Thursday, 30 December 1999

THE BEST TEN FILMS OF 1999

This was the hardest Top Ten I've had to do. I have about 20 more films that have made my honorable mention list this year than last year. It is also ironic, looking back on last year's list, that I was "thrilled that only two of the films on the list come close to being conventional Hollywood movies." Makes me laugh. After all, this is the year of change, right? Because there are so many great films this year, I am going to do a Top Ten, a Second Ten that will not be ordered by number, but will fill my list to twenty and then (or actually, first), the 29 Alternates. (If for any reason, any member of the Top 20 cannot be projected, these films will provide an excellent alternative.)

29 Movies That You Really Should See:

AFTER LIFE:
Hirokazu Koreeda's funny, tender, smart look at what the afterlife might bring and what we can still do to make our lives happier while we are on earth.

AMERICAN PIE:
It is crude, it is rude, it is funny as hell. As so often is the case, the moment every one talks about, the pie deflowering, isn't even close to being the biggest laugh.

ANALYZE THIS:
No, it's not The Sopranos, but then again, it was never meant to be. DeNiro is funny. Crystal is the straight man. Funny movie.

AUTUMN TALE:
Eric Rohmer finally gets around to the adults and tells the story with all the warmth and humor you could hope for. It's not too often that you get to see grown women think about love.

BOWFINGER:
The ultimate coastal movie. This one is so inside the freeway that it could have been called Jimmy Hoffa. Nonetheless, two great performances by Eddie Murphy, Heather Graham as Anne Heche (kind of) and a sincere Steve Martin. The only thing that isn't funny is that it isn't that far from reality.

BOYS DON'T CRY:
A solid debut by director Kimberly Pierce. The supporting cast is strong, but this is Hilary Swank's movie and she gives the most ambitious, most successful performance by an actress this year, bar none.

BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB:
Not a perfect movie, but a great look at a glorious subject.

CRADLE WILL ROCK:
Tim Robbins really brings it with this film. If you are going to obsess on dates and facts, stay home and fact check your dictionary. Lots of terrific performances and a beautiful job done by the chef.

DICK:
The most misunderstood movie of the year. But also one of the funniest. If you are old enough to get the Watergate jokes and you like sketch comedy, this movie should be a priority rental.

THE DINNER GAME:
A real delight from Francis Veber. Yeah, it's a stage play put on film, but it is one of the funniest comedies of the year and, after a while, you won't notice you're reading subtitles.

FELICIA'S JOURNEY:
I'm not an Atom Egoyan fan, but I really like this movie a lot. It's probably the best role Bob Hoskins has had since The Cotton Club. Really good, really creepy.

GO:
I really expected this movie to connect with young audiences...but it didn't. I saw the film twice and I loved the ride both times.

THE GREEN MILE:
Classic Hollywood melodrama. People looking for a reason to hate this can make up all kind of absurd reasons. Sure, it's 20 minutes too long, but it'll get you if you let it.

GUINEVERE:
A small movie, but a beautiful one. Audrey Wells understands her sex and she clearly has been around guys like Stephen Rea's Connie Fitzpatrick. Everyone needs to have their adventures if they're going to grow up.

IRON GIANT:
A beloved film to many. No doubt, it is excellent. The funny thing is, because it's not a musical people say it's not like Disney animation, but Toy Story 2 only has one song and I believe the original only had two. Truth of the matter is, Disney has the franchise and marketing won't make any of these other studios' films break into the big bucks... only audiences can do that.

LAKE PLACID:
A good time was had by all. And finally, a movie in which Oliver Platt gets to chew the scenery and be chewed by the scenery.

THE LIMEY:
A wonderful bit of small filmmaking by Steven Soderbergh. He's all grown up as a director now. I still prefer The Underneath and Out of Sight, but that may just be because I've watched them over and over and over again.

MANSFIELD PARK:
A good adaptation of Jane Austen. I don't know the history and I don't care. Harold Pinter rocked the world in this one. And Frances O'Connor will be a movie star here... in time.

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE:
Luis Mandoki does romance as well as anyone out there. And Paul Newman may be using old tricks, but damn, they're good tricks.

MR. DEATH:
Errol Morris' documentary about a man hoisted on his own deadly petard is one of the very best films of the year. Every entertainment journalist should be made to watch it... a few times.

