers practice drills, their bodies synced and individualities subordinated. At times, they dance with ******** women, their gazes uneasily summoning up the history shared by the formerly colonized and their colonizers.

Loosely inspired by Herman Melville’s novella “Billy Budd,” Denis’s beguiling tour de force takes shape after one soldier (Grégoire Colin) rescues another, an act that disturbs a sergeant (Denis Lavant). The soldier “seduced everyone,” the sergeant says in voice-over. “Deep down I felt a sort of rancor, a rage brimming.” With minimal dialogue, ravishing visuals and meticulous attention to sensuous detail, Claire Denis elliptically charts what binds these men — tracing lines between love and hate, past and present, nation and self, masculinity and militarism — in a film that ******** as disturbing as it is seductive. MANOHLA DARGIS

Dargis’s other 1999 favorites: “

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,” “Pola X,” “

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,” “

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”

Like several Mike Judge comedies, “Office Space” (available on

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) was not fully appreciated when it premiered, but it has emerged as a modern classic. Years before the sitcom “The Office,” this highly quotable satire captured the soul-crushing drudgery of white-collar office life.

But while its portrait of passive-aggressive bosses and meaningless corporate jargon is timeless, the movie benefits from the era in which it was made: the first internet *****, a more innocent, less lucrative disruption. The idiocies of tech companies then seem quaint compared with the behemoths to come. The targets of the movie, including chains that coerce employees to express themselves with pieces of “flair” and middle managers whose work seems to be creating the appearance of work, reflect the benign absurdity of the moment. The plight of the pointedly bland protagonist (Ron Livingston) doesn’t seem melodramatic so much as ridiculous.

Judge could ******* the culture with a sledgehammer (see “Idiocracy,” 2006), but we can laugh at “Office Space” even after seeing it scores of times because he made it with a light touch. JASON ZINOMAN

Zinoman’s other 1999 favorites: “

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,” “

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,” “

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,” “

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”

Red has never looked as alluring, as empowering and as passionate as it does in “All About My Mother” (streaming on

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), Pedro Almodóvar’s towering melodrama. The ****** is boldly worn by the maternal leads at different points in this unconventional story. An organ transplant coordinator who has lost her son in an accident goes searching for the boy’s other parent, a transgender woman who doesn’t know she had a child. On paper, the characters might seem most at home in a soap opera, but Almodóvar instills each with complexity and humanity, guiding us through their inner lives with a sensitive touch. And yet, the movie still leaves room for some Bette Davis-style sass and a little Blanche DuBois excess mixed in for good measure. A milestone in the director’s eclectic career, the film is anchored by fearless performances from Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Antonia San Juan and Penélope Cruz. MEKADO MURPHY

Murphy’s other 1999 favorites: “

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,” “

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,” “

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,” “

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”

“The Iron Giant” (available on

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) felt old-fashioned the day it was released. That was partly because of its story — the director Brad Bird, loosely adapting a British children’s novel for his feature film debut, set it in America at the end of the 1950s, with all of that *******’s social, technological and cultural upheavals. (Whatever you do, don’t “wig out,” man.) But it was also circumstance. In the summer of 1999 — a few months before “Toy Story 2” would define the next quarter-century of ********* animation — a non-franchise, theatrically distributed, 2-D-animated film already seemed like a transmission from a bygone era. I was a teenager when I first received it, via a special presentation on cable TV. My younger brother and I, purportedly aging out of “cartoons,” instantly fell for Hogarth and his **** giant from outer space, who cure each other’s loneliness amid the ruthless incursions of a changing world. REGGIE UGWU

Ugwu’s other 1999 favorites: “

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,” “

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,” “

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,” “

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”

The best documentaries of 1999 often coaxed viewers to learn from history, lest it repeat itself. But among them, Errol Morris’s “Mr. ******: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr.” (streaming on

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) stands as the most chillingly relevant 25 years later. Morris first introduces us to Leuchter as he sees himself: a humanitarian who believes in capital punishment but wants to make it painless, and has spent his career inventing more humane versions of devices like the electric chair. But the film takes a sharp left turn when Leuchter’s views as a Holocaust denier come into view. He’s certain he’s right, even in the face of reams of evidence and his own inexperience with the subject. It’s a portrait of self-delusion, of refusing to acknowledge facts as anything more than someone’s opinion — and Morris, in typical fashion, simply gives him enough rope to hang himself. ALISSA WILKINSON

Wilkinson’s other 1999 favorites: “

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,” “

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,” “

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,” “On the Ropes”

1999 was a terrific year for rom-coms (“10 Things I Hate About You,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “She’s All That”), but it was an even better year for Julia Roberts rom-coms. This was the tail end of her America’s sweetheart era, and you can see her smile (and chemistry with Richard Gere) light up “Runaway Bride.” In the superior “Notting Hill” (available on

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), in which she plays a version of her Hollywood-star self, that smile draws Hugh Grant’s bookstore owner and his kooky friends the way the sun draws sunflowers. But it can’t quite cover up her character’s sadness or concerns as work and a previous relationship intervene, and the sense that grown-ups are talking here is one of the strengths of the film. Thankfully, the director Roger Michell tamped down the too-cute excesses that the screenwriter Richard Curtis (“Love, Actually”) can be prone to. The result is an all-too-rare sighting: the intelligent rom-com. STEPHANIE GOODMAN

Goodman’s other 1999 favorites: “

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,” “

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,” “

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,” “

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”

Takashi Miike’s films range from children’s movies to hyperviolent splatter films, musicals and niche videogame adaptations. His disparate topical and thematic interests are embodied in “Audition” (available on

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,

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or

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). The film begins as a solemn romantic drama, depicting a grieving widower who becomes infatuated with a young woman he’s met via the pretense that he’s auditioning her for a melodrama. Their tender courtship is undermined by glimpses of the woman’s alarming past: ******* ******, decapitation and dismemberment, and the burlap sack in her apartment that seems to contain something alive. This culminates in a spectacularly demented conclusion, a stark, forceful inversion of the power imbalance that once characterized this ill-fated romance. The widower, seen in close-up and in agony, hopelessly gazes up at the young woman, now sitting astride his limp body. “Words create *****,” she says. “Pain can be trusted.” RUMSEY TAYLOR

Taylor’s other 1999 favorites: “********* Hollow,” “

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,” “

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,” “eXistenZ”

Contributions by Kyle Buchanan, Manohla Dargis, Stephanie Goodman, Mekado Murphy, Rumsey Taylor, Reggie Ugwu, Alissa Wilkinson and Jason Zinoman.

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