1980

Classics
Airplane! (dir. Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker)
The Blues Brothers (dir. John Landis)
The Elephant Man (dir. David Lynch)
The Empire Strikes Back (dir. Irvin Kershner)
Raging Bull (dir. Martin Scorsese)
Ordinary People (dir. Robert Redford)
The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Superman II (dir. Richard Donner and Richard Lester)

Other Notables
9 to 5 (dir. Colin Higgins)
Altered States (dir. Ken Russell)
The Blue Lagoon (dir. Randal Kleiser)
Caddyshack (dir. Harold Ramis)
Coal Miner’s Daughter (dir. Michael Apted)
Dressed to Kill (dir. Brian De Palma)
Fame (dir. Alan Parker)
Flash Gordon (dir. Mike Hodges)
Gloria (dir. John Cassavetes)
Heaven’s Gate (dir. Michael Cimino)
Private Benjamin (dir. Howard Zieff)
Seems Like Old Times (dir. Jay Sandrich)
Somewhere in Time (dir. Jeannot Szwarc)
Stardust Memories (dir. Woody Allen)
Stir Crazy (dir. Sidney Poitier)
The Stunt Man (dir. Richard Rush)
Urban Cowboy (dir. James Bridges)

This list illustrates the clash between the auteur driven films of the 1970s with what was coming in the 1980s. The ballooning costs and the box office failure of Heaven’s Gate nearly bankrupted United Artists and sparked studios’ money people pulling the reins back from directors. Still, two of the greats, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, delivered masterpieces that subverted genre and molded outside source material into searing personal statements. Both The Shining and Raging Bull examined flawed men losing themselves to anger and terrorizing their families. Kubrick wisely downplayed the supernatural elements in Stephen King’s book to make the real horror come from Jack Torrance’s personal demons. Scorsese stripped down boxing to its essence and asked what type of man would submit himself to such punishment. Each evoked primal career-defining work from their respective leads, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro.

The year also featured established figures making daring choices. Mel Brooks took a step away from his bawdy slapstick comedies to produce The Elephant Man, directed by a young, unproven David Lynch. Robert Redford made his directorial debut by not appearing on camera at all in Ordinary People. He also cast America’s Sweetheart, Mary Tyler Moore, against type, as a cold uncaring mother. Those risks all paid off handsomely in films with complicated dynamics and raw, powerful performances.

On the other side, we see the increased reliance on sequels with two of the best, The Empire Strikes Back and Superman II. Both films went deeper than their respective predecessors and broadened their worlds. Rather than rehashing old stories, they challenged their characters, and by extension, the actors playing them. Christopher Reeve showed his range through reprising the Man of Steel, while also playing a romantic lead in the underappreciated time-travel film Somewhere in Time.

Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker invented a new type of comedy with Airplane! The never ending stream of jokes combined with the genre satire had been done well before by Mel Brooks, but the “ZAZ” team tweaked the formula by having their actors play their scenes straight, and letting laughs come from the absurdity of the dialogue spoken dramatically.

The Blues Brothers, with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and Caddyshack, with Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, was a sign of the growing influence of “Saturday Night Live” on film comedy, which would be felt particularly in the 1980s. SNL and its Canadian counterpart, Second City TV, would also prove to be a stepping stone for other future movie stars of the decade, including Eddie Murphy and John Candy.



1981

Classics
Absence of Malice (dir. Sydney Pollack)
Arthur (dir. Steve Gordon)
Atlantic City (dir. Louis Malle)
Blow Out (dir. Brian De Palma)
Body Heat (dir. Lawrence Kasdan)
Chariots of Fire (dir. Hugh Hudson)
The Great Muppet Caper (dir. Jim Henson)
Prince of the City (dir. Sidney Lumet)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (dir. Steven Spielberg)
Reds (dir. Warren Beatty)
Stripes (dir. Ivan Reitman)

Other Notables
Cattle Annie and Little Britches (dir. Lamont Johnson)
Continental Divide (dir. Michael Apted)
Das Boot (dir. Wolfgang Petersen)
For Your Eyes Only (dir. John Glen)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (dir. Karel Reisz)
Escape from New York (dir. John Carpenter)
History of the World, Part I (dir. Mel Brooks)
On Golden Pond (dir. Mark Rydell)
Ragtime (dir. Milos Forman)
Scanners (dir. David Cronenberg)
Taps (dir. Harold Becker)
Thief (dir. Michael Mann)
Time Bandits (dir. Terry Gilliam)

1981 doesn’t garner as much attention as 1980, but it’s a sneaky good film year. Raiders of the Lost Ark set a standard for adventure movies that still holds today. The film further cemented Spielberg and co-creator George Lucas as masters of popular entertainment. Harrison Ford, a second choice after Tom Selleck wasn’t available, became the thinking man’s action hero. The film’s co-writer, Lawrence Kasdan, also wrote and directed Body Heat, which brought film noir into modern times, while also making William Hurt and Kathleen Turner stars.