MY BEST FIEND:
I'm told that Werner Herzog probably made a lot of stuff up about his best "fiend" Klaus Kinski, but so what? This is a whole lot of legendary fun.

OCTOBER SKY:
Loved it. Joe Johnston has become a real A-list director. Great performances by Chris Cooper and all the kids in the movie. This is the "family movie" that everyone keeps asking for.

THE RED VIOLIN:
I saw it with a reel out of place, but it was still a sumptuous feast of a film.

SWEET & LOWDOWN:
A tiny, tiny Woody Allen movie with a towering, should-win-an-Oscar® performance by Sean Penn.

10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU:
One of the few good films to come out of the teen craze. Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger will both be movie stars for years to come.

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR:
A good solid movie, the way momma used to make `em.

THREE KINGS:
I went back to revisit this one because I just couldn't get as excited about it as some of my colleagues have. I liked it better, but the problem is still the same. Russell does great stuff with the individuals we identify with but never really connects us to the people these guys get inspired to save.

TOY STORY 2:
A wonderful movie. Take the kids. Have a good laugh.

TREKKIES:
Roger Nygard is a freakin' genius... he paid me to write that. Okay, so I know the guy. But it is a terrific documentary and incredibly funny.

THE TOP TWENTY:

AMERICAN BEAUTY:
A terrific film from first-time director Sam Mendes, first-time-feature-produced screenwriter Alan Ball, legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall and an incredible cast. Make no mistake, this movie is a real collaboration. Ball was lucky to have a director who didn't fight his theatricality. Mendes was lucky to have a cinematographer who wouldn't let him screw up. Hall was lucky to have a cast of real pros, even the young ones. And DreamWorks was smart enough to put up the money. A bit too chilly of spirit to hit my Top Ten, but respect must be paid.

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD:
Scorsese is still on the top of his game and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. I'm not kidding. There are people out there who claim to have artistic insight and are taking Scorsese on, not because he isn't still delivering in new and inventive ways as an artist, but because he is and the public isn't buying. Well, screw the public. Martin Scorsese isn't a revered director because he has entertained the public but because the public (and the critics) have learned to follow what he was doing and to appreciate its depth and complexity. Of course, these are the same idiots who will attack Scorsese for trying to be commercial by hiring Leo DiCaprio for Gangs of New York. Can't win if they want you to lose. This film, written by Paul Schrader, is another tale of Jesus. It is a religious movie and contains some of the most beautiful work of Scorsese's career. Is it fun? Not at all. But it is masterful and insightful and a real wake-up call.

THE END OF THE AFFAIR:
This one was a shocker. If only Sony realized that they had an Oscar® movie on their hands when they started marketing it. I'll tell you how desperate they were for press on this one...they sent us to the junket at their expense! But from the first frames to the very end, Neil Jordan has created a masterpiece of movie love. Ralph Fiennes is in his perfect role, as a man who precisely defines ambiguity. Stephen Rea is one of the great cuckolds of all time. And Julianne Moore just gets to me more and more each time I see her. I didn't get it in Short Cuts, but now I'm just happy to see her. And Jordan... is there a filmmaker who walks the tightrope more often or with more success than Neil Jordan? As I'm writing this, I'm not quite sure how this movie didn't make my Top Ten. I really loved it. It shares so many of my passions, secret and overt.

THE HURRICANE:
Denzel is simply as great a movie star as this industry has ever had. And his performance in this movie is perhaps his best work yet. This is a man who has it all and loses it all and loses it again and again. And it's all there on the screen. The reason this movie isn't a Top Ten pick for me is that director Norman Jewison just didn't have the courage or perhaps the skill to really get creative in the editing room and let the movie be what it is really about... a young black man, surrounded by generous opportunities for racial assimilation, finding his own personal blackness - and all that entails - in a book by a hero who won many battles but lost the war and this young black man's desperate fight to get the hero to fight one more fight so that they both can have their personal freedom. Perhaps a movie that was fully about Rubin "Hurricane" Carter would have been great. But that's not what Jewison & Co. shot. They made Lazurus & The Hurricane. The boy & the destroyed man. The pieces were there. But the film, perhaps via studio pressure, seems to tilt to the Hurricane side. Still, a great and powerful third act that will leave most people crying with passion and some joy. And what a stunning performance!

