1. Run Lola Run
2. The Straight Story
3. All About My Mother
4. The Dreamlife of Angels
5. The Insider
6. Three Kings
7. The Sixth Sense
8. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
9. Being John Malkovich
10. Any Given Sunday

Last year was not a good year for the movies. At best, it yielded only a few "great" movies, and from what I've seen, there is little hope that the future will reverse this trend. What it did produce seemed deeply influenced by the freedom of the independent films and thus we got movies that were off-beat, sometimes weird and deeply flawed, and that may be harbingers of the kinds of movies to come in the new century.

Proof that the year was, at best, a mixed bag can be found in the Top Ten lists from the major critics and their organizations. There was so little unanimity among their top choices, it suggests near chaos, while grotesqueries were found on almost every list, with, for once, the mainstream critics having the edge of what was at least entertaining as opposed to those films with a few good moments floating in a sea of intellectual sludge.

Back to the notion of the deeply flawed film as characteristic of 1999's output. Think about it for a moment. About the movies that started with a bang and then fell apart, as if from a failure of nerve or a fear of failure at the box office: American Beauty; Being John Malkovich; Twin Falls, Idaho. The Dada cloud cuckooland director Spike Jonze sustains Malkovich for two-thirds its length, until the screenwriter let the played-straight soufflé fall by violating the rules of illogic he so carefully set up with the initial conceit of the film. The creepy opening 30 minutes of Twin Falls plays like an homage to David Lynch, maintaining a wonderfully serene and spooky distance from the action before pitching that overboard by taking its premise into sentimentality and the soap operatic - Siamese twins meet a lady hooker. Beauty manages to sustain its mythic fairytale-like stylization of the American suburban experience, before embracing the cheapest of melodramatic gimmicks (who'll murder Kevin Spacey) and descending straight into the arms of a kind of homophobic cliché, which probably accounts for its surprising critical and mass appeal. (I liked this movie, by the way, but thought its ending contemptible. Likewise, I was enchanted with all the things that Being John M did right. So do I hold its failure against it, or rejoice in its sassy freedom and refusal to buckle to those empty cocoons of Hollywood conventionality?)

And what about those movies that started out disjointedly, almost improvisationally - like Topsy Turvy - and got up to full steam as they went along, in the case of Topsy, some 80 minutes or so into its 160-minute length, long enough for me to, with some doubt, keep it off the top ten. Or those movies that exhibited sustained genius in a fragment like Eyes Wide Shut, which is on JV's list, but not mine. (Or at a much lesser, more highly commercial level The Cider House Rules, which is often both meretricious and historically sloppy.) Or Boys Don't Cry, which not only sentimentalizes the real-life Brandon Teena, but alters the truth to fulfill a kind of romantic agenda, much as Cider House uses the abortion issue in romantic fashion? Even Three Kings, with its biting attack on George Bush's Persian Gulf War, hangs onto the buddies-movie concept that has been around since Gunga Din.

Eyes Wide Shut, which I once described as a movie more interesting to write about than to experience, belongs in that category of the movies this year that either fall apart or work in spurts. Kubrick's swan song works inconsistently - it doesn't start brilliantly and then go to pieces - it drifts in and out of focus for its entire length. And it is not the only one that seems headed toward the promised land, but with troubles at helm, as if the steersman couldn't decide whether to let go of the clichés of the past or throw caution to the wind and run the risks of disaster (as in Being John Malkovich). If it weren't Kubrick who chickened out here, then surely it was Warner Bros who, in changing the orgy scene so as not to shock the Aunt Cecilias on the censorship board (the MPAA), denatured the film.

There are three unquestionably great films that we got to see in '99, and that most of the American movie-going public did not see. These are movies that sustain their initial conceits without collapsing into the ordinary or exhibiting a failure of nerve in the crunch. They are, as you know, Run, Lola, Run, The Straight Story, and All About My Mother. I only wish I had written as well about Lola as Jonathan Valin does this time. Heaven knows I tried twice in these pages to suggest the hugely entertaining vividness and technical virtuosity that overlies and, on first viewing, quite masks its quite firm metaphysical foundations. It is also difficult to write about the beauty and nuance of David Lynch's depiction of the American soul, in all its mostly unspoiled complexities and contradictions, without spoiling the sense of wonder that abounds in The Straight Story and makes it so engrossing. It is an American odyssey, more challenging because its hero is nearing the end of his journey, where the stakes always are higher. And then there is the incomparably entertaining All About My Mother, which gives new zip and a twisty spin to the phrase "as pure as the driven slush." Its demimonde is about as unconventional as you're likely to imagine, but with all the warmth and caring of any conventional family. It ends up being about unconditional love, which, we might hope, may always flower in the most exotic of settings. Valin and I agree, in all major respects and most minor ones of these films.