Two of the year’s most acclaimed movies were also its unlikeliest. Chariots of Fire, a film with no movie stars about the U.K.’s 1924 Olympic track team, might not even get made today, but, in part thanks to a killer score, it won at the box office and at the Oscars. So did Reds, a three hour plus epic about Russia’s Communist revolution, coming out in the same year Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.

Not so fortunate were Blow Out and Prince of the City, both of which were critically lauded but underperformed with audiences. Brian De Palma and Sidney Lumet both delved deep into themes that they explored before, but in unique ways. Over time each film was gradually rediscovered, with Quentin Tarantino championing Blow Out. I wrote about Prince of the City a few years ago in a column about Lumet.

Some older stars had a renaissance. Paul Newman, who had an uneven 1970s, showed a different side of himself in Absence of Malice. So did Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City, excelling as a broken man whose life has passed him by. Of course the most remembered is Henry Fonda capping his career, and winning a long overdue Oscar, with his bravura turn in On Golden Pond. He and Katharine Hepburn, who strangely had never worked together before, had an instant chemistry. Fonda’s scenes with his daughter Jane had an added poignancy given their at times strained relationship in real life. Milos Forman brought James Cagney out of retirement for Ragtime, which would be that legend’s final film.

While these stars were exiting, Taps introduced audiences to Tom Cruise and Sean Penn. And Michael Mann launched his career with the taut thriller Thief, looking at crime as a profession, a theme he would return to often in his later films.




1984

Classics
Amadeus (dir. Milos Forman)
Blood Simple (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)
Body Double (dir. Brian de Palma)
Ghostbusters (dir. Ivan Reitman)
The Karate Kid (dir. John G. Avildsen)
The Natural (dir. Barry Levinson)
Once Upon a Time in America (dir. Sergio Leone)
Starman (dir. John Carpenter)
The Terminator (dir. James Cameron)
This is Spinal Tap (dir. Rob Reiner)
Splash (dir. Ron Howard)
Stranger Than Paradise (dir. Jim Jarmusch)

Other Notables
1984 (dir. Michael Radford)
2010: The Year We Make Contact (dir. Peter Hyams)
All of Me (dir. Carl Reiner)
Bachelor Party (dir. Neal Israel)
Beverly Hills Cop (dir. Martin Brest)
Broadway Danny Rose (dir. Woody Allen)
The Brother From Another Planet (dir. John Sayles)
Cloak and Dagger (dir. Richard Franklin)
Footloose (dir. Herbert Ross)
The Gods Must be Crazy (dir. Jamie Uys)
Gremlins (dir. Joe Dante)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (dir. Steven Spielberg)
The Killing Fields (dir. Roland Joffé)
The Muppets Take Manhattan (dir. Frank Oz)
The NeverEnding Story (dir. Wolfgang Petersen)
A Passage to India (dir. David Lean)
Places in the Heart (dir. Robert Benton)
Purple Rain (dir. Albert Magnoli)
Romancing the Stone (dir. Robert Zemeckis)
A Soldier’s Story (dir. Norman Jewison)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (dir. Leonard Nimoy)
Swing Shift (dir. Jonathan Demme)
The Times of Harvey Milk (dir. Rob Epstein)
Top Secret! (dir. Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker)
Under the Volcano (dir. John Huston)

When I remember the 1980s, I think of big crowd-pleasing films, and 1984 had a bounty of those. Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, The Natural, Beverly Hills Cop, Gremlins and Footloose were all fun, entertaining movies that not only made tons of money, but also remain part of pop culture to this day. Neither Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom nor Star Trek III: The Search for Spock were the best films in their respective franchises, but they both were solid hits that kept their respective series going.