MAGNOLIA:
For all of its attention grabbing onanism, Magnolia is still one of the best movies of the year. This is said with love for your work, PT... rein it in. There's a point at which bending convention becomes the whole show and people feel like they were just in a 25 cent carny sideshow. No one gets better work out of his actors. Some get work as good, but right now, none better. You don't need gimmicks. Between Kubrick and Anderson, Tom Cruise has done the best work of his life as an actor, not a movie star, this year. Robards is great in this movie. Melora Walters has become a real actress in Anderson's pictures. Actors like Julianne Moore and Phillip Seymour Hoffman are involved enough to take on less and less showy roles. John C. Reilly is actually given some screen time. Aimee Mann's music is great. And to have the guts to look Boogie Nights in the face - a movie that was probably slowed by $20 million in domestic box office mostly by the dark, heavy 80s third act - and to make a movie about the abuse that parents rain on their child, intentional and not, sexual and not, lovingly or not... big hairy cajones, man. Anderson can be one of the greats... I can tell because so many of my director friends hate him so much for getting his movies made and being called "great"... but a little restraint would have made Magnolia a Top 3 movie for me.

MAN ON THE MOON:
When I saw this movie, I wrote "Is this the best movie of the year?" Apparently, not, since it didn't break the Top Ten. But it's pretty damned good. Jim Carrey is amazing as Kaufman. I watched the "Andy's Funhouse" special from 1977 on TV Land the other night and it made me even more impressed with Carrey's work. And I think the movie is very funny. Yes, it does not analyze Andy Kaufman into the ground and "explain" him. But what would be the point of that? The Hurricane doesn't "explain" Hurricane Carter. You have to do the work. The work is easier to figure in The Hurricane, which in no way diminishes that film. But Andy Kaufman was an enigma and the filmmakers chose to allow him to remain that way. Do we always need to find the man behind the curtain? Isn't it fun, sometimes, to simply watch the Wizard do his thing? It was a funny reflection, seeing the TV special, and realizing that the audience got the joke too well. Kaufman seemed flustered at times because the audience loved him too easily. He wasn't a guy who liked shooting fish in a barrel. And that's the joy of Man on the Moon. In order to give an audience of people ranging from Kaufman lovers to people who don't know him at all to Kaufman haters a great movie experience, Milos Forman, screenwriters Alexander & Karaszewski and the Jersey Films team have built all kinds of layers into the storytelling so that it keeps any viewer a little off balance. A Kaufmanesque movie about Kaufman. Great stuff.

ROMANCE:
This film absolutely floored me. So much so that it's got me thinking again about how I chose my Top Ten, but I'll deal with that later. Men never get to hear women's internal monologues. That is the mystery of women. Men's thoughts are so simplistic and terse in comparison that by a certain age, we tend to give up trying to figure out the fairer sex. Catherine Breillat is the fairer sex, so she knows the monologue. Surely, there are many variations on the theme. Here we get one, beautifully realized. People who didn't like this film seem to have focused on the specifics and the soul of the film. Bzzt! Wrong. I wrote it back at Toronto and I repeat: no child should leave for college without seeing Carnal Knowledge and Romance. Both speak to the dark side of human sexual behavior. But both flash a "stop" sign, reminding us all that we are not the only ones with dark places in our hearts. It's the secrecy of the dark that keeps us lingering there. Romance is the brightest light I've ever seen into the spirit of a woman.

SOUTH PARK LONGER, BIGGER & UNCUT:
Has there been a funnier stupid movie since Animal House? If so, I can't remember one. This one is right up there with the Delta gang and Blazing Saddles for me. Inventive, smart and about something for all of its unending stupidity. The songs were great and memorable. Saddam & The Devil may be the couple of the year, just edging out Bill & Monica. Parker & Stone smacked the MPAA around so hard that the valley-based jury of hypocrites couldn't even figure out a penis joke when it was in the title of the movie. The thing about these guys is that for all the rage, there is a real palpable joy in their work. And their joy becomes ours. Thanks.

