Items19The creator’s order
  1. 1Lost Highway (1997)Lost Highway (1997) 7.6/10 on IMDbReleased Jan 15, 1997David Lynch splits one man into two halfway through and never explains the join. Bill Pullman's jazz musician is watched, accused and then, inside a prison cell, transformed into someone else entirely, a younger man played by Balthazar Getty, while Patricia Arquette plays both women in their…0
  2. 2Gattaca (1997)Gattaca (1997) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 9, 1997Andrew Niccol's first feature as director imagines a world where your genes write your resume before you are born. Ethan Hawke's Vincent, an "In-Valid" in a system obsessed with genetic perfection, borrows the identity of Jude Law's Jerome to reach a job he was never meant to have, and the whole…0
  3. 3The Game (1997)The Game (1997) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased Sep 12, 1997Michael Douglas plays Nicholas Van Orton, a cold San Francisco banker whose younger brother, Sean Penn's Conrad, gives him an odd birthday present: entry into a game whose rules keep changing until he cannot tell where it ends and his real life begins. This is the late-1990s fear in its most…0
  4. 4Open Your Eyes (1997)Open Your Eyes (1997) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 19, 1997Spain's Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos), the 1997 original that Vanilla Sky later remade. Alejandro Amenábar wrote it with Mateo Gil and directed it; Eduardo Noriega plays César, a young man who seems to have everything until a car accident scars his face, after which dreams, memories and something…0
  5. 5Dark City (1998)Dark City (1998) 7.5/10 on IMDbReleased Feb 27, 1998Alex Proyas made the darkest and best-looking of the reality-is-fake films: a noir city where the sun never rises and a man cannot trust a single memory of his own past. It reached theaters a year before The Matrix, did poorly at the box office, and some of its sets were later used to shoot scenes…0
  6. 6Perfect Blue (1998)Perfect Blue (1998) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased Feb 28, 1998Satoshi Kon's debut feature follows Mima, a pop idol who quits singing to become an actress, while fans insist that the "real Mima" is the singer they paid for. One of them runs a website called Mima's Room, a diary written as if by Mima herself, and the film turns that idea into a nightmare about…0
  7. 7The Truman Show (1998)The Truman Show (1998) 8.2/10 on IMDbReleased Jun 4, 1998Peter Weir's film, from Andrew Niccol's script, imagines an insurance salesman whose entire life is a television show he does not know he is starring in. In 1998 it played as satire pushed to an absurd extreme; two decades of reality television have since made it look almost restrained. Jim…0
  8. 8Pi (1998)Pi (1998) 7.3/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 10, 1998Darren Aronofsky's debut is the most frantic film here and the one closest to a computer's-eye view of the era. A mathematician, Max Cohen, believes he is on the verge of decoding the numerical pattern beneath the stock market, and the closer he gets, the less he can tell insight from…0
  9. 9Pleasantville (1998)Pleasantville (1998) 7.5/10 on IMDbReleased Sep 17, 1998Gary Ross's first film as director drops two modern teenagers into a black-and-white 1950s sitcom, where color starts creeping in as the residents feel things they were never written to feel. It is the most optimistic film here, a story about choosing to leave a safe, scripted world rather than…0
  10. 10Enemy of the State (1998)Enemy of the State (1998) 7.3/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 20, 1998Tony Scott's thriller makes the late-1990s fear of being watched loud, fast and expensive. Will Smith plays Robert Clayton Dean, a labor lawyer who unknowingly ends up with a videotape of a congressman's murder and finds the NSA taking his life apart to get it back. Gene Hackman's mysterious Brill,…0