After the three, we go our separate ways. I have not seen The Minus Man. He had not, as of this writing, seen The Dreamlife of Angels. I think The Mummy is pure popcorn, like Casablanca of yonderyear, and while I don't begrudge anyone the guilty pleasures of popcorn movies, I prefer movies that work on at least two levels with me, heart and head, and in those rare cases in which I learn something about life itself, soul.

Another point with which I agree with JV is on the business of ten "best."

I could say these are the ten films I liked best, or possibly even, for me, these were the ten with the most meat on the bone. But who sees each and every film released in the USA each year, including those all-too-often hard-to-find foreign films that may never make it outside of Manhattan (King of Masks, for example)? Or as much as I found to munch on in Romance, one of JV's top ten, I did wonder if its ending, surely the blackest of comedy for something up till then played straight, and dirty, weren't the shaggy-dog punch line of a most serious film about women's contradictory feelings about sexuality.

Even as one mad for movies, I didn't get to see Magnolia, Hurricane, The Green Mile, Angela's Ashes, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Cradle Will Rock, or Sweet and Lowdown. Some of these I had no taste for, but even if I had, I would have been hard put to see them all, given that they were released in the briefest imaginable time frame, just in time to qualify for Oscar and critics' awards (awards = box office, fingers crossed). Some died in the overkill. But it seems to me cynical and an injustice to the moviegoers who might be interested in more than a few of the year-end films, and yes, even to the critics who have to sort out all the year-end releases at the last moment, and render snap judgments. No justice to the films and no justice to the earlier issues of '99 that might have been lost along the way.

So, with those caveats and reservations, we shall begin.

The Straight Story. To prove that he loves his brother, who is dying after suffering a stroke, Alvin Straight, eyesight failing, hips collapsing, does the only thing he can honorably (and legally) do to atone alone for their long estrangement, and that is ride a John Deere lawnmower (top speed: 5 mph), over hill and dale, through middle America, to his brother's side. If you stop to imagine the difficulties, you'll see how this turns into an heroic Odyssey that will, sooner or later, move you to tears. That and Farnsworth's perfectly modulated, almost existential performance. Engrossing, and played relatively straight by the ordinary rococo David Lynch. (See HP's Complete Review.)

All About My Mother.

The Dreamlife of Angels. This French film, directed in cinéma verité style by Erick Zonca (his first truly full-length feature), is essentially about friendship. For those of us who have loved a friend, but been unable to keep that friend from his or her own self-destructiveness, it is both a beautiful and painful work. Beautiful because it so well captures the "falling-in-love" phase of a great friendship, the playfulness, the sharing, and the complementary influences we have upon one another, a sort of blending of two personalities into something different. In this case, the free spirit, Isa, loosens up the fearful control freak, and the control freak, Marie, brings order into the vagabond life of an undisciplined roamer. Painful because one of the friends, the fearful one, unhinged by an outside sado-masochistic relationship, not only reverts, but descends into a kind of madness. It is gorgeously photographed by Agnes Godard (and on the recently issued DVD looks better than it did in the theater in which I saw it); it is gloriously well acted by its three principals, Elodie Bouchez (playing Isa, the free spirit), Natacha Regnier (as Marie, her friend), and Gregoire Colin (as Chriss, a truly despicable Lothario). Zonca is nothing if not an actor's director. He is so good with his actors that you are never aware that anyone is acting (the two women shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes the year the film was released in Europe).

You have to see it twice, which you may not want to do in succession, to see how canny its construction is. The first time through, the introductory scenes seem desultory and almost documentary in tone and shaping, as you follow Isa from her life on the roads and as a beggar on the streets into a sweatshop job where she meets Marie. Seen again, the opening is amazingly economical, its editing rhythms establishing, in realistic fashion, its credibility and moving swiftly into the beginnings of the friendship. (There is no music score, and no cues telling you how to react to the material, which, in this case, only enriches the sense of realism in the material.) You will come to understand exactly the meaning of that adage - the seeds of the future are planted in the present (much the same message you get from Run, Lola, but without all the trimmings).