THE STRAIGHT STORY:
David Lynch took my breath away with this film. Yeah, it's a guy driving a tractor for a couple of hours. Look closer. (© DreamWorks Publicity) This movie was like the feeling on a perfect summer day, out in the middle of the water, with nothing around but the sound of the water and the heat of the sun and you. And the world stops for a minute and peace is yours. It's the sound you hear underwater. It's the smell of great soup. This movie is home. Just sitting here writing about it is making me a bit misty-eyed. Just go to the theater and take a deep breath before it starts and let it embrace you. David Lynch has kept up in his turmoil in movie after movie... his serenity is every bit as intense.

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY:
Anthony Minghella really steps up into the ranks of the world class filmmakers here. The English Patient was a poetic book and Minghella made a poetic movie and I respect that and the film. But here he really delivers on his art and his craft. After watching Rene Clement's Purple Noon, I respect Minghella's work even more, though it makes it even clearer that Gywneth Paltrow was simply bad casting. Not that she's bad in the film. But the Margie in Clement's movie is not another Vassar girl on a fling, which is what I get from Paltrow. Margie seems European and she's giving as much to Dickie and Ripley as she gets, in terms of the world view. Nonetheless, this is a terrific movie. This is Damon's most difficult role and he does it with absolute smoothness. Jude Law is absolutely perfect as Dickie. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Cate Blanchett steal scenes with ease and style. The one thing I finally figured out regarding Clement vs. Minghella is that Blanchett/Meredith is Damon/Ripley's Paltrow/Marge. She is there because he's going to take her where Dickie took Marge. And so, a more worldly Marge would demand a more worldly Meredith (a character Minghella created himself). This film just gets better and better the more I discuss it.

THE TOP TEN
The biggest issue for me was trying to figure out what the criteria would be to pick a Top Ten. After all, how does one really compare The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Insider in a way that is remotely quantitative? You can't. So, I kind of did my figuring on a walk and just did it. And when I reflected on it, I realized that it was emotion that guided me. Every one of the Top Ten films stands alone as a moment in the history of movies. Like every film, there are reflections of both film history and "real life" history in each. There's not a film in my Top 20 that I don't think deserves a spot on a Top 10 list somewhere and when I originally thought I'd do a Top 15, I felt I was leaving stuff out. And even in the list 21-49, I wonder how some of those titles didn't make the Top Ten. But it's been that good a year. Of the ten films, only two were made by filmmakers who have made more than five feature films. Three were made by first-timers. One is in another language, but it speaks without words. One is a documentary. Only one is directed by a woman. One of the filmmakers is now dead and another temporarily drove a major actor out of the business. One of the films is fictional non-fiction and another is non-fictional fiction. And of all ten of these films, only one will ever have a sequel.

10. RUN LOLA RUN:
This is the great gimmick film of 1999, not The Blair Witch Project. Blair won big, but it's not worth watching when Lola is running and running and running. Using virtually every form of filmmaking, still and moving, to tell the story of one lover trying to save another and taking three times to get it right, writer/director Tom Tykwer gives audiences an adrenaline rush that forces us to think and think differently as we run with Lola through his maze of ever-changing familiarity. Run Lola Run is my favorite high intensity, high-texture party favor from Europe since Caro & Jeunet's 1991 classic, Delicatessen. Hmmm... Tom Tykwer directing Alien 5... interesting.

9. AMERICAN MOVIE:
In some ways, Errol Morris' Mr. Death is a better documentary than this. But this is a film about not only an unstoppably passionate maniac, but it's about a man who unstoppably passionate about making movies. Chris Smith hit my hot button when he found Mark and his sidekick, Mike and went along on their quest to film the holy grail, a horror film called Coven. (And this wouldn't be a story about American Movie if I didn't give you a link at which you could buy Coven for yourself.) If you ever forget why you fell in love with the medium of film, this film will remind you in a hurry. And even better, it will make you feel like an idiot for ever being willing to consider walking away from it. If Mark and Mike can stay focused, you better learn how to yourself.

