The Matrix
Fight Club
American Beauty
The Insider
The Green Mile
Magnolia
Office Space
Three Kings
The Blair Witch Project
The Sixth Sense

Others from ‘99 that I enjoyed:
Stigmata
Stir of Echoes
The Boondock Saints
Dogma
Arlington Road
Being John Malkovich

I cant believe the disrespect for ‘The Green Mile’! Especially when in the same breathe you praise ‘The Mist’!! What a terrible film that was!! Worst movie I’ve seen in a long time!!

And Angie… “When She Loves Me” is one of my favorite Randy Newman songs, particularly the way Sarah McLachlan performs it. Totally heartbreaking.

And Destiny: “Sweet and Lowdown!” Crap! I forgot about that. I loved it. It’s certainly close to my top ten. (And big ups to the SPICE House Oscar party!)

And Michael: To me, the cruel joke of “Being John Malkovich” is not that everyone focuses on getting new kinds of sex, but that they focus on getting new kinds of control. Much of that control is sexual, but then there are the scenes where Malkovich is being forced to dance like a puppet. The point (to me) is that trying to control other people only cuts us off from life… that the act of manipulation does more damage to the puppet master than the puppet.

Take John Cusack’s character: He tries so hard to avoid vulnerability around the people he loves—to just manipulate them until they can’t leave him—that he gets trapped inside his little girl. He is too terrified to stop trying to control people, and as a result he loses all control.

Meanwhile, Cameron Diaz and Catherine Keener give themselves over to impulse, and they end up liberated. I don’t see that as a “let’s start boinking” thing so much as a “sexuality represents a general willingness to be vulnerable” thing.

I have disliked/loathed American Beauty from the first–I find it (like a lot of Alan Ball at his worst) one-half snarky, smug, caricatured, and mean-spirited and one-half insultingly sentimental-faux-lyrical, especially about sex. No, thanks.

I WANT to like Being John Malkovitch, but am always put off by the unending visual ugliness of the film, and it makes me downhearted that, given the chance to occupy other lives and experiences (the reason we have imaginations and art), everybody just focuses on getting new kinds of sex. (Maybe I’m on a prudish tear?)

On the other hand, Talented Mr. Ripley (an ambivalent treatment of its source, but I don’t care) pulls me in every time. not least by the sheer beauty of the photography and visual design, which cues the sneaky eroticism.

I love Cradle Will Rock with all my theater-geek lefty heart, until the too-schematic conclusion.

And, speaking of theater geekhood, I am the personal slave of Topsy-Turvy–I love that film from the blue velvet seats in the first shot to the vengeful wifely fantasy voiced at the end. Have the dialogue virtually memorized–”I am much concerned about your little weakness . . . ” I could nosh on the acting Mike Leigh gets out of his actors for weeks. And I do.

I’m not sure I agree with the Sixth Sense, but then I haven’t seen it in forever. I really enjoyed it when it came out, but the Shyamalan follow-ups have sullied me to all his movies. And some of its lines became such a cliche in jokes and parodies, that it just gets on my patience even if I watch a scene now. Perhaps it’s time for me to re-examine this one.

I also agree that American Beauty still holds up pretty well. My love for that movie may have died a tiny little bit since I first saw it in the cinema, but it is still a great movie.

Cider House Rules: I saw this when it came out, and I remember almost nothing about it. So there.

And, finally, Three Kings was a pretty great movie, but I’m not sure it qualifies as top-10 material for me.

I agree about Toy Story 2, and would just add that Sarah McLachlan’s “When She Loved Me” really makes me cry and I’m a 27 year-old relatively stable woman.