Looking back, it seems like damn near every decade that we’ve been tinkering with motion pictures has had its contribution to the seemingly omnipresent question of “what is the best ever year in movies?” 1915 brought about the birth of the blockbuster (although hardly the modern-day filmmaking tentpole we’re more familiar with since the mid-1970s) with the monumentally important — yet also deeply racist, uncomfortably revisionist and vitriol-infused — nakedly propagandistic Birth of a Nation, although special shout-outs need also go out to Cecil B. DeMille’s surprisingly modern-feeling crime thriller The Cheat, no less than two adaptations of the novella Carmen, the Ince-backed immigrant’s story The Italian and the war-swept romance The Captive. 1927 saw the development of synchronized sound, ala Sunrise, talkies, ala The Jazz Singer, ambitious genre epics, ala Metropolis, historical epics ala Napoleon and the first-ever Oscar Best Picture winner Wings.
1931 saw the birth of the classic Universal Horror franchises, spear-headed by Dracula, it’s Spanish language Drácula and Frankenstein, as well as the cerebral M, the star-making Platinum Blonde, the original Maltese Falcon and the crowd-pleasing City Lights, although 1939, which gave us The Wizard of Oz, the Birth of a Nation-adjacent Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the quintessential Stagecoach, ahead of its time The Women and the worldly Rules of the Game is likewise temping. Although for the following decade it’s tempting to go with 1941 — the year which gave us Citizen Kane, the version of The Maltese Falcon that people lovingly remember, Sullivan’s Travels, The Lady Eve and The Wolf Man — or with 1942 — the year which gave us Casablanca, The Magnificent Ambersons and Cat People — the real prize from this decade was 1940: a remarkable 12-month stretch that gave us Chaplin’s first talkie in The Great Dictator, His Girl Friday, The Grapes of Wrath, Shop Round the Corner (which went on to be remade into You’ve Got Mail), Pinnochio and the proto-RomCom The Philadelphia Story.
1953 and 1954 are a tough couple of years to choose between, because they marked both some of the greatest releases in studio-system Hollywood and a rise in the post-war Japanese film industry, which to date remains one of the most compelling outpourings of creative energy in modern history. And while I like 1953’s lineup of late noir The Big Heat, Disney-branded Peter Pan, iconic Shane, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s grossly underrated Gate of Hell, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story and Kenji Mizoguchi’s all-time best Ugetsu, I ultimately have to side with 1954 as the superior year, as it gave us no less than two Hitchcock movies (Dial M for Murder and Rear Window), the twisting Drive a Crooked Road, the first Godzilla, Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff, Akira Kurosawa’s all-time best (and my all-time favorite movie) Seven Samurai, Federico Fellini’s La Strada and the seminal White Christmas. And while its similarly compelling to give the following decade’s best-of mantle to cineaste-favorite year 1967 — which saw the release of In Cold Blood, In the Heat of the Night, Cool Hand Luke, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, The Jungle Book, Le Samouri and The Producers — nothing it it can possibly hold a candle to 1960’s unparalleled release of Psycho, Peeping Tom, Breathless, Eyes without a Face, The Magnificent Seven (a Western genre remake of Kurosawa’s aforementioned Seven Samurai) and The Virgin Spring (not to mention Spartacus if you’re feeling particularly charitable).
1979 is an understandable favorite among moviegoers. After all, Alien, Apocalypse Now, The Jerk, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, The Castle of Cagliostro (the first Miyazaki-directed feature), the first Mad Max, the Herzog-directed remake of Nosferatu and cult-classic Phantasm and Zombi 2 all came out during it. Similarly, the 1980’s have 1982, which gave us genre fare like Blade Runner, E.T., The Thing, Poltergeist, Tenebrae, Tron, Creepshow and more (although 1989’s strung-together releases Do the Right Thing, The Little Mermaid, Kiki’s Delivery Service and Christmas Vacation are similarly impressive). And while several years in the 90 could take the prize, most seem to agree that 1994 — with Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, two of the acclaimed Three Colors trilogy entries, The Lion King, The Crow, Chungking Express, New Nightmare and high-octane Speed — is the one to beat.