8. THE INSIDER:
Michael Mann peaked with Heat. The movie was so smart and so dense with characters living right on the edge of their lives and it was so beautiful, it never occurred to me that this director would be following it up with a button-up drama. But he took the story of two corporation men and made it into a grand opera of self-delusion and absolute heroism and all the gray area in between. The trio of Russell Crowe, Al Pacino and Christopher Plummer are perfection. The imagery manages to be grand and human too. And we walk out of the theater wondering what heroic deeds we might be faced with in our simple, humdrum lives and how we will react. We are all heroes. We are all failures. We are all in need of a little more perspective.

7. ELECTION:
I think everyone who fell in love with this slapdash pitch-black comedy felt that they were finding something that no one else had found. Part of that was because Paramount didn't quite figure it out until it was a few minutes from opening in theaters. But a bigger part is that director Alexander Payne made a film (co-written by Jim Taylor from the Tom Perotta novel) that is smart and so cruel that it feels like a guilty pleasure as each frame is projected on the screen. Reese Witherspoon got the opportunity to announce herself not only as a terrific comedienne, but as a completely fearless one. And Matthew Broderick, in a bit of great casting, finally got a dose of his own Ferris Bueller medicine. Tracey Flick is a character that you would expect from no one less than Preston Sturges - and that's no small compliment. A classic comedy.

6. EYES WIDE SHUT:
This is probably the greatest puzzle movie ever created by a director. And you know, when a guy like Kubrick gives you the finger, I don't expect you all to fall in love with him. But to look at Eyes Wide Shut without appreciating what it really is... that's an affront against film. That's no sin if you are a civilian. If you are a critic and you give yourself a pass on this movie, you should turn in your keyboard. Nothing is on the surface. The movie is all subtext. Tom Cruise is in a waking dream. He's a jerk because that's the facade he has become. (A mask, get it?) Nicole Kidman needs her man back. She's drunk with fear of what she might do. The orgy isn't supposed to be sexy. It's not a movie about a man trying get laid. It's about fidelity. Got it?!?!? Make no mistake. This film will be studied in film schools for decades to come. Once deconstructed, the genius of the complexity that Kubrick brought to this movie will unfold. The only sad part is that he will never be able to help in the decoding. All we have are backstabbing co-workers like Frederic Raphael who have treated the master in death as they would never dare treat him in life. So if it's so good, why isn't it higher on the list? Well, it is a puzzle. It is an intellectual exercise. And as I've indicated before, this list is so loaded with quality, I had to make choices and my choices in the Top Five were about emotion, not intellect. And so, I press on...

5. BEING JOHN MALKOVICH:
It's a rare thing to see a writer given as much credit as a director for a film, but Charlie Kaufman has achieved just that with Being John Malkovich. And Spike Jonze has grown beyond his talent in my eyes for allowing it to happen from a P.R. standpoint, but even more, for allowing Kaufman's vision to shine through in his directing choices, choosing not to cover the written core of the film with flashes of visual intensity. Jonze, in his first feature, served the film ahead of himself. And what a film he served. When people talk about the perception that this film could never be made, they aren't just selling a story. This is a one-of-a-kind. Surreal, real, silly, smart, abrasive, sexually confused, angry, loving and mad. Being John Malkovich is all that and more. And just when you think that the premise has gone so far over the deep end that it can't go on another second, another twist takes you down another tunnel. A great experience.

4. THE MATRIX:
It's hands down the best and most surprising action film since Steven Spielberg did the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. Andy and Larry Wachowski created the most complete living comic book ever and sliced together the entire history of filmed entertainment to do it. For the first time since Speed, Keanu Reeves' emotional distance was used exactly right. Laurence Fishburne has been waiting to play the sensei his entire career. Hugo Weaving brought a face to the machine that was just wrong enough to be perfectly right. Gloria Foster kicked ass quietly as The Oracle. Great supporting cast, each filling very specific needs. But beyond the acting, this film was about adrenaline. This is the only film I can imagine (except maybe La Femme Nikita) that made Run Lola Run seem restrained. But the brothers did it with an elegance and a love of film that was so intense that the film is just as fun on the tenth viewing as it was on the first. It's the potato chip of movies. You can't eat just one. You can't look away. Just as you become aware that the movie has changed speeds, BOOM-another change and another eye-grabbing, heart-pounding scene. Just thinking of moment after moment on this movie, I am smiling ear to ear. There are people who prefer Dark City to The Matrix, but I don't get it. Besides any problems I have with Dark City, there is one basic element that moves The Matrix way ahead for me. It's fun. Alex Proyas is a wonderful filmmaker and I would love to see Warner Bros. give him Batman to do, but Dark City is not fun. The Matrix is the ultimate E-ticket ride. And you'd better make sure that seat belt buckle is working.