Exciting new talent both behind and in front of the camera also filled the year. The Coen brothers’ debut, the neo-noir Blood Simple, already featured many of the staples that would define their filmography, including dark humor, Carter Burwell’s music, and Frances McDormand as part of an underrated ensemble cast. James Cameron displayed his talents with The Terminator, fusing horror and sci-fi, and making a star out of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Rob Reiner was still known as “Meathead,” but made his directorial debut with Spinal Tap, still the sharpest and funniest satire of rock music. The film also pioneered the “mockumentary” style that one its stars, Christopher Guest, would refine throughout his career.

Reiner’s fellow 70s sitcom star Ron Howard was also establishing himself as a director with his third film, the romantic comedy Splash, starring a then-80s sitcom star named Tom Hanks. Splash began a decades-long partnership between Howard and Hanks. With that film, and the much less funny but still successful Bachelor Party, Hanks made the leap to movie stardom. He already had the everyman quality that made audiences identify with him. Denzel Washington, another TV star at the time, stole all of his scenes in A Soldier’s Story, showing all the intensity and gravitas would define his later work.

In the midst of all of these fresh faces, two legends made their swan songs. David Lean’s A Passage to India may not have had the pull of his best work, but it still had the epic scope you would expect along with an anti-colonialist message you might not. Sergio Leone poured his heart and soul into Once Upon a Time in America, only to see it chopped up by his studio, and then have critics ravage the abridged version of the film, which also bombed with audiences. In the 90s, well after Leone’s death, his vision of the film was restored and given its proper due. A forerunner to The Irishman many years later, Once Upon a Time in America played organized crime as a grand tragedy of guilt and regret. It’s a bold, visually stunning and haunting film.




1994

Classics
Clerks (dir. Kevin Smith)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (dir. Mike Newell)
Ed Wood (dir. Tim Burton)
Forrest Gump (dir. Robert Zemeckis)
Hoop Dreams (dir. Steve James)
The Lion King (dir. Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff)
Nobody’s Fool (dir. Robert Benton)
Pulp Fiction (dir. Quentin Tarantino)
Quiz Show (dir. Robert Redford)
The Shawshank Redemption (dir. Frank Darabont)

Other Notables
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (dir. Tom Shadyac)
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (dir. Stephan Elliott)
Bullets Over Broadway (dir. Woody Allen)
Clear and Present Danger (dir. Phillip Noyce)
Dumb and Dumber (dir. Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly)
Eat Drink Man Woman (dir. Ang Lee)
The Crow (dir. Alex Proyas)
Heavenly Creatures (dir. Peter Jackson)
Interview With the Vampire (dir. Neil Jordan)
The Madness of King George (dir. Nicholas Hytner)
The Mask (dir. Chuck Russell)
Maverick (dir. Richard Donner)
Little Women (dir. Gillian Armstrong)
The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (dir. Peter Segal)
Natural Born Killers (dir. Oliver Stone)
The Paper (dir. Ron Howard)
The Professional (dir. Luc Besson)
Reality Bites (dir. Ben Stiller)
Speed (dir. Jan De Bont)
Three Colors: Red (dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski)
True Lies (dir. James Cameron)

The independent film scene was growing in the late 80s and early 90s, but in 1994 it became the main attraction. The films of Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith and their comrades seemed to capture popular taste more than much of what was coming out of mainstream Hollywood. Tarantino had already been someone to watch after his inventive and cool Reservoir Dogs, but took matters even further with Pulp Fiction. He reimagined how a story would be told, subverting the standard idea of a beginning, middle and an end. His characters were as pop culturally aware as the audiences. The dialogue, soundtrack and the images crackled with a singular energy. Not only did Tarantino rediscover John Travolta, but he found his perfect actor in Samuel L. Jackson. Tarantino’s words and Jackson’s delivery seemed destined to go together. Jackson dominated every moment he was onscreen, as he would do often over the next 25 years.

Kevin Smith captured another part of the indie scene. Smith had an affinity for the guys who would spend hours arguing over comic books and Star Wars. He was one of these fanboys, and he made his films for them. While I bought a poster of Pulp Fiction to hang on my wall, Clerks had a funnier version of discussions I would have with friends.

The rise in indie film led to more opportunities and more awareness for documentary filmmakers. Steve James took a huge chance with Hoop Dreams, spending years with two high school athletes in Chicago. The uncommon access that James had with these athletes and their families made us feel like we were there with them. Audiences responded, becoming engrossed by these young men and their story.

