A review by vonnenook
Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Raftery

5.0

There’s too much good stuff in this book for me to even highlight all of it. Two chapters that stand out are the ones about “Fight Club” and “Boys Don’t Cry,” in part because those movies really knocked me flat when I saw them in the theater in 1999, but also because it’s genuinely astonishing they both got made in the first place. I listened to the audiobook, and it’s very well read. This book mentions Mark Harris repeatedly, and though it’s been many years since I read “Pictures at a Revolution,” his magnum opus about the films nominated for best picture at the 1968 Oscars (and how beautifully they encapsulated, as a group, American society and pop culture and cinema at the time), I do think “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.”deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence as Harris’ masterwork. If you’re a cinephile, this one’s a must.