The Best Year in Cinema

I talked to a few people this week who wanted the result spoiled, and I could tell in talking to each of them that they were a little disappointed to learn that the greatest year in cinema is, factually, 1999.

While there is no exciting answer to what is the best year in cinema—unless I had said the year 3000 or it happened to be your birth year—allow me to try to convince you that something truly special (even compared to the other great years we’ve discussed) occurred in the film industry of 1999. And that first special something is The Matrix. 

It’s hard to overstate both how good and how influential The Matrix is. Hitting theaters in the midst of the Y2K paranoia, a time in which many people were genuinely afraid that computers, and therefore civilization, would stop working at midnight on New Year’s Eve, the Wachowskis’ magnum opus responded to and, much like its main character Neo, shaped the world around it. The movie’s influence is obvious within the film industry, which was dominated by Matrix copycats for years afterward, and which took advantage of the pioneering work done by The Matrix in regards to color-grading, bullet time, and choreographed action. The film’s influence, however, extended beyond the industry and into broader culture. In addition to memorable quotes like “There is no spoon” and “I know Kung Fu” or images like the red pill and blue pill or black leather attire, The Matrix provided ordinary people with a touchstone for thinking about the internet, technology, and particular philosophical concepts.

In my estimation, this last point is not appreciated as much as it should be: that the general public was given an updated telling of Descartes’s malicious demon and thereby forced to reckon with the subjectivity of their reality. Few works of art have confronted the world with philosophical questions as convincingly, pervasively, and profoundly. Having said that, 1999 was saturated in existential dread and the question, What is reality? In addition to The Matrix, movies like Fight Club and The Sixth Sense dominated the box-office, movies that sunk viewers into a distorted vision of the world. Add to these The Truman Show, which, while released in late ’98, reached its peak in ’99 and raised similar questions with a cheerier tone. Either these films captured a paranoia and existential anxiety of their time, or those feelings within their creators penetrated the public consciousness.

The Wachowskis’ work, as mentioned, was also incredibly influential on the field of special effects, but possibly more influential was 1999’s biggest box-office hit: Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. The return to Star Wars, after a 16-year hiatus, was the first major film to be shot almost entirely with digital backdrops and characters, signaling the transition from practical movie-making to the CGI-heavy era we live in now. Beyond that, its production led to the creation of ILM, further advancing digital compositing and motion capture technologies, and helping solidify the modern blockbuster model in which studios prioritize expansive, effects-driven franchise universes over standalone films.

Even as things are shifting and evolving, the industry as a whole seemed to reach a level of maturity (Columbia Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer both marked their 75th anniversaries) and impressive level of quality. In addition to The Matrix, Star Wars, The Sixth Sense, and Fight Club, this year produced classics like The Green Mile, The Mummy, and Notting Hill. Even the Best Picture winner, American Beauty, which has not aged well, was a high quality film that also seemed to gesture at the pervading existential worries. Add to these, still, heavy-hitters in animation like Toy Story 2, The Iron Giant, Disney’s Tarzan, and even the South Park movie. Given the sheer strength and variety in genre, it should be no surprise that ’99 also shows up on Daniel Parris’s list, in which it and 2001 are the only two years to be in the top 10 in two categories (with 1999 being higher in both categories).

But let’s not stop. We should acknowledge the independent and auteur films released that year like The Blair Witch Project, Office Space, The Virgin Suicides, Yi Yi, Run Lola Run, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Three Kings. We got special treats from legendary directors like Stanley Kubrick’s posthumous final film Eyes Wide Shut, Frank Oz’s Bowfinger, John McTiernan’s The Thomas Crown Affair, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (written by Charlie Kaufman). And—count our lucky stars—we even got a Bond film in ’99, The World Is Not Enough. Granted, we also got Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, which killed the Bond formula for 20 years.

Yet, despite all of these amazing movies, it might still be the case that the most influential event in 1999 on the film industry was the launch of Napster. More than initiating the slow death of physical media, Napster habituated an entire generation to the idea that digital media could be accessed instantly, freely, and outside traditional channels, thereby eroding the economic assumptions that had long undergirded Hollywood. In time, streaming would necessitate the complete reorganization of that industry and rewrite how any of us think about “cinema.”

With the exception of The Matrix, none of the movies I’ve mentioned from ’99 are a contender for the greatest of all time themselves—it’s not like 1994 or 1967, when multiple movies came out that might conceivably top someone’s list. But every movie in 1999 is a 9 out of 10; an astonishing roster in which so many exceptional movies came out that captured a special moment in time or determined the era that would follow. And that, to my mind, is what it takes to be the great year in film history.