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The Top 10 Films of 1998

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This year we’ve looked at the top ten films of 1898/190819181938, 1948, 1958196819781988, and 2008, and this month it’s time to head back to 1998!

It was the year of Monica Lewinsky and the Unabomber trial, of the founding of Google and a peace deal in Northern Ireland. In the realm of film, the movie that would win Best Picture was Shakespeare in Love, but that one doesn’t quite crack the Flickchart Top 10. After 20 years of reflection, some then-unknown movies have risen in profile, while some heavy-hitters like our #1 have retained a prominent place in the popular consciousness.

Let’s look at what the users of Flickchart collectively think are the 10 best films of 1998:

10. Perfect Blue

By rights, Perfect Blue shouldn’t make a top 10 list that’s based on sheer popularity. It’s a niche movie in a niche genre: an anime, but an adult one, not as glossy or bubbly as most. It’s rough, violent, and risque. But the people who have seen it, the cineastes and the Japanophiles exploring on a higher plane, love it enough that their rankings carry it into the Flickchart Top 10 for 1998. Apart from its obvious artistic and narrative qualities, the movie has a rarefied aura due to being one of only four features that its idiosyncratic creator Satoshi Kon made before passing away at the far-too-young age of 46.

Perfect Blue is about a Japanese pop singer who leaves her moderately-successful band to start a television career. Unfortunately, she has a stalker who operates a vintage 1990s-style website dedicated to her. The agents and screenwriters in the actress’s life begin mysteriously dying in disturbing ways, and things go downhill from there. The protagonist has an increasingly hard time separating real life from the parts she is playing, and from the idealized version of herself that the stalker worships. The layers of artifice and narrative-within-narrative in this movie put the likes of Christopher Nolan’s Inception to shame, but always feel like natural progressions of theme and character. The movie is at times grotesque and disturbing, but in a way that feels authentic and human and non-exploitative, terms not usually associated with pop diva career arcs. Perfect Blue is a mindbending psychological thriller par excellence whose quality transcends the boxes we imagine around its medium. – David Conrad

  • Global ranking: 788
  • Wins 56% of matchups
  • 960 users have ranked it
  • 2 have it at #1
  • 67 have it in their top 20

9. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

With those wild words, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, based on Hunter Thompson’s cult book, kicks off in loony fashion across the desert. But as much as the movie in its early minutes might resemble a cartoon from Terry Gilliam, the movie is actually something of a funeral mass for the 60s as the characters make their way from the broken promises of California to the repression of 70s Nevada and a law enforcement convention. There isn’t really a plot, or any suggestion that the filmmakers had any knowledge what a plot would look like, but along the way the protagonists encounter all manner of madness from literal lounge lizards to Gary Busey and Mark Harmon, each of which captures the artificial scuzziness of Las Vegas. (It could have been worse, of course; they could have missed the exit for Las Vegas and ended up in Utah.) There’s always danger, like the risk of encountering one’s older self or the fear of learning what exactly happens beyond the men’s room door, but none of it is quite as weird as an incident told in Hunter Thompson’s book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 wherein he is recruited by Pat Buchanan to talk football with then-candidate Richard Nixon. That deserves its own movie.

This warped vision of 1971 owes a lot to Terry Gilliam’s madcap vision and directorial skill, but it is also worth mentioning that Alex Cox (Sid & Nancy, Repo Man) was originally supposed to direct this. (Supposedly, Alex Cox retaining co-screenwriting credit seriously got under Gilliam’s skin.) Cox — an Englishman who came to America as opposed to Gilliam, an American who went to England — is prone to his own flights of filmmaking fantasy but is a more overtly political filmmaker than Gilliam, so his vision for this bit of surreal Americana would have been different. But Gilliam successfully walks a tightrope of his own inimitable design to capture something of the feel of Thompson’s mad memoir. – Walter J. Montie

  • Global ranking: 708
  • Wins 50% of matchups
  • 37906 users have ranked it
  • 178 have it at #1
  • 3240 have it in their top 20

8. Run Lola Run

“God does not play dice with the universe” – Albert Einstein

Okay, so Krzysztof Kieslowski did it first with the whole “exploring multiple outcomes of a single incident” thing in his 1987 film Blind Chance, which explores three possible timelines that vary after a character tries to catch a train.

