Muriel Award: 10th Anniversary Award for Best Film of 1999
So that category I mentioned where the margin of victory was as tiny as possible? This would be it.
Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick) [113 points/19 votes]
“It’s rather remarkable to think that in 1999, Eyes Wide Shut, a baroque and adult reverie, opened in malls across the United States. Perhaps the most conventionally mapped and plotted dream film in the history of cinema, Stanley Kubrick’s final film was so adept at disguising its true nature that even the countless interpretations seem misguided and tiresome and the film still so ripe for reappraisal. A true oddity for Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut owes much to Ophuls and (as Jonathan Rosenbaum stated in his seminal review) Franju and Welles in the interpretation of past literary works as reframed moral tales about the present.
Dream films typically differentiate between scenes of characters awake and asleep, with color cues and aural textures doing the legwork. By comparison, Eyes Wide Shut, at least until the final sequence (or so I think) never quite tells you which is which: the meticulousness of its mirrored scenes and dialogue, the endless stand-ins for Nicole Kidman’s character, and the numerous operatic, drawn-out set pieces never spell things out one way or another. Nothing quite feels “real” or “dreamlike” in Eyes Wide Shut, but instead everything exists in the muddle in between. Or, as the costume shop owner in the film states, “Just like life, no?” I can think of no film in the elapsed decade as confounding or as beautiful.” - Michael Lieberman
Runners-up:
Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson) [113/17]
Fight Club [75/11]
Three Kings (David O. Russell) [65/11]
Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze) [63/10]
