Party like it’s 1999: 10 movies that encapsulate one of the greatest years for cinema

It was the year when arthouse brains met Hollywood brawn. But what made the last 12 months of the 90s so special? These films tell the story

In 1999, cinemagoers flocked to watch The Talented Mr Ripley, in which Jude Law smoked cigarettes in a lazily buttoned linen shirt. The same year, they could also watch the actor getting a socket stamped into the base of his spine so he could play a video game. In David Cronenberg’s Existenz, Law’s character is fitted with a gnarly looking “UmbyCord” and hooked up to a creepy, pulsing virtual reality game “pod” that mines his nervous system for data as he plays. While plugged in, the player is unable to take stock of the “real” world outside. “You won’t be able to stop yourself, so you might as well enjoy it,” says the game’s creator, a line that feels spookily resonant today.

I am certainly not the first person to notice that 1999 was a great year for film. At the time, Entertainment Weekly ran a piece with the headline: 1999: The Year That Changed Movies, declaring it the year “all the old, boring rules about cinema started to crumble”. It’s not that films such as The Virgin Suicides, The Sixth Sense and Fight Club are better than everything else that came before or after, but that 1999’s harvest was a bumper crop. That year’s freakish climate saw cross-pollination between Hollywood studios with money and independent-minded film-makers with vision. It was a period that saw cinema creating the culture instead of second-guessing it.

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