CONT'D: Reanimations: The Best Movies of 1999 | Page 1, 2

5. Buena Vista Social Club. Another perfect evocation of a place and the community that inhabits it even farther south, in Cuba. Whereas the relationships among the characters in Cookie's Fortune are rendered so real as to seem non-fictional, the relationships among the people in this documentary are drawn so vividly - and their personal histories are narrated so intriguingly - as to seem dramatized. The musicians have such easy rapport with each other and with the audience - that is, with both the live concert audience during their filmed performances and the imaginary audience with whom they share their memories through the movie camera - that each of them seems to carry inside him or herself the spirit of the jazz-folk music which Ry Cooder found in the album he made from their recording sessions, and which Wim Wenders finds in the streets of Cuba where he films them.

6. Princess Mononoke. This beautiful animated fairy tale is marred by some cloying dialogue that was perhaps badly translated into Disneyfied English idioms, but that doesn't hide the spiritual mysticism at the core of the story - exactly what's missing from Disney's kitschy, moralistic parables. The theme of this work is the relationship between man and his environment, and it is delineated through gestures rather than homilies. At their most exquisite, Hayao Miyazaki's animations work to evoke the tranquillity of the natural world and to dramatize it as a transcendental presence with a force and clarity that recalls Satyajit Ray. (Much of the spectral nature imagery also recalls Robert Flaherty's and F.W. Murnau's Tabu.)

7. Midsummer Night's Dream. The director of this Shakespearean production, Michael Hoffman, resets the comedy in fin-de-siecle Tuscany. Along with his photographer, Oliver Stapleton, he evokes the opulence of this period and place and underscores it with the music of Italian opera composers: Mascagni, Puccini, Verdi, Bellini, Donizetti, & Rossini. It's an extravagantly lush, emotionally transporting production - moving in ways that catch you off guard. The movie's emotional center seems to be Kevin Kline, who brings a poignancy to the role of Bottom that seldom reveals itself in interpretations of this character: in a performance that plays Bottom's buffoonery as an unselfconscious expression of his desire to be loved, Kline achieves moments of tragicomic poetry that would make Charlie Chaplin weep.

8. The End of the Affair. Neil Jordan's adaptation of Graham Greene's World War II-era novel is a magically powerful piece of filmmaking. Jordan recreates the tone of '40s romantic melodramas and tempers it with his fairy-tale sensibility: the richly evocative period atmosphere is so stylized that it seems slightly unreal, an effect that is augmented by the writer-director's prismatic, non-linear approach to narrative. In the central role, Julianne Moore creates a wrenching, astoundingly soulful portrait of a woman who is torn between two kinds of passion: romantic and spiritual, and whose ultimate inability to keep faith with both of them destroys her.

9. The Insider. Michael Mann's behemoth-sized dramatization of the process leading up to the expose that "60 Minutes" ran on the tobacco industry plays like a cross between contemporary TV legal melodramas and the Hollywood muckrackers of the '30s. It's a weighty, serious-minded piece of work, but - amazingly - it never feels ponderous. Mann manages to inject just enough levity into the individual scenes to keep them crackling, and the leaping continuity that bridges them keeps you keyed-up, alert. The volatility of the filmmaking style seems concentrated in Russell Crowe's sensational performance as the noble stool pigeon, Jeffrey Wigand - a man haunted by conflicting responsibilities to his integrity, his family, and the world.

10. Sleepy Hollow. A true piece of moviemaking alchemy. The atmosphere in Tim Burton's horror picture has more to do with the classic scare movies made at Hammer and Universal studios than with Washington Irving's story. He sustains the perfect tone: a balance of operatic menace and droll, affectionate self-mockery. From a technical perspective, this is his most impressive piece of filmmaking - it includes action sequences that are marvels of editing and audio-visual craftsmanship. And although the murder-mystery plot that propels the action is itself pretty insubstantial, the characters aren't: Burton's imagery gives them dramatic dimensions that are only hinted at in the script, and - along with Johnny Depp's performance - pulls Ichabod Crane's quest to reconcile rational thought with the realm of the supernatural into sharp emotional focus.

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Mark Dellelo lives in Boston where he writes about film and music.
mark.dellelo@poppulse.com