Of course the year was more than just the indie scene. Robert Zemeckis may have been more traditional with Forrest Gump, but he was no less ambitious. He used Winston Groom’s novel, then-cutting edge technology and the Gump character for a nostalgic look at America’s history from the 50s to the 80s. Tom Hanks went from a movie star to an icon, embodying the decency America wished it had. After the financial success of the Batman films, Tim Burton used his cache for his most personal film, Ed Wood, a tender, funny biopic about “The Worst Director in History.” The Shawshank Redemption did not connect with audiences in its theatrical release, but repeated TV showings have since turned this earnest, touching prison movie into a beloved staple.

Disney’s early 90’s resurgence continued with The Lion King, which was also a high water mark for old-school animation before computer animation became dominant. Speaking of animated, Jim Carrey exploded this year with three films (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber) putting him on his way to being the decade’s leading funnyman.




1997

Classics
4 Little Girls (dir. Spike Lee)
As Good as it Gets (dir. James L. Brooks)
Boogie Nights (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Eve’s Bayou (dir. Kasi Lemmons)
Good Will Hunting (dir. Gus Van Sant)
Jackie Brown (dir. Quentin Tarantino)
L.A. Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson)
Men in Black (dir. Barry Sonnenfeld)
The Sweet Hereafter (dir. Atom Egoyan)
Titanic (dir. James Cameron)
Wag the Dog (dir. Barry Levinson)

Other Notables
Air Force One (dir. Wolfgang Petersen)
Amistad (dir. Steven Spielberg)
The Apostle (dir. Robert Duvall)
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (dir. Jay Roach)
Chasing Amy (dir. Kevin Smith)
Deconstructing Harry (dir. Woody Allen)
Donnie Brasco (dir. Mike Newell)
Face/Off (dir. John Woo)
The Fifth Element (dir. Luc Besson)
The Full Monty (dir. Peter Cattaneo)
Gattaca (dir. Andrew Niccol)
Grosse Pointe Blank (dir. George Armitage)
In & Out (dir. Frank Oz)
Kundun (dir. Martin Scorsese)
Liar, Liar (dir. Tom Shadyac)
Men with Guns (dir. John Sayles)
Mrs. Brown (dir. John Madden)
My Best Friend’s Wedding (dir. P.J. Hogan)
Soul Food (dir. George Tillman Jr.)
Tomorrow Never Dies (dir. Roger Spottiswoode)
Ulee’s Gold (dir. Victor Nunez)
Wild Man Blues (dir. Barbara Kopple)

Titanic consumed so much attention in 1997, and still does in remembering that year. For all its flaws, the simplicity of the story and the complexity of the visual effects still hold up. But beyond Titanic, 1997 was an eclectic year that had something for everyone. L.A. Confidential hearkened back to Chinatown in its layered tale of police corruption. Russell Crowe proved his chops as a leading man amongst an exemplary ensemble. Jack Nicholson’s biting and funny turn as a misanthropic author in As Good As it Gets echoed some of his signature work in the 70s. His former Easy Rider colleague Peter Fonda reemerged in Ulee’s Gold with an understated performance reminiscent of his legendary father Henry.

The year had its share of promising newcomers. Kasi Lemmons transported audiences to 1960s Louisiana in her engrossing family drama Eve’s Bayou, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. Paul Thomas Anderson found both comedy and pathos in the 70s/80s porn scene in his daring second effort, Boogie Nights, another film I’ve explored in-depth. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had worked in movies before, but had to write their own film, Good Will Hunting, to become stars.

Audiences looking for laughs had plenty of great choices, be it the biting and prescient political satire in Wag the Dog, or Mike Myers skewering Bond films and the London 60s in Austin Powers. Barry Sonnenfeld deftly blended action, sci-fi and comedy in Men in Black, making the most of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith’s odd couple chemistry. John Cusack somehow made a hitman funny in Grosse Pointe Blank. In & Out was one of the first films to have fun with people’s attitudes about homosexuality without making homosexuals themselves the subject of ridicule.

Legendary Hong Kong action director John Woo had worked in the US before, but Face/Off was the first real American “John Woo movie.” Woo fully tapped his balletic, kinetic style in service of a blissfully over-the-top story and performances. Tomorrow Never Dies was the high point of Pierce Brosnan’s Bond tenure, helped by Michelle Yeoh as the first Bond girl that could likely beat him in a fight.

Spike Lee has never gotten the credit he deserves as a documentarian, but 4 Little Girls ranks among his most powerful films. His measured look at the 1963 Birmingham church bombing placed the attack in the context of the larger civil rights struggle. It also took the time to show who these four girls were, which only deepened our understanding of the immense tragedy in their murders.