But what Tom Tykwer (whose films are simultaneously underappreciated and frustrating) does in his breakout 1998 film “Run Lola Run” is inject this premise with a shot of adrenaline and triple espresso in order to tell the story of Lola (Franka Potente) who has 20 minutes and three chances to save her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) by coming up with the money to save him. The entire movie is a whirlwind 80 minutes, which might somehow be shorter than the techno soundtrack that accompanies the action. A variety of formats are used, including animation, and each segment is markedly different. Lola’s trajectory is affected by obstacles along the way, each of which causes the story to take a different path and eventually reach a different outcome. It’s nothing deeper than that, but it sure is fun while it lasts. – Walter

  • Global ranking: 684
  • Wins 49% of matchups
  • 28058 users have ranked it
  • 105 have it at #1
  • 2076 have it in their top 20

7. Dark City

In the late 1990s, in the midst of a golden age of special-effects-driven genre films, an odd epiphenomenon started to take place around the edges of science fiction and horror. A crop of films emerged that told stories of white men slowly and dramatically discovering that the world that we experience with our senses is a lie, a high-tech charade orchestrated by inconceivable forces, toward ends that are simultaneously horrifying and banal. The pervasive sense of powerlessness in the culture was articulated in these films like The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, The Game, and of course The Matrix. But before The Matrix poured crates of bullets into those black-and-white checkered sets, another film would make use of them to play out the most artistically ambitious of this school of anti-existentialist movies. Dark City combines expressionist Dick-Tracy-noir style with Kafka-esque sadomasochism, somehow also invoking an Eastern European elemental dread a la Nosferatu, in order to tell what is ultimately a tender and pathetic story of the powerful frailty of the human soul. The film (especially the director’s cut) forces us to walk every cruel, confusing step alongside our doe-eyed messiah-to-be as he navigates two thousand years of philosophical thought to finally arrive at the same conclusion as He-Man and all our other messiahs: “I have the power.” The film is wildly ambitious, too ambitious for the audiences of its day, but the unaffected honesty of the performances (except for Kiefer Sutherland, who leans too heavily on a quirky speech pattern) played against the haunting dark-steampunk surrealism of its world is unmistakably arresting. The visual design will keep you glued to the screen, but the points it’s used to make will continue to make this film stand out  as a timeless example of an era of thoughtfully-paranoid speculative fiction. – Doug van Hollen

  • Global ranking: 654
  • Wins 51% of matchups
  • 19615 users have ranked it
  • 46 have it at #1
  • 930 have it in their top 20

6. Rushmore

When I first saw Rushmore while in college in the early 2000s, it was unlike anything I’d seen before. Its style and sensibility were new to me, and I fell in love with it, buying it on VHS and watching it over and over. I didn’t realize at the time that it was also the cinematic introduction of the Wes Anderson style and sensibility. It was not Anderson’s first feature, yet it is this sophomore effort that set the tone for the director’s career. The film features several stage productions by its protagonist Max (an auspicious debut by a teenage Jason Schwartzman), and created a foundation for the stageplay-like framing and narrative structure that Anderson would continue to perfect over the next two decades. Rushmore also features my favorite Bill Murray performance (outside of maybe Groundhog Day), a precursor to his later great dramatic work in indie films such as Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. Co-written by Anderson and his frequent collaborator Owen Wilson, and featuring affecting performances by Olivia Williams and Seymour Cassel, Rushmore remains one of Anderson’s best films. – Tom Kapr

  • Global ranking: 470
  • Wins 54% of matchups
  • 23765 users have ranked it
  • 138 have it at #1
  • 1792 have it in their top 20

5. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

As much as Guy Ritchie’s career might have floundered, disappointed, confounded, and on occasion pleased in the last two decades, it might surprise some how much his debut film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels came out of almost nowhere and was a breath of fresh air. Its cheeky, stylish, and violent humor made stars out of Jason Statham and Vinnie Jones (alas, not so much for Jason Flemyng), who are here part of a group of low-level and colorful criminals in the British underground who have far more ambition than brains. They get in way over their heads with some not very nice people with violent tendencies (a friend of mine from England had to explain the Cockney rhyming slang for me.) What sets this apart from other crime movies of its ilk is Ritchie’s ability to handle the complicated plot structure of four separate gangs gunning for each other and the loot, keeping the plates spinning throughout. It’s something of a shame that even the success of later films like Sherlock Holmes and The Man from Uncle has not brought Ritchie again to this level of complexity or depth. – Walter

  • Global ranking: 456
  • Wins 54% of matchups
  • 44491 users have ranked it
  • 177 have it at #1
  • 3752 have it in their top 20

