So iTunes has different sales every week, and this week happens to be movies from 1999 and...wow.

The incomplete list:

- The Sixth Sense
- Fight Club
- Eyes Wide Shut
- The Matrix
- The Hurricane
- Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
- Being John Malkovich
- Run Lola Run
- American Beauty
- Magnolia
- Man on the Moon
-The Talented Mr Ripley
- The Virgin Suicides
- Boys Don't Cry

And that doesn't include some of the more mainstream entries like Notting Hill, Three Kings, Galaxy Quest, and Austin Powers. Has there been another year in the last 20-30 years with this many critically acclaimed releases?

Only one that seems competitive off the top of my head is 1994, which had maybe a better top of the list (Pulp Fiction, Shawshank, The Professional, Forrest Gump, The Usual Suspects) but not the depth.

Not trying to do a "there's already a thread on this" post, just pointing you to a great Ringer article on the subject from last year, and some prior discussion on 1999 vs other years...

https://texags.com/forums/13/topics/3027895/replies/53976855

I actually tried to search but the lovely TexAgs search kept just reloading the first page when I tried to keep going in the results so I couldn't see anything past late last year. I thought we had covered something like this before so I did try

Feel free to ignore, just figured there's not a lot of other actual movie discussion at the moment.

There's a lot of meh on that list for me. If we are doing quality of movies you have listed, we could basically do this for almost any year. I'll do it for a couple years. I'm sure there are numerous more years that have an even better line-up compared to the ones below.

2014:
The Guest
The LEGO movie
Grand budapest hotel
What we do in the shadows
American sniper
Ex Machina
It follows
Nightcrawler
22 Jump Street
GotG
Predestination
Birdman
John Wick
Interstellar
Gone girl
Fury
X-men days of futures past
Whiplash
Imitation Games
Edge of tomorrow
Boyhood
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Winter Soldier
Babadook
Blue Ruin

2013:

Wolf of Wall Street
Gravity
Before Midnight
Mud
Django
The worlds end
Zero dark thirty
Frances Ha
Wreck-it Ralph
Prisoners
12 years a slave
Dallas buyers club
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis
Frozen
This is the end

2008:

Tropic thunder
21
The Dark Knight
Role Models
Pineapple Express
Ip Man
Step brothers
Wanted
Taken
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Iron Man
Slumdog Millionaire
Man on wire
Wall-E
Kung fu panda
The Wrestler
In Bruges

2007:

Juno
Ocean's Thirteen
There will be blood
The Assassination of Jesse James
Transformers
Zodiac
Bourne Ultimatum
Super Bad
Knocked Up
3:10 to Yuma
Gone Baby Gone
Into the wild
Ratatouille
Stardust
Hot Fuzz

2006:

Idiocracy
Borat
Casino Royale
Apocalypto
Talladega Nights
The prestige
The departed
Little miss sunshine
300
Click
Children of Men
Pan's labyrinth
MI:3
Blood Diamond
Pirates of the Caribbean dead mans chest
Thank you for smoking

TCTTS said:

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The last thing I think when I see the '99 list is "meh." I'm honestly kind of shocked at that reaction, especially compared to some of the other years listed.

And just FYI, you left off '07 Best Picture winner, No Country for Old Men. Still the best year of the century, IMO, at least prestige/Oscar-wise. Assassination of Jesse James, Michael Clayton, No Country, There Will Be Blood, and Zodiac. Such an all-time insane lineup. Not to mention Knocked Up and Superbad in the comedy department that year, within like two months of each other.

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The only movies listed from '99 that really move the needle for me are Matrix, Fight club, Lock Stock, and American Beauty. Most of the other movies range from very good to decent, which is not much different than any other year for movies. The 2014 line up is much better than '99 for me. GotG, John Wick, Winter Soldier, Babadook are some of the best movies all time for their genre, no hyperbole. Boyhood and Whiplash are two of my top 10 movies all time, Whiplash being probably my favorite at the moment.

Basically every year has between 2-4 movies that I feel are transcendent, with a few years that might have 5 or 6 and then a whole lot of very good movies that I will likely never think of again.

2006: The Prestige, The departed, Casino Royale, Children of Men

2007: Superbad, There will be blood, No country

2008: The Dark Knight, Ip Man, Man on Wire, Wall-E

2013: Frances Ha, WoWS, and Before Midnight (I'm a huge Before trilogy fan)

(Already listed '99 and '14)

I'm sure you will disagree, but I just don't see what is special about the '99 list of movies. I don't think anyone is wrong for disagreeing, but I think most other years are pretty comparable. I'm sure everyone has their own years they believe are better than others.

TCTTS said:

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The last thing I think when I see the '99 list is "meh." I'm honestly kind of shocked at that reaction, especially compared to some of the other years listed.