Isa walks off the job after one day, and Marie, impulsively, follows suit. The two share a flat that Marie is housesitting, because its owner and her daughter were seriously injured in a car wreck; both are in a coma. The women flirt (with two club bouncers, beautifully acted by Patrick Mercado and Jo Prestia), chase guys in the shopping malls (flirting, then running away), while sort of hustling to make ends meet. All is well until Marie has a (second) chance encounter with the plastically handsome ladies' man, Chriss. At this point, the movie becomes harrowing, and we know, well before Isa does, that Marie's barely contained demons have been unleashed. She tries to save Marie, in her pure and innocent way, but she's no match for Marie's devils (note the scene between Marie and her mother and what Marie tells Isa about the "mad" father).

I have left out the other heart of the movie, which centers around a diary left in the apartment by the young daughter (hence, the dream life of angels), deep in her dreaming sleep at the hospital. If you understand the symbolism here (and it may take that second viewing to put it together), you'll see that what seems to be a matter-of-fact ending, is chilling, indeed, and unlike that of Romance, it is an earned and unsentimental comment on the disastrous after-effects of a great friendship gone bad.

The Insider (See HP's Complete Review.)

Three Kings. David O. Russell's third feature (after Spanking the Money about mother/son incest and Flirting with Disaster, which breaks taboos on almost every subject - check out Mary Tyler Moore's dental floss) looks to be, at the outset, as radical as his first two features. Four buddies (one more than the title calls for) stumble onto a map leading to a treasure trove left by Saddam Hussein at a crumbling Arab village during the Kuwait war. And what begins as a cynical buddy "heist" film, with a look at odds with mainstream big-studio productions, seems to be as cockeyed as his first two feature length movies. This tone is sustained to the halfway point, and through an excruciating and beautifully played torture scene that occurs when Mark Wahlberg is captured by Hussein's troops, and then - guess what? The buddies, seeing the situation of the insurrectionist Arabs whom the Americans (specifically, President Bush) left to fend for themselves, get all misty-eyed and noble. Old story, new packaging, and yet most consistently entertaining, with enough imaginative touches to keep you wide awake, if you don't mind seeing a cow exploded, and a bullet rip through what looks to be human tissue. As I said: Old wine, new bottles. (See HP's Complete Review.)

The Sixth Sense. Cool, elegant, and with the kind of sustained tone that eluded Kubrick, Leigh, and other masters of the cinematic arts last year. With at least three wonderful performances, the widely praised one by its 11-year-old star, Haley Joel Ozment, who provides the emotional glue that holds this picture together; Toni Collette, who is so good you don't see her "acting"; and the significantly under-rated one by Bruce Willis, a model of the sustained low-key performance that makes the entire "device" work. Beautifully moody photography by Taj Fukimoto (his lifetime best) of the nation's most interesting "old" city enriches, with comment, just the point the team behind this is trying to make. Its huge box-office success is testimony, one widely misread I fear, to the intelligence of much of the audience for contemporary cinema. (See HP's Additional Comments .)

Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. (Available on DVD, unfortunately with the same element problem that nearly derails Lola's run. In other words, the color is seriously off. The element used has a deep yellowish cast that submarines the almost three-dimensional pop colors of the film as seen in the theater. Lola you can adjust by tinting the image greener; no such strategy works here. Let's hope and hope again someone issues a re-mastered version from a fresh dupe of the original negative. The loss of color fidelity, for me anyway, seriously detracts from the pop-goes-the-weasel, Trickster Coyote intricacies of its plot.) This is directed by Guy Ritchie and it is smashingly enjoyable, from the beginning to the end, with nary a let down nor drop in the way Ritchie can sustain both the out-there concept and the shifting tone that underlies the story's looped-back-on-itself tail swallowing. It has enough Dada surrealism to challenge Jonze's Malkovich, even if it is not played out on quite so literal a level. The plot is a kind of Chinese box puzzle, and you've got to stay on your toes to catch all the linkages that are folding around so intricately that you might never suspect where you're going to wind up, or what the fate of our (slightly besmirched) heroes will be. Has more in common with Lola's run than you might suspect. (See HP's Complete Review.)

Being John Malkovich. So I didn't hold its flaws against it, entirely. (See HP's Complete Review.)

Any Given Sunday (See HP's review, Issue 29.) Just for the record, let me say that, despite a few patches of Oliver Stone machismo (which is beginning to wear like a case of lockjaw), this is a successful return to form for this director. Since it is a movie about the mutual transformation that occurs between student and teacher, there is a level of deeper resonance here than what might otherwise be a cinematic virtuoso's dissection of the rough and tumble (and I mean rough and tumble) on the playing field. Spectacular visuals - sure to be an HDTV demonstrator - and punched-up sound for those lonesome nights when you either can't get or don't want a date.