1999

Classics
All About My Mother (dir. Pedro Almodóvar)
American Beauty (dir. Sam Mendes)
Being John Malkovich (dir. Spike Jonze)
Boys Don’t Cry (dir. Kimberly Peirce)
Galaxy Quest (dir. Dean Parisot)
Election (dir. Alexander Payne)
Fight Club (dir. David Fincher)
The Limey (dir. Steven Soderbergh)
The Insider (dir. Michael Mann)
Man on the Moon (dir. Milos Forman)
The Matrix (dir. Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski)
Office Space (dir. Mike Judge)
The Sixth Sense (dir. M. Night Shyamalan)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (dir. Anthony Minghella)
Three Kings (dir. David O. Russell)
Toy Story 2 (dir. John Lasseter, Ash Brannon and Lee Unkrich)

Other Notables
Analyze This (dir. Harold Ramis)
Any Given Sunday (dir. Oliver Stone)
The Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez)
Bowfinger (dir. Frank Oz)
Bringing Out the Dead (dir. Martin Scorsese)
Cookie’s Fortune (dir. Robert Altman)
The Cider House Rules (dir. Lasse Hallström)
The End of the Affair (dir. Neil Jordan)
eXistenZ (dir. David Cronenberg)
Eyes Wide Shut (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (dir. Jim Jarmusch)
Go (dir. Doug Liman)
The Green Mile (dir. Frank Darabont)
The Hurricane (dir. Norman Jewison)
The Iron Giant (dir. Brad Bird)
Limbo (dir. John Sayles)
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (dir. Guy Ritchie)
Magnolia (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
The Mummy (dir. Stephen Sommers)
One Day in September (dir. Kevin Macdonald)
The Red Violin (dir. François Girard)
Run Lola Run (dir. Tom Twyker)
Sleepy Hollow (dir. Tim Burton)
Snow Falling on Cedars (dir. Scott Hicks)
South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (dir. Trey Parker and Matt Stone)
Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace (dir. George Lucas)
The Straight Story (dir. David Lynch)
Summer of Sam (dir. Spike Lee)
Sweet and Lowdown (dir. Woody Allen)
Topsy-Turvy (dir. Mike Leigh)

If you have not read Brian Raftery’s Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen go find it now. He makes a very persuasive case as to why 1999, even more than 1939 or other years I’ve examined in this series, was the time when we saw the most innovative and creative films. I’m going to try to avoid restating the same points Raftery made much more effectively. For a second, just look at the number of films on the “Classics” list. You can argue about a couple here and there, but overall these are films that have lasted. Critics and audiences keep going back to them in part because these films took chances and also because on some level, they connected with how people were feeling.

In many different ways, several 1999 films tapped into a discontent younger people in particular had, a rumbling underneath a prosperous America. The characters in these films wanted to change who they were and their reality. The most severe form was the red pill in The Matrix, but it could also be inventing a new version of yourself (Fight Club), assuming your friend’s identity (The Talented Mr. Ripley), changing your gender (Boys Don’t Cry), immersing yourself in a video game character (eXistenZ), quitting your dead-end job (American Beauty), or sabotaging your dead-end job (Office Space).

Perhaps you could also jump into a movie star’s head, as the people in Being John Malkovich did. Director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman gambled that people would come along with a crazy idea, without even trying to explain how it worked. We were just asked to accept it, and we did. They were not the only ones who gambled on unconventional storytelling. The “found footage” style of The Blair Witch Project has been copied so much by now that it’s long since become stale, but in that film it was new and terrifying. The Sixth Sense seemed like a more traditional scary film, but revealing that a lead character was dead for almost the whole movie was boundary pushing in its own way.

1999 also was the year that the Tarantino influence came to full fruition. Go and The Limey both played with time in very nonlinear storytelling. Tom Twyker took this step one step further in the frenetic Run Lola Run. He told a story, literally rewound it in the film and told it two more times, while changing key details. Newcomer Guy Ritchie became the British Tarantino with his rollicking, funny, violent crime film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

The old masters also had their say. George Lucas’s Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace did polarize both critics and fans, but it successfully restarted the franchise. David Lynch went in a completely new direction with the sweet, poignant The Straight Story. Stanley Kubrick died before the release of Eyes Wide Shut, but his bizarre, dreamlike sexual odyssey proved that he could be more controversial in death than most filmmakers could alive.