The 2000s saw a clear favorite in 2007, a year which conspired to give us No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, , Zodiac, Juno, Superbad, The Simpsons Movie, Sweeney Todd and a series of underrated genre flicks that include 1408, Enchanted, Hairspray and Sunshine. The 2010s have been a tremendous year for filmmaking, but I don’t think anything else could possibly edge out 2014, which included beloved Marvel entries Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy, arthouse horror-adjacent movies like Nightcrawler, Under the Skin and Enemy, action-packed features like The Raid 2 and X-Men: First Class, serious dramas like Boyhood, Whiplash, Foxcatcher and Gone Girl and animated treasures like The Lego Movie and When Marnie Was There (and, trust me, I could go on and on and on and on about this singular year of impeccable filmmaking).
Going on twenty years after the fact, however, there has been a massive deluge among film writers and more broadly defined cineastes that the single one-and-only best year in all of moviedom was 1999: an odd choice in as much as I never seem to have heard it brought up in similar conversations over the years. No less a great personage than Edward Norton (whose appearance in Fight Club did much to define that year in filmmaking), opined that there really hadn’t been a 12-month span of time, either before or since, “that had more really original young filmmakers tapping into the zeitgeist.”
And, to be fair, 1999 was a pretty great year, all told, and saw a lot of touchstone features and emerging filmmakers at a unique crossroad between our online and offline, increasingly global, turn-of-the-century culture. There was, of course, the first Matrix film, which wholly defined the look, feel, sound and general presence of studio-produced blockbusters of the 2000s just as The Avengers did for the 2010s, whose readings only get more and more fascinating as time goes on as we learn more about its unique construction and the singular women who conceived of it in the first place. There was also Alexander Payne’s Election, about an over-qualified but somehow unlikeable young woman running for class president whose male overseer on the faculty, repulsed at the prospect of having to work with her despite being heads and shoulders above all of her competition, rigs the school election to keep her out of student government despite her winning the popular vote, is cryptically prescient for our most recent presidential election (although, thankfully, the move at least ends with justice being meted out when all was said and done).
1999 saw the rise of M Night Shyamalan as a serious up-and-coming director with his second-best film to date, The Sixth Sense, as well as the best entries in the Toy Story franchise (Toy Story 2) and Kevin Smith-directed Askewniverse (Dogma). We saw disturbing deconstructions of toxic masculinity in Fight Club and of female codependence in Audition. We saw bizarre arthouse oddities like Being John Malkovich released alongside nakedly quotable crowd pleasers (at least for coming-of-age cineastes) like The Boondock Saints. There were all-time great genre entries like The Blair Witch Project, The Mummy, The Iron Giant and Galaxy Quest as well as complicated (but, retroactively, deeply uncomfortable) movies like American Beauty or the big-screen continuation of South Park.
Seriously, Folks, there were a LOT of great movies in this one year, and I’ve only just scratched the surface of them all!
But is it that greatest year for movies? That is, after all, the question at hand that every internet film buff worth their salt is trying to answer. Is 1999 not just a good or even great year in movies, but the hands-down best one that somehow beats out 1927, 1931, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1953, 1954, 1960, 1967, 1979, 1982, 1989, 1994, 2007 AND 2014?
Well… no: not if I’m being honest here. 1999 is an uncommonly great year for movies, and in particular for mainstream, sometimes-global, still-popular movies. It was uniquely positioned at the crux between the last and present centuries, between two emerging generations of filmmakers, between two distinct styles of filmmaking. It was a time when Romantic Comedies weren’t considered a dead genre, when we didn’t have to grapple with the complexities (nor benefits) of Netflix and other online streamers. In fact, the internet was in its popular infancy, just emerging enough at that point as to fuel the growing, geographically disparate “geek culture” that would soon latch onto the Star Wars prequels, Matrix sequels and everything in between, for good or for ill. It was certainly a more diverse time to be going to the movies on a Friday night, that’s for sure, but was it necessarily better?
With as often as critics and cultural commentators are accused of being literal cinema snobs, it might come as a surprise to find somebody like myself saying that movies are as good now as they’ve ever been. I mean that, too: the movies today — though undeniably different in tone, style, text, subtext, aesthetic and sensibilities — are qualitatively the same kind of ephemeral magic that you could find in the slapstick of the 1920s, horror of the 1930s, noir of the 1940s, studio productions of the 1950s, transitional films of the 1960s, New Hollywood of the 1970s, emerging blockbusters of the 1980s, slick genre flicks of the 1990s, prestige pictures of the 2000s and every last little thing from the 2010s. It all depends on what kind of movie it is that you’re looking for, but I honestly couldn’t begin to place one decade over the other. To use the words of Jonathon Rosenbaum, doing so would be “tantamount to ranking oranges over apples or declaring cherries superior to grapes.” It all depends on what type of movie you have a taste for at a given moment.