4. The Truman Show

Jim Carrey in the 90s was a zany force to be reckoned with, from his impossibly-stretchy facial expressions to his over-the-top vocal gymnastics. And then he started taking roles that required him to tone it down. The Truman Show sits in the middle between something like Dumb and Dumber and his most dramatic role in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Truman is a little goofy, a little playful, but there are real stakes here, and Carrey succeeds in making us feel them even amid his jokey persona. The film owes a lot of its successful atmosphere to the incredibly compelling score by modern classical composer Philip Glass, who takes what could have been a silly little film and adds a sense of larger mythos to it. And the script is beautiful. It builds this unusual world in such a fascinating way and unrolls the plot at such a perfect pace that we’re never either lost behind Truman or bored waiting for him to catch up to us. The final scene brings all these elements together, along with a stellar performance from Ed Harris and some gorgeous visuals, to create one of the most oddly inspirational endings I have ever seen. It’s a lovely movie that well deserves its spot in our top ten. – Hannah Keefer

  • Global ranking: 287
  • Wins 54% of matchups
  • 84949 users have ranked it
  • 665 have it at #1
  • 12155 have it in their top 20

3. American History X

Stark, brutal, and violent, American History X was shocking and thought-provoking upon release. From its infamous curb stomp scene to the detailed time spent with Neo-Nazis and white nationalist, this film isn’t easy to watch. But force yourself to look at it and you will find a stark examination of what evil means, if it can truly be said to exist. While never quite sympathizing with Ed Norton’s character, the film does have a nuanced take on what drives people into racist ideologies and the socioeconomic conditions that can warp into a person’s psyche and come to dominate them. Norton’s powerful performance makes his ascendance from the white nationalist mindset work despite everything going against him as he learns to recognize his hate, where it took him, and where it was taking others. Mixing in black and white with color photography, American History X remains poignant and powerful today. – Connor Adamson

  • Global ranking: 137
  • Wins 61% of matchups
  • 65948 users have ranked it
  • 697 have it at #1
  • 10900 have it in their top 20

2. The Big Lebowski

This movie has a lot of ins, a lot of outs, and a lot of what have yous. The Coen brothers’ cult classic lives on twenty years later as one of the most beloved comedies in cinema. Despite initial critical and box office disappointment, The Big Lebowski has more than won people over with its massive collection of quotable lines, fantastic performances from a diverse cast, and an eclectic yet killer soundtrack. Jeff Bridges’ The Dude has inspired a religion based on the character’s own post-hippie philosophy while John Goodman and Steve Buscemi make for more than colorful companions. Shot beautifully, this comedy may or may not have a larger meaning, the very idea of which is teased by an enigmatic turn from Sam Elliot as the Stranger. Though the Coens have pledged never to do a sequel, Jon Turturro recently filmed a spin-off starring his character “Jesus” meaning that some element of the film will carry forward. Either way, The Dude abides. – Connor

  • Global ranking: 77
  • Wins 66% of matchups
  • 73483 users have ranked it
  • 1307 have it at #1
  • 15673 have it in their top 20

1. Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan was a rarity in the 90s: an R-rated blockbuster. And not a soft R, either – many industry watchers in 1998 felt that Spielberg‘s latest war film actually deserved an NC-17 rating for its extremely graphic violence, which would have made it practically unshowable in most theaters in the country. Instead it skated by with an R and a strong warning from studio that “We do not want children wandering in,” and grossed half a billion dollars in ticket sales. In comparison, 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge made less than half of that, and 2006’s Flags of Our Fathers made less than half of that. Saving Private Ryan was THE war movie phenomenon of the blockbuster era; even Spielberg’s Best Picture-winning Schindler’s List hadn’t made as much money. Everyone saw it. It felt like a patriotic duty.

Rom-com staple Tom Hanks and a young Matt Damon, both recent Oscar winners, gave the movie star power, but what made Saving Private Ryan a must-see was the same thing that could have gotten it relegated it to the arthouse circuit: its profound violence. “Did you see Saving Private Ryan?” people would ask each other. “Oh my god, that first scene!” came the inevitable reply. They weren’t talking about the bookend segments of an elderly man visiting a military cemetery; they meant the bloody reenactment of the D-Day landings in Normandy. Even now it feels tactless, almost sacrilegious, to describe the wreckage of humanity Spielberg depicts, as though doing so would be disrespectful to the real-life dead. And the losses don’t stop once the beaches are secure. Spoiler alert, but almost nobody makes it out of the movie alive. Future action star Vin Diesel, whom we are used to thinking invincible, bites the dust early. A Jewish soldier played by Adam Goldberg pointedly does not get a Tarantino-esque moment of revenge-fantasy fulfilment. Even Tom Hanks isn’t shielded by plot-armor.

The consistent quality of the movie has been overshadowed by its unforgettable opening scene, but war film buffs will recognize that the final battle sequence is every bit as good as the first. It may actually be better thanks to its strong spatial awareness and ability to maintain tension without excessive gore. The story’s human drama works well, too, thanks to a surly, unsentimental performance from Hanks and his troops that balances Spielberg’s tendency towards melodrama.