3. FIGHT CLUB:
A different battle than Eyes Wide Shut, but in many ways more ferocious.

If they know not what they got from Kubrick, they seemed to have felt this one like a bolo punch to the throat. Who are they? Well, I've made enough enemies pointing fingers on this one. Let's just say that a lot of very smart people were so turned off by the second act of this movie that they decided to check out and disregard the third act as a trick and not as what it so clearly was...a balance between the first two acts.

The first act of this film does, indeed, brilliantly speak to the consumerist malaise of white middle class America. Had David Fincher stopped there and made what would have been a grittier version of American Beauty, critics would have been as dripping with self-reflective joy as they were for A.B. (That, as so many of you have pointed out, is the core of my separation of that very good movie from this truly great one. American Beauty makes its viewers feel like it's okay to be stuck, you can always break free, somehow. Fight Club demands more of you when you walk out of the theater.)

But Fincher and novelist Chuck Palahnuik and screenwriter Jim Uhls look a lot closer. Take American Beauty's Ricky Fitts and look closer. He's the drug-selling, daughter-deflowering good guy of American Beauty. Talk about a guy hiding his dark side. Tyler Durden doesn't stay clean. He gets really, really ugly. He screams out, "Look at the all-American hero... he wants to screw your daughter and dismiss her the next day... he wants to smash other guys in the head until they can see clearly... he wants to blow up buildings and..." Went too far, didn't he?

That's when the third act of Fight Club hits. Ed Norton realizes how far over the edge he's gone and he has to make things right. And what is it that saves him? The real love he feels for another person... another person as disturbed as troubled as him. But his connection with Marla and her life or death becomes more important than even a bunch of buildings that are going to be blown up when no one is in them. And he will go to any length to save her. And in the end, with the world crumbling around them, if he has her, he has a chance. Not in Ikea world, not in the All-testosterone world... in love.

I have used the analogy of Fight Club to The Graduate a few times and I tend to get blank stares. But it is so true. First act, Benjamin comes home with no purpose in life, floating in that fool. Second act, he and Mrs. Robinson. Nothing in Fight Club was more violent than the spirit of that relationship. Third act, he needs Elaine to be whole, despite all he has done to her. Think about it. Even the very end... he breaks up a wedding, causing destruction of a quieter version, but it's all okay because he gets the girl. And if you look at them at the end of The Graduate, they don't know why they are doing it or whether it will last or what the future holds. They just know that they are together and they have a chance to ascend. And I truly believe that in 32 years, Fight Club will be looked at as The Graduate of its time.

I decided to have a tie at the top of the list this year. How did I decide on the two films that tied? Well, they were the two films that made me feel the most. And they were the two films that surprised me the most. And they were the two films with the best work from two new film directors, albeit in a year of sensational work from a lot of new film directors. And one more thing... both films found the heart of their clearly defined subjects in a way that no one has ever found it before. So each is my Best Film of 1999.

1-Tie.TITUS:
I expected a pretty mess when I walked into a screening room to see Titus. This is the movie that sent Anthony Hopkins into retirement, temporary though it may have been. This was a film that had 50-year-old Jessica Lange playing a romance opposite Alan Cumming, whose last on-screen flirtation was with Tom Cruise. This was a movie that people in town were saying that Fox Searchlight was dragging its feet on releasing because it was just a mess. "Throw it to the Academy," went the comment. Julie Taymor was right and everyone else was wrong. No one has come close, as wonderful as Ian McKellan's Richard III was, to bringing the kind of punch to a Shakespeare movie that Taymor has since Ken Branagh burst on the scene a decade ago with Richard V. Titus Andronicus has long been stuck in the group of Shakespeare plays that are just too dark or dense to perform to big crowds.

