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1999 – The Best Movie Year Ever

The Matrix. The Sixth Sense. Fight Club. The Insider. Magnolia. Need I say more. For various reasons, the last year of the millennium saw an outpouring of auteur-driven filmmaking. Movie genres were redefined: was The Sixth Sense a horror, thriller or ghost story? What was Fight Club or Being John Malkovich? And new genres were invented like the horror pseudo-documentary – The Blair Witch Project.  

Part of this creative outpouring could be traced back to Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 Pulp Fiction. It was a critical and box office success which gave studios the confidence to experiment with less conventional movies for years to come.  

The decade also saw the increasing anxiety amongst the middle classes, especially men, which allowed movies like Fight Club, American Beauty and Office to touch a nerve. Then there was the rise of the internet and fears of the Y2K bug that set the stage for The Matrix. Finally, the year saw the return of heavyweight directors like Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut), and Terence Malick (Thin Red Line). It also saw the debut of Christopher Nolan with his film Following.  

I learnt all this in Brian Raftery’s excellent ‘Best.Movie.Year.Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen’. It’s packed with anecdotes and insights on the top movies of that year. Did you know that the first choices to play Neo in The Matrix were Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Sandra Bullock. In the end, it went to Keanu Reeves. Even funnier was that Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered for the Morpheus character (it went to Lawrence Fishburne).  

At the time, many thought 1999 would mark the beginning of a golden era for movies, but instead, it signaled the peak. Y2K, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war resulted in audiences to prefer escapism to being challenged. The rise of the Chinese film audience required less nuance and the success of 2002’s Spiderman began the CGI superhero movie juggernaut. Then there was the shift of creative talent to TV. 1999 was the debut year for The Sopranos and The West Wing.  

While the golden era never happened, at least we have the movies made in 1999 – here’s a more complete list to enjoy: 

The Sixth Sense 

Boys Don’t Cry 

American Beauty 

The Insider 

Being John Malkovich 

The Matrix 

Magnolia 

Fight Club 

Three Kings 

Run Lola Run 

The Blair Witch Project 

Eyes Wide Shut 

Thin Red Line 

Girl, Interrupted 

Office Space 

10 Things I Hate About You 

The Best Man 

Star Wars Phantom Menace 

The Limey 

All About My Mother 

American Pie 

Election 

Rushmore 

The Virgin Suicides

Enjoy, Bilal.



Bilal Hafeez
 is the CEO and Editor of Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.

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