2004

Classics
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (dir. Adam McKay)
The Aviator (dir. Martin Scorsese)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (dir. Michel Gondry)
The Incredibles (dir. Brad Bird)
Kill Bill, Volume II (dir. Quentin Tarantino)
Million Dollar Baby (dir. Clint Eastwood)
Napoleon Dynamite (dir. Jared Hess)
Shaun of the Dead (dir. Edgar Wright)
Sideways (dir. Alexander Payne)
Spider-Man 2 (dir. Sam Raimi)

Other Notables
Before Sunset (dir. Richard Linklater)
Being Julia (dir. István Szabó)
The Bourne Supremacy (dir. Paul Greengrass)
Campfire (dir. Joseph Cedar)
Cellular (dir. David R. Ellis)
Closer (dir. Mike Nichols)
Collateral (dir. Michael Mann)
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber)
Downfall (dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel)
Fahrenheit 9/11 (dir. Michael Mann)
Finding Neverland (dir. Marc Forster)
Garden State (dir. Zach Braff)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (dir. Alfonso Cuarón)
Hellboy (dir. Guillermo del Toro)
Hotel Rwanda (dir. Terry George)
In Good Company (dir. Paul Weitz)
Kinsey (dir. Bill Condon)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (dir. Wes Anderson)
Maria Full of Grace (dir. Joshua Marston)
Mean Creek (dir. Jacob Estes)
Mean Girls (dir. Mark Waters)
The Motorcycle Diaries (dir. Walter Salles)
Open Water (dir. Chris Kentis)
P.S. (dir. Dylan Kidd)
Ray (dir. Taylor Hackford)
The Sea Inside (dir. Alejandro Amenábar)
Secret Window (dir. David Koepp)
Shrek 2 (dir. Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson)
Silver City (dir. John Sayles)
Super Size Me (dir. Morgan Spurlock)
Team America: World Police (dir. Trey Parker and Matt Stone)
The Terminal (dir. Steven Spielberg)
Turn Left at the End of the World (dir. Avi Nesher)
Vera Drake (dir. Mike Leigh)
A Very Long Engagement (dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

My final year in this column and this series, blends the best of the new and the traditional. Older filmmakers such as Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese showed they hadn’t lost a step. Million Dollar Baby continued what Eastwood started with Unforgiven, challenging the models of masculinity and toughness that he thrived on in his younger days. He even ventured into Scorsese territory, examining questions of faith and morality. As always, Eastwood drew out exquisite performances, with both Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman winning Oscars.

Scorsese went really old-school in The Aviator, his biopic of Howard Hughes, recreating old Hollywood and giving the first part of the film a Technicolor sheen. Cate Blanchett completely captured Katherine Hepburn in an Oscar-winning turn. Scorsese went to more familiar territory in exploring Hughes’s demons that eventually consumed him.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Michel Gondry’s inventive work in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, spending much of the movie inside a character’s brain and memories. Gondry’s direction of Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant script challenged the audience to keep up, and played with how we were thinking about their story. The Pixar team continued to improve, using their computer animation on human beings for the first time with The Incredibles, which told a funny and compelling superhero story while also poking fun at the genre staples.

The year boasted many other hilarious comedies ranging from the indie quirky (Napoleon Dynamite), to the broad and satirical (Anchorman, Dodgeball), to the family friendly (Shrek 2) to the more moving and humanistic (Sideways), to the anarchic (Team America), to the wistful (Steve Zissou). The variety and depth here showed not only the immense talent behind these films, but also that comedy itself was growing in many different directions.

Comedy even found its way into documentaries. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 became the first documentary ever to make more than $100 million at the box office. Since his start, Moore had used humor to make his points, changing what we expect from this art form. Now others followed his lead including Morgan Spurlock with Super Size Me. Spurlock used a gimmick, eating nothing but McDonalds for a month, for laughs, but also to make a point about how harmful this food can be.


When I started this series, my goal was to consider the films of 1939, often held up as movie’s greatest year, but also to challenge that idea by focusing on other great film years. Revisiting these years has been fun and illuminating. Gun to my head, I would probably go with 1999 as the best, given the sheer quantity of the quality. In the end though, all of these years have so much to offer. If you see films on these lists you may have missed, please go back and find them. The best films stay alive both by fans revisiting them and by new viewers discovering them for the first time. If any of these columns inspires you to see one of these films, than this will all be worth it.


Adam Spector
January 1, 2020

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