And just FYI, you left off '07 Best Picture winner, No Country for Old Men. Still the best year of the century, IMO, at least prestige/Oscar-wise. Assassination of Jesse James, Michael Clayton, No Country, There Will Be Blood, and Zodiac. Such an all-time insane lineup. Not to mention Knocked Up and Superbad in the comedy department that year, within like two months of each other.

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07 is pretty fantastic, agreed.

As per 1994, even if they're not your cup of tea and we put the more mainstream friendly films like Matrix/Fight Club at the top, a "second tier" of Sixth Sense, Eyes Wide Shut, The Hurricane, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, and Talented Mr Ripley is tough to beat.

I mentioned it in the other thread I think, but American beauty was really highly acclaimed at the time and has kind of been forgotten in the interim years.
Just a really well constructed movie.

Nice! Good to have a fellow Aggie out here in the industry.

Phantom Menace is also 99. It's terrible, but I still enjoy it.

fig96 said:

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Has there been another year in the last 20-30 years with this many critically acclaimed releases?

Only one that seems competitive off the top of my head is 1994, which had maybe a better top of the list (Pulp Fiction, Shawshank, The Professional, Forrest Gump, The Usual Suspects) but not the depth.

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'94 was an awesome year for movies and music.

So obviously 1994 has the best top-end movies, but if you include more movies does 1999 become a better overall year? Obviously there is no definitive answer because it depends on your own personal opinion of each movie. But I decided to do the best I could to come up with a scientific answer using movie ratings from IMDb.

So I grabbed the top 100 movies of each year (1980-2019) based on US box office (this is to filter out weird foreign films that no one has heard of but that have unusually high ratings (which is still not a perfect system, some pretty obscure movies still make it in)), then I sort the movies by their IMDb rating. Then I take the average of the top 1 movie from each year, then the top 2 movies from each year, then the top 3 movies from each year, etc...

Here are the results:
(First column is how many movies deep you have to go before the given year becomes the best year, you can click the links to see the movies for the top year)

01: 1994 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=1
10: 1999 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=10
20: 1993 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=20
26: 2014 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=26
51: 1993 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=51
55: 1999 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=55
76: 2013 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=76
99: 2014 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=99

(you can change the number at the end of the urls to see any specific movie depth)

The worst years seem to be 1984 and 1996, but those years have some pretty good movies, I guess they just fall off quickly.

1984 has Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Temple of Doom, Gremlins, Karate Kid, Police Academy, Footloose, Terminator, Red Dawn... if nothing else it was a good year for comedies.

1996 has Independence Day, Twister, Mission: Impossible, Jerry Maguire, and three John Travolta movies for some reason. So a pretty good year for action movies.

redd38 said:

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So obviously 1994 has the best top-end movies, but if you include more movies does 1999 become a better overall year? Obviously there is no definitive answer because it depends on your own personal opinion of each movie. But I decided to do the best I could to come up with a scientific answer using movie ratings from IMDb.

So I grabbed the top 100 movies of each year (1980-2019) based on US box office (this is to filter out weird foreign films that no one has heard of but that have unusually high ratings (which is still not a perfect system, some pretty obscure movies still make it in)), then I sort the movies by their IMDb rating. Then I take the average of the top 1 movie from each year, then the top 2 movies from each year, then the top 3 movies from each year, etc...

Here are the results:
(First column is how many movies deep you have to go before the given year becomes the best year, you can click the links to see the movies for the top year)

01: 1994 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=1
10: 1999 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=10
20: 1993 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=20
26: 2014 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=26
51: 1993 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=51
55: 1999 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=55
76: 2013 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=76
99: 2014 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=99

(you can change the number at the end of the urls to see any specific movie depth)

---

Interesting.

I noticed some interesting choices in your values shown so I tried the numbers just before them and got more occurrences of 1999 and 1993 in particular. And 1994 only seems to appear when low number included meaning it appears to be top heavy and then fall off. And the higher you go the more often it is 2013 and 2014.

5: 1994
15: 1999
25: 1993
60: 1999
75: 1999

Anyway don't know what the answer is - what's the right number to determine the best? Or do you use them all and see what year appears most. Who knows.

Certainly it appears that the best year is one of 1993, 1994, 1999, 2013 or 2014 as those are by far the most occurrences. Personal choices would probably sway anyone.

Zombie Jon Snow said:

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redd38 said:

---

So obviously 1994 has the best top-end movies, but if you include more movies does 1999 become a better overall year? Obviously there is no definitive answer because it depends on your own personal opinion of each movie. But I decided to do the best I could to come up with a scientific answer using movie ratings from IMDb.

So I grabbed the top 100 movies of each year (1980-2019) based on US box office (this is to filter out weird foreign films that no one has heard of but that have unusually high ratings (which is still not a perfect system, some pretty obscure movies still make it in)), then I sort the movies by their IMDb rating. Then I take the average of the top 1 movie from each year, then the top 2 movies from each year, then the top 3 movies from each year, etc...

