Was 1999 the Best Movie Year Ever?
A favorite film is defined by taste and emotion, the moment in your life when you see it and whether it lingers in your imagination. It is entirely personal. More tangible criteria define a great year in film: total box office, strides in ambition and innovation (whether it's storytelling, cinematography or special effects) and perceived cultural impact. In that regard, you'd have to include 1939, which yielded Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Stagecoach, among many others. There's 1969 too, when Hollywood began to mirror the nation's deepening cynicism and mistrust of the status quo, as seen in the films Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
But is there a greatest year? Brian Raftery makes a good case for one in Best.Movie.Year.Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen (Simon & Schuster). The lifelong movie nerd was a young writer at Entertainment Weekly in 1999 (full disclosure: I was among his editors) when a cover story made that proclamation. After leaving EW, Raftery went on to write about culture for GQ and Wired. He also continued to inhale films, and over the next two decades he came to believe there was something to that cover line. After interviewing over 130 people for his book (among them, David Fincher, Reese Witherspoon and Christopher Nolan), Raftery realized he wasn't alone in believing 1999 to be Hollywood's best ever.
That year saw an astonishing breadth of quality and variety, from indie insta-classics (Spike Jonze's directorial debut) and to box-office bonanzas like and . (It also saw the industry-changing launches of Netflix's monthly DVD subscription and Apple's AirPort technology.) is packed with trivia, behind-the-scenes anecdotes from creators, as well as