The only excuse for not having seen Saving Private Ryan is that you’re not yet old enough. – David

  • Global ranking: 65
  • Wins 67% of matchups
  • 82281 users have ranked it
  • 1091 have it at #1
  • 16632 have it in their top 20

BLOGGER’S CHOICE

Here are a few picks that we think deserve special attention, even if they lie outside — sometimes way outside — the actual Top 10 list.

Doug – Pi

Darren Aronofsky‘s directorial debut seems to be a collection of contradictions and bad script decisions: a thriller about math, starring no one, in black and white, where Hassidic Jews are the bad guys. To call it improbable is to sell probability theory short. There was simply no way to make such a story exciting or coherent, and to use the same consistent, grainy, indie sensibility to sell both the banal world of modern New York City and nightmarish hallucination. But Aronofsky has demonstrated again and again since ’98 that his facility with the most difficult conceivable material was not a fluke, but rather a trademark and calling card. He can turn literally anything into exciting, momentous cinema, by showing us how the smallest, most intimate worlds of pain and obsession mirror and connect directly to the largest possible stories that we as a species can tell. Pi is the rawest, most condensed form of this “emotional fractal” aesthetic, and it’s as thrilling as it is painfully sad to watch.

  • Global ranking: 1503
  • Wins 42% of matchups
  • 14235 users have ranked it
  • 23 have it at #1
  • 405 have it in their top 20

Walter – Whatever

Even with a passively disturbing opening scene, Whatever is less a sensational or preachy cautionary tale than a character study of two best friends struggling with high school and fractious households. In response, they seek release from the ennui of suburban New Jersey in 1981 by experimenting with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. (The coolness of the soundtrack tries to contradict how uncool 1981 really was.) While Brenda (Chad Morgan) does her own thing, it is Anna (Liza Weil of Gilmore Girls) who actually has an escape plan, sort of, by applying to an art school at Cooper Union in New York City. The fact that she basically ignores her studies, except art class, and gets in-school suspension for repeatedly smoking in the girls room, shows that she is already thinking ahead without much thought for the present. As far as that potential future goes, the movie is as optimistic as it can be. It even plays Aimee Mann over the final credits.

  • Global ranking: 38254
  • Wins 52% of matchups
  • 14 users have ranked it
  • 0 have it at #1
  • 0 have it in their top 20

Tom – Festen (The Celebration)

Danish director and Dogme 95 co-founder Thomas Vinterberg‘s Festen — or The Celebration, as it is known to English-speaking audiences — recounts the gathering of a family to celebrate the 60th birthday of their patriarch (Henning Moritzen) where the festivities are interrupted by shocking allegations against the father by his son (Ulrich Thomsen). The son claims the father sexually abused him and his sister in their youth. As with Rushmore (see above), I discovered The Celebration in college in the early 2000s, and again it was something entirely new to me. The stripped-down production allowed for something more emotionally raw than I’d been used to. Yet despite such heavy themes as rape and incest, and other family dynamics that are dysfunctional besides, it is a surprisingly warm and satisfying film, and even has a sense of humor. If you are unfamiliar with the cinema of Denmark, Festen is a great place to start.

  • Global ranking: 1188
  • Wins 43% of matchups
  • 1413 users have ranked it
  • 0 have it at #1
  • 61 have it in their top 20

David – Flowers of Shanghai

Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou made one of the ultimate fly-on-the-wall movies with Flowers of Shanghai, a richly-saturated period drama in which there are only around a dozen cuts and the only camera movement is a slow 360° arc. It is an experimental film, an art film, but a beautiful and lavish one with complex plots that reward careful attention. Set in a Chinese brothel around the turn of the 20th century, the mood of the film is suffused with sex and opium smoke, but very little is actually shown, certainly nothing particularly illicit. The women of this brothel work tirelessly to acquire wealthy clients and keep them away from the other prostitutes in the hopes that they might eventually receive a marriage proposal or save enough money to buy their freedom from the brothel owner. Rivalries, betrayals, and actual romantic love complicate these plans, but voices rarely rise and tears are seldom shed; a silent stare and a quiet conversation over tea are more powerful in this time and place. This is the kind of serene and painterly filmmaking that rarely cracks top 10 lists but that stays with you for a long time if you’re lucky enough to find it.

  • Global ranking: 30604
  • Wins 46% of matchups
  • 34 users have ranked it
  • 0 have it at #1
  • 1 has it in their top 20

What’s your top 10 from 1998? Let us know in the comments!


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