But Taymor, first in her editing of the text, has cut Shakespeare to the quick and found the heart of the story. Here is a man, completely loyal to his patriotism, so much so that he is not only blind to the needs of his own flesh and blood, he is disdainful towards the fact that anyone needs anything other than that patriotism. And as a direct result of that loyalty and his own unflinching commitment to the rules of engagement, however cruel and heartless, he is undone. Undone by villainy. Undone by the power structure above him that is more vain and self-serving than he could have ever been as a soldier. Undone by himself. And when he finally finds his humanity, he must become a true villain to fulfill his destiny. But what is villainy and what is loyalty and what is love and how do we show it and when is it too much and when is it too late and how much pain can the mind take before it bursts and how much pain can it dole out before it bursts?

And that just begins to tell you what the experience of Titus is. Is Titus a fun movie? It depends what kind of fun you are into. But it isn't a mystery like Eyes Wide Shut. And its violence isn't as graphic as Fight Club (though if people ever realized that the reason they think that the violence in FC was as intense as it is not because of what they show but because of what you feel, people might reassess that movie). This is masterfully artistic work. Taymor is working with a limited budget, but sets her characters in one intensely symbolic, simple but incredibly beautiful location after location. The whole thing is very reminiscent of what Norman Jewison tried to do with Jesus Christ Superstar... except that Taymor goes beyond the location to enrich each scene with an emotionally resonant richness that is... well, amazing. Like The Straight Story, Magnolia, Run Lola Run and others on this list, you have to let yourself take this trip. If you fight it, you will hate it. But if you embrace it, it will make your blood pump as fast as The Matrix with even more humanity.

1-Tie.THE WAR ZONE:
Hmmm... talk about a front runner. I saw The War Zone at Sundance. It was the best film I saw there, going away. Others, including such box office valuable critics as Roger Ebert, agreed. And still, no distributor would pick up this movie in America. It's being distributed by Lot 42 now, though as far as I can tell, they've never distributed anything else, nor do they have the clout or money to do a major domestic distribution. And it's a crime. Because as great a year as this was for movies, I still didn't feel a movie any more intensely than this one over the whole 12 months.

It shares the top slot with Titus because the two films are opposite sides of the same coin. Titus is as grand and visual a feast as The War Zone is quiet and dark and personal. Tim Roth has clearly been influenced by Ken Loach, but Roth goes further. It wasn't until I went back for a second look that I realized how much further. The stillness of the images... Roth's willingness to stay in real space and to let the characters breathe... stunning. The one-liner subject of this film is incest. But that is too simple. For me, this is really a film about family and love and the secrets that can rip us apart. It's easy to make a father a mustache-twisting villain when he chooses to have sex with his daughter. It's easy to make her into a simple, helpless victim. But Roth reaches for more truth than that. There is a real insight into the complexity of the very closest of relationships that Roth looks at without fear. And that's probably why he doesn't have a distributor. One of the most remarkable things, which is also one of the things that really marked a high point in Hilary Swank's work in Boys Don't Cry, is that Roth is able to take the audience beyond a rather sexually compelling female form. Lara Belmont is often topless in this movie. But so is the just-pregnant Tilda Swinton and Ray Winstone and Freddie Cunliffe. This is a family, not a sex romp. So when things do happen, you're not having a peek at a great pair of breasts... you are feeling why things are happening. You are feeling the choices made. Lara Belmont is portraying a member of your family. Ray Winstone is a guy you want to have a pint with at the pub. Tilda Swinton is a mother we all might want to have. And Freddie Cunliffe has all the confusion of any teen you know or may have been and all the courage you would be proud to see in any person you love.

I went back to see this film in early December, not wanting to overpraise the film out of overly loving memory. And I thought, in the first act, that I knew where the twists were, so maybe that was why I wasn't feeling what I remembered so vividly feeling at Sundance. But then, it got me all over again. I was, I admit, able to stop crying for these people before the credits rolled out this time. And I should probably note, I am not a victim of any sexual mistreatment, nor is any member of my immediate family, as best I know. But the tears, they came. And a conversation with a friend who had suffered this fate went places after this film that the conversation hadn't ever gone before. No other film touched my soul as deeply this year. Thank you, Tim Roth. Thank you for having the courage of your convictions. If there is any similarity between all of the films in my Top 20, it is that.

My thanks to all these filmmakers. You made 1999 a great year for the art form I love most dearly. I couldn't be more grateful.

E ME: Whaddya think?