Here are the results:
(First column is how many movies deep you have to go before the given year becomes the best year, you can click the links to see the movies for the top year)

01: 1994 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=1
10: 1999 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=10
20: 1993 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=20
26: 2014 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=26
51: 1993 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=51
55: 1999 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=55
76: 2013 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=76
99: 2014 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=99

(you can change the number at the end of the urls to see any specific movie depth)

---

Interesting.

I noticed some interesting choices in your values shown so I tried the numbers just before them and got more occurrences of 1999 and 1993 in particular. And 1994 only seems to appear when low number included meaning it appears to be top heavy and then fall off. And the higher you go the more often it is 2013 and 2014.

5: 1994
15: 1999
25: 1993
60: 1999
75: 1999

Anyway don't know what the answer is - what's the right number to determine the best? Or do you use them all and see what year appears most. Who knows.

Certainly it appears that the best year is one of 1993, 1994, 1999, 2013 or 2014 as those are by far the most occurrences. Personal choices would probably sway anyone.

---

The numbers I showed is just where it changes from one year to another, so 1-9 are all 1994, 10-19 are all 1999, 20-26 are all 1993, etc

I'm going with 2017 as a great recent movie year:

Get Out
Lady Bird
Phantom Thread
Dunkirk
Call Me By Your Name
The Big Sick
Good Time
Baby Driver
It
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Shape of Water (only mentioned because it won Best Picture and is beautiful, but with the other movies listed, it's hilarious to think that the fishman ****ing a woman won best picture)

Then you get to the superhero movies:
Thor: Ragnarok
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Wonder Woman
Logan
Lego Batman

redd38 said:

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Zombie Jon Snow said:

---

redd38 said:

---

So obviously 1994 has the best top-end movies, but if you include more movies does 1999 become a better overall year? Obviously there is no definitive answer because it depends on your own personal opinion of each movie. But I decided to do the best I could to come up with a scientific answer using movie ratings from IMDb.

So I grabbed the top 100 movies of each year (1980-2019) based on US box office (this is to filter out weird foreign films that no one has heard of but that have unusually high ratings (which is still not a perfect system, some pretty obscure movies still make it in)), then I sort the movies by their IMDb rating. Then I take the average of the top 1 movie from each year, then the top 2 movies from each year, then the top 3 movies from each year, etc...

Here are the results:
(First column is how many movies deep you have to go before the given year becomes the best year, you can click the links to see the movies for the top year)

01: 1994 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=1
10: 1999 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=10
20: 1993 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=20
26: 2014 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=26
51: 1993 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=51
55: 1999 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=55
76: 2013 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=76
99: 2014 http://redd38.com/movies/?d=99

(you can change the number at the end of the urls to see any specific movie depth)

---

Interesting.

I noticed some interesting choices in your values shown so I tried the numbers just before them and got more occurrences of 1999 and 1993 in particular. And 1994 only seems to appear when low number included meaning it appears to be top heavy and then fall off. And the higher you go the more often it is 2013 and 2014.

5: 1994
15: 1999
25: 1993
60: 1999
75: 1999

Anyway don't know what the answer is - what's the right number to determine the best? Or do you use them all and see what year appears most. Who knows.

Certainly it appears that the best year is one of 1993, 1994, 1999, 2013 or 2014 as those are by far the most occurrences. Personal choices would probably sway anyone.

---

The numbers I showed is just where it changes from one year to another, so 1-9 are all 1994, 10-19 are all 1999, 20-26 are all 1993, etc

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Ahhhh then that would mean:

1994 has 9 occurrences all for 1-9
1999 has 10+21 = 31 occurrences
1993 has 6+4 = 10 occurrences
2014 has 25+2 = 27 occurrences
2013 has 23 occurrences

94 seems to be maybe the best at the top of course.
99 is the deepest
14 is pretty close too but has nowhere near the number of top films
13 is not bad
93 has a few top ones but falls off after that

Another interesting thing is when looking at just the top 5 movies of the year, the worst average is 7.9, the second best average is 8.5, so a difference of only 0.6 over 39 years. But 1994's average is 8.8! Truly head and shoulders above the rest.

This came up on another thread recently, it I think 1998 kills it.

Shakespeare in Love, Saving Private Ryan, American History X, The Truman Show, Primary Colors, Rushmore, Rush Hour, There's Something About Mary, The Big Lebowski, fear and loathing in LV, Armageddon, wedding singer, enemy of the state, meet joe black, half baked, rounders, a bugs life, antz, you've got mail..

The Phantom Menace was in 1999.

maroon man said:

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The Phantom Menace was in 1999.

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now that's what I call pod-racing