The Best Cinema of 1999

1 ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER A Madrid nurse (Cecilia Roth), luxuriating in grief, goes to Barcelona, where she learns to live again by tending to creatures even more wounded than she. Pedro Almodovar's screwball melodrama has all the kooky verve of his early comedies, but with a depth and life-enhancing warmth that proves Spain's bad boy has reached a vibrant maturity. If this movie doesn't touch your heart, consult a cardiologist. You may be missing something.

2 THE MATRIX With its dazzling effects and the dizzying ways it toys with reality, virtual and actual, this film may or may not portend cinema's future. But who cares about that when what we have from Larry and Andy Wachowski is a demonically hip, computer-driven reimagining of the dorked-out sci-fi tradition?

3 TARZAN and SOUTH PARK: BIGGER LONGER & UNCUT It can be plausibly argued that there were more good cartoon features made in the U.S. this year than there were live-action films. Disney alone had Tarzan (its snazziest and most affecting feature since The Lion King), Fantasia 2000 (a rhapsody of sound and light) and, via Pixar, the deft, ingratiating Toy Story 2. And what can we say about Trey Parker's very un-Disney South Park that the film itself didn't sing in four-letter words and the cleverest original movie score in decades? Just that it's devilishly, hummably funny.

4 THE END OF THE AFFAIR This may be Graham Greene's best novel; surely Neil Jordan's starkly disciplined film is the best screen adaptation of any of Greene's fictions. An account of a slightly slutty woman's unlikely transformation into something like sainthood, it is acted with stunning austerity by Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes.

5 ROSETTA She is the teenager who will do anything to get any job, however menial. Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's dour Belgian drama earned the top prize at Cannes this year by being both grinding in its bleakness and inspiring in its intensity. Emilie Dequenne plays Rosetta with a blank fury that suggests a medieval saint or a modern assassin.

6 AMERICAN BEAUTY Yes, some of the shots at suburbia are cheap. Yes, Kevin Spacey undergoes an all too familiar mid-life crisis. But Sam Mendes directs with vivifying freshness, and Spacey's wicked performance as the cynical, bedeviled protagonist is hands down the year's best.

7 THE DREAM LIFE OF ANGELS If poor Rosetta had found a pal at one of her crummy jobs, the resulting film might have been this spare, coiled first feature from France's Erick Zonca. Marie (Natacha Regnier) is broody, draped in doom; Isa (Elodie Bouchez) is a sunny vagabond. Their friendship and rivalry are beautifully observed, magnificently portrayed.

8 ELECTION Cold, driven, hilarious Reese Witherspoon cares far too much about a school election. Matthew Broderick, the teacher supervising it, goes into sexual overdrive as he tries to cope with her machinations. And director Alexander Payne makes a dark, smart, sexy farce about the American ways of winning, losing and screwing up.

9 THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) would rather "be a fake somebody than a real nobody." So he pursues a fatal game of pretense in Anthony Minghella's devious twist on the Patricia Highsmith crime novel about patrician indolence and underclass yearning. In a handsome cast, no one can touch Jude Law for golden gorgeousness with an undercoat of sadism.

10 THREE KINGS Calculated brutality and mindless consumerism exist side by uneasy side as American soldiers search for gold and find postmodern anarchy in the Gulf War's aftermath. Writer-director David O. Russell's electrifying trip down the rabbit hole is bruising, amusing, scary, yet finally very moving.